The Peepshow

The Murders at Rillington Place

By: Kate Summerscale

Narrated by: Nicola Walker

*A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice *

*Named a Best Book of 2024 by FT * Nominated for the Women's prize for nonfiction*

From the Edgar Award-winning author of The Haunting of Alma Fielding, the tale of two journalists competing to solve the notorious Christie murders in postwar London

In March 1953, London police discovered the bodies of three young women hidden in a wall at 10 Rillington Place, a dingy rowhouse in Notting Hill. On searching the building, they found another body beneath the floorboards, then an array of human bones in the garden. They launched a nationwide manhunt for the tenant of the ground-floor apartment, a softly spoken former policeman named Reg Christie. But they had already investigated a double murder at 10 Rillington Place three years before, and the killer was hanged. Did they get the wrong man?

The story was an instant sensation. The star reporter Harry Procter chased after the scoop on Christie. The eminent crime writer Fryn Tennyson Jesse begged her editor to let her cover the case. To Harry and Fryn, Christie seemed a new kind of murderer: he was vacant, impersonal, a creature of a brutish postwar world. Christie liked to watch women, they discovered, and he liked to kill them. They realized that he might also have engineered a terrible miscarriage of justice.

In this riveting true story, Kate Summerscale mines the archives to uncover the lives of Christie’s victims, the tabloid frenzy that their deaths inspired, and the truth about what happened inside the house. What she finds sheds fascinating light on the origins of our fixation with true crime—and suggests a new solution to one of the most notorious cases of the century.

©2025 Kate Summerscale (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“A gripping true crime tale that is an unflinching portrait of a postwar Britain riven with sexism and racism.”—FT, Best Books of 2024

“Summerscale revisits one of the most controversial murder cases in British history in this engrossing true crime page-turner . . . she introduces a few eyebrow-raising wrinkles to the publicly accepted narrative and paints a compassionate portrait of the victims. It’s a rigorous look at a still-potent tragedy.”—Publishers Weekly

“Exhaustively researched . . . the arrest of John Reginald Halliday Christie, his trial, and his eventual execution serve as a narrative clothesline upon which hang detailed biographies of the key players, set amid a racist and misogynistic society slowly emerging from the rubble of the Blitz . . . the haunting biographies of the victims themselves, their families, and their upbringings. The true heartbreak lies in its depiction of poverty-stricken young women who were sex workers or much-less-well-paid cleaners and domestic servants, some sleeping in public lavatories. The cruelty and indifference meted out to them strikes the reader as true crime.”—Kirkus

The details

The details in this book had details. Individuals were often identified by such details as eye color, height, clothing. The research must have been exhaustive.