Return to Rillington Place: TV writers reveal the story behind remake of serial killer tale
THE writers of a new drama about serial killer John Christie went to extraordinary lengths to show how the man hanged for his crimes was framed.
They pored over the original trial reports and evidence, talked to a relative of the executed man — and consulted an FBI profiler.
Christie is believed to have murdered at least eight women at his home in 10 Rillington Place, Ladbroke Grove.
His victims included Timothy Evans’s wife Beryl and their baby daughter, Geraldine, who lived in the same building as the killer. But Christie blamed Evans for the murders and, in 1950, Evans was convicted and hanged. He was 25. Justice finally caught up with Christie three years later. Evans was given a posthumous pardon in 1966.
The case inspired the campaign to end the death sentence and was told in the 1971 thriller 10 Rillington Place, with Richard Attenborough as Christie and John Hurt as Evans.
In the BBC1 drama Tim Roth is the serial killer and his wife, Ethel, is played by Samantha Morton. Nico Mirallegro takes the role of Evans.
Writers Ed Whitmore and Tracey Malone went through the original trial reports and evidence to produce their story. “We then took it to an American ex-FBI profiler for his independent thoughts,” they said. “They absolutely chimed with ours, that it was a tragic miscarriage of justice.”
They also spoke to Evans’s surviving half-sister, who told them about the “heartbreakingly frustrating” moments when he could have been cleared. They said: “She recalled to us how she and her sister spoke up to the police after Christie and Ethel gave them conflicting accounts of Beryl and Tim’s whereabouts but that the police weren’t interested in taking their statements.
“Christie was accused of the murders on the stand as he delivered his evidence against Tim. Tantalisingly, the idea didn’t take hold because Christie presented himself so well as a decent, educated man, a decorated serviceman and ex-policeman with no possible motive to kill a woman and her baby.
“He didn’t have the appearance of a monster, the only other place to look was at Tim. Tim was an easy target, uneducated, a compulsive storyteller — the odds were stacked against him even when there were gaps and inconsistencies.”
Christie killed at least eight women between 1943 and 1953, including his wife. He was arrested when he moved out of the building and several bodies were discovered. He was hanged in 1953, at the age of 54.
The drama is the BBC’s latest remake, with Poldark among recent revivals of classic shows. Sitcom remakes including Porridge and Are You Being Served? have been panned by viewers as “terrible” and “unfunny”, leading to calls for more original shows to be commissioned.