I don’t usually feature a book that comes with a side note, but I have here and it is an important one. Indeed, Detective Chief Inspector Jennings who led the Evans inquiry explicitly stated that he was not. Recently I watched a YouTube video presented by one Fred Dinenage, made a few years back it seems, for one of the Freeview TV channels. Instead of intervening, Mr Thorley told his son he was being sent to live in New Zealand for a “better life”. Eventually, I worked my passage on a fridge ship, doing every menial job in existence, and arrived six weeks later.

I did suspect when reading earlier in the book about Beryl frequently swapping clothes with Joan Vincent that this would foreshadow some suggestion that Joan was mistaken for Beryl when Beryl was supposedly sighted by Jones leaving the house on the 8th.i expect most fans know that Rudolph Walker has a very small part playing Beresford Brown, he (Brown) is the one who makes the gruesome discovery in the Christie’s kitchen, when he tears the wall paper off. This gives the reader the impression that the judge did not give a summation and left the jury with only the barristers’ last words to consider before they brought in their verdict. Tennyson Jesse’s account of the case in the Notable British Trials series ( Trials Of Evans and Christie, Hodge, 1957), with which all students of true crime should be familiar. In fact, Christie was protective of her on many occasions once he realised what an evil little moron Tim Evans was.

This has caused great distress to the Thorley family, particularly to her other brother Basil, whom I met several times and was a most impressive, modest, and honest man. In shock, and despondent over the news, he confesses to both crimes, though he is guilty of neither. One house that is definitely ingrained on the public psyche – so much a film was made using it as its title – is 10 Rillington Place, a grotty end of terrace house in a cul de sac in Notting Hill, west London. As though such pain were not enough to have borne, he and his family have had also to live with the sensationalised, endlessly trawled over and almost always erroneously depicted events which are so very far from the truth as he alone knew it to be – alone, that is, until now, thanks to this belated but heartfelt and crucially valuable contribution.Christie’s sexual troubles only led to more torment, and his intimate issues would follow him into adulthood. In all of the voluminous archive material now available, which includes a good many witness statements from close neighbours and others, there is nowhere to be found the suggestion or accusation that Christie was an abortionist. His first thought may have been to cover it up and keep police out at any cost; but was that a good idea, and was it going to work?

Somewhat surprisingly, it seems to me to foreshadow the final sounds of John Carpenter’s 1978 film, Halloween. Sadly, some oral history recordings of Trevallion’s held at The National Archives contain further such questionable reminiscences which also need to be treated with caution. Here for once Evans’s confession to Black did have the “ring” of truth, and Peter’s account seems questionable, unless it was some other ring his sister gave him. Trevallion was fairly firm on the point that Ethel Christie was a well known abortionist in the neighbourhood, and that the Christies operated a clandestine abortion clinic with Ethel performing the operations and Reg providing the ‘anaesthesia’. Peter Thorley’s book does everyone a service by shining a light on the character of Evans, and of course we must have sympathy for his lifelong pain at the loss of his beloved sister and niece–more so when so many people have been deliberately misled into dismissing the guilt of their killer.Needless to say, there was a dark side to Christie which we never knew at the time but were to find out three years later. Three years later, on March 21, 1953, Christie left Rillington Place and three days after that Beresford Brown, a new tenant, found six bodies in the garden, kitchen and under the sitting room floor. He lets them in, and when he sees they are well-occupied, he pours a new cup of tea and heads back upstairs. Praise went to John Hurt for his "remarkably subtle and fascinating performance as the bewildered young man who plays into the hands of both the murderer and the police.

On November 30, he went to a Merthyr Tydfil police station where he told the police he had killed his wife. The matter is obviously of some significance to him since he mentions that he and his wife still mourn the anniversaries of Beryl’s and Geraldine’s deaths. Five years later, in May 1929, Christie was once again arrested, this time for hitting a prostitute over the head with a cricket bat, and sentenced to six months.Tom Hardy of the British Film Institute observed Attenborough had the ability of "getting into the flesh of the paranoid and the distressed", describing the film as a "detailed account of life under the shadow of World War II [which] is powerful and compelling". Her husband, an illiterate van driver, was handy with his fists and spent money on gambling and drinking.