Did he, or didn’t he ? True crime with uncertain conclusions

In 1953 the murders of his wife and child at 10 Rillington Place in London were discovered and Timothy Evans was arrested, tried and hanged for the killings. When further deaths were uncovered it transpired that Evans’ landlord Reginald Christie was the murderer and these events are now regarded as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British legal history. In The Peepshow the writer Kate Summerscale revisits the crimes with a new eye and challenges the popular view. She does this by looking at the context of the murders and the activities of many of the people on the periphery of the crime.

I already have one book about these murders which was written by the journalist Ludovic Kennedy in an attempt to gain a pardon for Evans (see my review here) and is the text on which the well-known film is based (Richard Attenborough features as Christie). In this book the author is not as convinced of Evans’ innocence and proposes an alternative account of what happened, also showing how the publicity around the case and the occupation of many of the victims formed public opinion and now clouds the ability to look totally objectively at the case.

This is a fascinating account and an excellent social history of the seedier end of London at the time. I’m not sure that the author really proves her point but she does open up some possibilities and cast doubt on accepted certainties. There is enough of the social history for me not to feel too uneasy about turning people’s tragedies into some sort of intellectual puzzle and I enjoyed the emphasis being placed on the victims rather than the criminals. I suspect that the truth is that we will never know everything that happened at the time and we need to prevent our fascination from the case causing us to lose sight of the fact that the victims were real people who, whatever their occupation and status in life, didn’t deserve to have their lives abruptly ended.

This author has written a number of books about past crimes (see here for my review of a very unusual case) and her research and presentation help us to understand a whole story rather than just the bits that hit the headlines.