When bestselling true crime writer Kate Summerscale found herself looking back on the notorious , she was struck by a question: “Why do some men go out of their way to kill women?” These horrific killings have already been the subject of countless books, as well as a classic film and a . However, when Summerscale began her research in 2021, a spate of recent crimes against women – , who a stranger in Fryent Country Park killed, and , who was abducted and killed by – meant that the case felt horribly resonant. Working on her book , she would unpick these uncomfortable parallels and inadvertently end up finding an answer to one of the case’s outstanding questions.
Almost 70 years earlier in March 1953, a tenant from the upstairs flat at this now notorious London address made a horrifying discovery. While cleaning the ground floor kitchen, he had torn a hole in the wallpaper; through it, he could see what appeared to be a woman’s naked back. When the police arrived at the unassuming end-terrace house in Notting Hill, they discovered the bodies of three young women, hidden in an alcove.
Their names were Rita Nelson, Kathleen Maloney and Hectorina MacLennan. But the house, it turned out, held yet more shocking secrets. Under the floorboards was the body of Ethel Christie, who had lived in the flat for 15 years with her husband John Christie, known as Reg, a clerk and former police officer who had disappeared a few days earlier.
Later, two more bodies were found buried .