I read Peter Thorley’s book with great interest, and I agree that this testimony from a first-hand witness is an important contribution to understanding the mystery of Rillington Place. By then Christie was on the run and his name and photograph were plastered on the front page of every newspaper. Peter: I found out about the murders when my father sent a letter to Mr and Mrs Manson; I worked for them in New Zealand. Whether he did it on impulse as frustration overcame him, or coldbloodedly for his own protection, “without conscience”–the central feature of psychopathy–is hard to say, though either is possible. The linguistics expert in the programme opined that the wording used in Evans’s confessions was that of the police rather than of a poorly-educated and illiterate man, but even so it changes nothing of the substance of the statements and Evans himself never claimed to have been coerced into making false confessions or having had words put into his mouth under duress.

Two years later on 14 December 1952 he strangled his 54 year-old wife and hid her body, wrapped in a blanket, under the floorboards in the parlour.

They struggled financially, Timothy had a drinking problem, and the birth of their daughter Geraldine in 1948 put an even greater strain on their already rocky marriage. During his trial, he confessed to killing Evans’ wife in one of the most staggering cases of judicial failure in modern history. Needless to say, that wasn’t accepted and he was regarded as fit to stand trial for the murder of Ethel, his wife. Geeson’s Beryl, striving pitifully for a better life in the face of grinding poverty and lack of opportunity, is overruled by her husband in her choice of flat, and tolerates his unreasonable rages and melancholy.

Beryl had been strangled and wrapped up in a green tablecloth while Geraldine had been strangled with a man’s tie and hidden under a piece of wood. Since then Bartle Road and Wesley Square have been built where the place once stood, with new homes covering the burial site. According to the story Christie gave at trial, he and his wife heard a ‘bump’ during the night and the following morning Timothy Evans claimed Beryl had gone away to Bristol. John Curnow’s and Peter Mylton-Thorley’s very welcome evidence on the guilt of Evans and the innocence of Beryl, who was a particularly nice young woman, but whose behaviour has been viciously travestied, particularly by Sir Ludovic Kennedy and the BBC. I found the photograph of Beryl lying in the Kensington Mortuary particularly moving, a picture I’d never seen before.Evans confessed not twice, in his two statements at Notting Hill, but also to Sgt Trevallian, and in prison, saying she would not stop crying so he just had to strangle her. Indeed, such was the commitment to realism that the actual Rillington Place was used for external shots and the staircase, shortly before being demolished, with interior rooms shot in the studio.

Mercifully, the photos have not survive, one winces at thought of a naked, bald headed, middle aged Christie featuring in hard core delicto. Matheson had a pretty good idea what he was talking about when he stuck that label on Timothy Evans. The sequence drew on advice from Albert Pierrepoint, one of Britain’s last professional hangmen, and remains shockingly abrupt and cold – within just 30 seconds, Evans is marched from his cell, hooded, placed in the noose, and hung. Reg had a troubled childhood, often subjected to regular beatings by his father, his mother, and his older sisters.However, this is of course merely academic given Christie’s subsequent fate for his own crimes little more than three years later. This was a man who was capable of killing, not only his wife in a fit of temper, but even his own baby daughter. The 2011 production of Dinenage’s is a piece entitled ‘John Christie’ in the first of his three Murder Casebook series that I refer to in my book as being ‘to all intents and purposes a work of fiction’.