Town’s hangman link to infamous murders
TV viewers have been gripped by the chilling Rillington Place over the past three weeks – but not everyone knows the Southport connection to the tragic story.
Based on real events, the tense and impactful three-part BBC thriller explores the crimes of notorious serial killer John Christie and the subsequent tragic miscarriage of justice in 1940s and 50s London.
Christie killed at least eight women, including his wife, but early in the investigation police wrongly arrested Timothy Evans, who was later convicted and hanged for a crime he did not commit.
Christie was eventually caught and hanged by the same executioner – Southport’s Albert Pierrepoint.
Pierrepoint lived in Southport for much of his life and was renowned as ‘the most efficient executioner’ in British history by the Home Office. Although there is no officially recognised figure, he is known to have hanged more than 400 people.
He followed in the footsteps of both his father and uncle in becoming an executioner and was named the UK’s Chief Executioner in 1941. However, years after his retirement he revealed that he believed capital punishment was not an effective deterent.
Pierrepoint resigned as hangman in 1956, eight years before the last hanging was executed in Brit- ain. He went on to run a pub in Lancashire and made the revelation in his memoir, Executioner Pierrepoint: An Autobiography.
He wrote in the book: “I have come to the conclusion that executions solve nothing, and are only an antiquated relic of a primitive desire for revenge which takes the easy way and hands over the responsibility for revenge to other people. The trouble with the death penalty has always been that nobody wanted it for everybody, but everybody differed about who should get off.”
Pierrepoint was asked to give statements about his time as a hangman to the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment.
The case of John Christie, or more so Timothy Evans, was one of the factors which led to the outlawing of capital punishment in the UK.
All episodes of Rillington Place are available on BBC iPlayer.