Free Houses of Death (True Crime) by Gordon Kerr Page B

owners, who alerted Scotland Yard; the first time a ship to shore telegraph had been used in a criminal case. Crippen was arrested and found guilty of murder, while Le Neve was acquitted. He was hanged at 9am on 23 November 1911, by John Ellis, and his last request was to be allowed to have a picture of his lover, Ethel Le Neve in his jacket pocket. Ellis recorded in his memoirs that Crippen smiled as he walked towards him.
    The execution of the poisoner John Sedden, on 18 April 1912, was one of the fastest on record, taking just 25 seconds. En route to the gallows, it seemed as if the condemned man was about to faint at the sight of the noose. A passing tourist bus also sounded its horn at that moment, further frightening him. Again, John Ellis was the executioner.
    Ellis hanged Irish revolutionary Sir Roger Casement, for treason, on 3 August 1916. Casement, who was Irish by birth, but crucially held a British passport, had solicited help from Germany for the Easter uprising in Ireland, in 1916. However, the British intercepted a message he sent to his Irish colleagues and, after returning to Ireland on board a German submarine, he was arrested and taken to London and tried for conspiring with Britain’s enemies during a time of war. His trial lasted just three days, and shortly before his execution was stripped of his knighthood.
    Six spies were hanged at Pentonville during World War II and 27 year-old Private John Schurch was executed, in 1946, for treachery, the last person to be hanged in Britain for an offence other than murder. A member of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, prior to the war, Schurch was captured by the Germans in Tobruk and began working for both Italian and German intelligence. He would pose as a captured prisoner-of-war to gain the trust of fellow Allied prisoners. He was the only British soldier to be executed for treachery during World War II.
    Among other well-known executions were those of Neville Heath, who killed two women, sadistically, in 1946; Timothy Evans and John Reginald Christie, who were hanged in 1950 and 1953 in a sensational case, and the last double-hanging in Britain, when 22-year-old Kenneth Gilbert and 24-year-old Ian Grant were executed for a murder during the course of a robbery they were carrying out.

John Reginald Christie
    10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill, London, England

10 Rillington Place, as far as the British courts are concerned, was once home to more than one killer. Two tenants: Timothy Evans and John Reginald Christie were tried and found guilty of murder and both were eventually executed for their crimes. Evans eventually received a posthumous pardon for the murder of his young daughter, but did he kill his wife, or was Christie the real culprit? This run-down three-storey terrace house in Notting Hill held the answers.
     
    10 Rillington Place was a small Victorian house, built in the 1860s, when the Notting Hill and North Kensington areas were undergoing development. Located where the elevated dual carriageway, the Westway runs today, number 10 was located in a row of three-storey terraced houses. The house was split into three flats, none of which had a bathroom. Instead, an outhouse in the garden was used by the occupants of all three flats, and a wash house was also located there for the use of tenants, but it was not always functioning.
    John Reginald Christie moved into the ground floor flat at 10 Rillington Place in December 1938 with his wife, Ethel. They were pleased with the flat because, as it was on the ground floor, they would enjoy use of the garden.
    Christie had been raised in Halifax, in Yorkshire, but had been unpopular with school friends. He suffered from chronic impotence throughout his life, and it is presumed that this was probably what caused him to commit the terrible crimes for which he was responsible. He was also a hypochondriac, using