Known simply as the 10 Rillington Place murders, they sent shockwaves through post-war Britain. Smartly dressed and bespectacled John Christie appeared an unlikely monster yet he killed at least eight people in the 1940s and 1950s, strangling them inside his West London flat then disposing of the bodies in the walls and under the floorboards. The killings are still fascinating today for those with an interest in historical true crime.
But novelist Kate Summerscale, whose gripping new book The Peepshow examines the murders, reveals it was actually the tragic 2021 killing of Sarah Everard that prompted her to visit such a horrifying case from the past. Sarah, 33, was abducted in South London in March 2021 as she was walking home from a friend’s house. Her captor was off-duty Met Police officer Wayne Couzens, who raped and strangled her before burning her body and disposing of her remains in a woodland pond.
The murder horrified the nation and led to a widespread debate about women’s safety and violence against women. “I started researching my book that same spring,” Kate explains. “There were a few cases around 2020 and 2021 where men chose to kill women seemingly at random.
They weren’t domestic murders or crimes of passion and it occurred to me, almost for the first time – why? “I got unsettled by the thought and decided to look for a story from the past which might give me some way of understanding it. “Once I began reading about Christie and his crimes, I .