[2] John Christie was born on 8 April 1899 in Northowram, near Halifax in the West Riding of Yorkshire,[3][4][better source needed] the sixth in a family of seven children.

He had a troubled relationship with his father, carpet designer Ernest John Christie, an austere and uncommunicative man who displayed little emotion towards his children and would punish them for trivial offences.

Christie later said that seeing his grandfather's body laid out on a trestle table gave him a feeling of power and well-being; a man he had once feared was now only a corpse.

)[12] In September 1916, during the First World War, Christie enlisted in the British Army; he was called up on 12 April 1917 to join the 52nd Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Regiment to serve as an infantryman.

[13] Ludovic Kennedy wrote that no record of Christie's blindness has been traced and that, while he might have lost his voice when he was admitted to hospital, he would not have been discharged as fit for duty had he remained a mute.

He began working as a postman on 10 January 1921 in Halifax, and his first conviction was for stealing postal orders on 20 February and 26 March, for which he received three months' imprisonment on 12 April 1921.

[25] Christie was then convicted on 15 January 1923 of obtaining money on false pretences and of violent conduct, for which, respectively, he was bound over and placed on probation for twelve months.

The residence was a three-storey brick end-terrace, built in the 1870s during a period of intensive speculative building in the area resulting in much jerry-built property which declined into poorly maintained and unimproved multi-occupancy rentals.

Christie's first admitted victim was Ruth Fuerst, a 21-year-old Austrian munitions worker who supplemented her income by occasionally engaging in sex work.

[47] Evans initially claimed that Christie had killed his wife in a botched abortion operation, but police questioning eventually produced a confession.

[51] At the time of Evans' trial, Christie had found a job at the Post Office Savings Bank on 21 May 1946 as a Grade 2 Clerk and worked at Kew.

[52][53] Police made several mistakes in their handling of the Evans case, especially in overlooking the remains of Christie's previous murder victims in the garden at 10 Rillington Place; one femur was later found propping up a fence.

The police interrogation in London was mishandled from the start, when Evans was shown the clothes of his wife and baby and was informed that they had been found in the washhouse.

The several apparent "confessions" contain questionable words and phrases in high-register language such as "terrific argument" which seem out of place for a distressed, uneducated, working-class young man such as Evans and bear no relation to what he probably said.

[64] As Kennedy wrote, police accepted Christie, a former war reserve constable, as one of their own, largely taking what he said at face value without any further investigation.

Such an approach aligns with Christie's modus operandi of offering help to women so as to gain their confidence and lure them back to his flat, as demonstrated in Eady's case.

The tenants were predominantly migrants from the West Indies; this horrified Christie and his wife, who both held racist attitudes towards their neighbours and disliked living with them.

[70] Christie negotiated with the Poor Man's Lawyer Centre to continue to have exclusive use of the back garden, ostensibly to have space between him and his neighbours but quite possibly to prevent anyone from uncovering the human remains buried there.

To support himself, he sold his wife's wedding ring and watch on 17 December for £2 10s and furniture on 8 January 1953 for which he received £11; he kept cutlery, two chairs, a mattress and his kitchen table.

[79] Between 19 January and 6 March 1953, Christie murdered three more women he invited back to 10 Rillington Place: Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson and Hectorina MacLennan.

[82] For the murders of his final three victims, Christie modified the gassing technique he had first used on Eady; he used a rubber tube connected to the gas pipe in the kitchen which he kept closed off with a bulldog clip.

[85] One commentator has cautioned against categorising Christie as such; according to the accounts he gave to police, he did not engage sexually with any of his victims exclusively after death.

After leaving Rillington Place, Christie had gone to a Rowton House in King's Cross and booked a room for seven nights under his real name and address.

[93] On the morning of 31 March, Christie was arrested on the embankment near Putney Bridge after being challenged about his identity by a police officer, PC Thomas Ledger.

[121] The historian Jonathan Oates considers it unlikely Christie had any further victims, arguing he would not have deviated from his standard method of killing in his place of residence.

[124] The controversy prompted Maxwell-Fyfe to commission an inquiry led by John Scott Henderson QC, the Recorder of Portsmouth, to determine whether Evans had been innocent and a miscarriage of justice had occurred.

[125] Far from ending the matter, questions continued to be raised in Parliament concerning Evans' innocence, parallel with newspaper campaigns and books being published making similar claims.

[132] Brabin also noted that the uncertainty involved in the case would have prevented a jury from being satisfied beyond reasonable doubt of Evans' guilt had he been re-tried.

[136] In January 2003, the Home Office awarded Evans' half-sister, Mary Westlake, and his sister, Eileen Ashby, ex-gratia payments as compensation for the miscarriage of justice in his trial.

"[137] Lord Brennan believed that the Brabin Report's conclusion that Evans probably murdered his wife should be rejected given Christie's confessions and conviction.