The song, sung by Judy Collins and most recently Irish folk singer Karan Casey, was written by Ewan MacColl. The powerful anti-capital punishment song was written in response to the execution of Tim Evans for a crime most believe was actually committed by his neighbor at 10 Rillington Place, John Christie. Curiously, there's no mention of it ("The Ballad of Tim Evans," aka "Go Down Ye Murderers") in what is the most recent but not completely definitive or satisfying book in the Christie case. Jonathan Oates is not an interesting writer at all, but his selling point is being factual, and uncovering details that he insists were either missing or slanted by previous authors.
So what do all these facts produce? Not much. The main controversy (was it one murderer or two) continues. Oates in his "Conclusion" chapter even points out the various writers who believe a) Evans killed his wife and child, b) Evans only killed one of them, c) Evans conspired with Christie, d) Christie killed two women before Evans and his wife and child arrived at the fateful house, killed them, and killed four more women before he was captured.
There's some interest in Christie because physically, he's an unlikely-looking mass murderer. Hardly a Manson, with wild-eyes and a psychotic credo, Christie, 5'8" and 150 pounds, was soft-spoken, balding, and seemingly nothing more than an office drone and petty martinet,
The book, only 186 pages (if you don't include the notes and index) thinks so little of Tim Evans that there's no picture of him...while there are shots of such lesser players as Derek Curtis-Bennett and Beresford Brown. Is this due to some "rights" issue? The same reason not a single line of the famous song (which would be "fair use") is quoted?
Or wasn't there room for such thought, when the author was so seriously involved in such less-than-pithy summations as this one: "Although long dead, Christie has not been forgotten."
No, Christie isn't forgotten, because his balding, bland "just like anyone else" wax figure stands in a Madame Tussaud's, the song about Tim Evans is still played, and the film "Ten Rillington Place" based on the Ludovic Kennedy book is on DVD (with John Hurt as Tim Evans).
The main interest in the case is not really the crimes (Christie was no gruesome "Jack the Ripper" in a top hat) but the nagging question among conspiracy buffs, as to Evans' involvement. While Ludovic Kennedy's book (like MacColl's song, mainly aimed at proving Evans innocent and that capital punishment is not reversible) remains Exhibit A for "Christie did it all," others, especially Jonathan Oates, aren't comfortable with the amount of times both Evans and Christie outright lied, or offered impossibly confusing recollections. Evans, an acknowledged dimwit, who was also a loudmouth stuck in an increasingly hapless marriage, confessed several times in detail but ultimately recanted. Christie's "the more the merrier" confession to killing Evans' wife may have been part of a campaign to get off on an insanity plea...while his denial of killing the Evans baby could've been to save himself from vigilante justice within prison.
This volume, concerned as it is with Christie, his childhood (50 pages of bland detail) and his periodic petty crimes and the last series of murders (which included his own wife), tries to be sympathetic. "Christie was not evil, though he was capable of evil deeds," writes Oates, "nor was he a sadist, as were Brady and Hindley and the Wests (the author seems baffled but persistent in dragging in other serial killers and comparing them and their motives). "He was, in many ways, the ordinary man, on the surface, similar to our neighbors and colleagues, who was nevertheless a mass murderer." From a convoluted, comma-stricken line like that, you can see how this author tends to be a cartoon of Sherlock Holmes, his magnifying lens on the floor, walking around and around in circles. "To label him as a monster is simplistic and emotive," we are assured, "for Christie was just a sexual inadequate who murdered to sate his lusts." There is, it should be noted, conflicting testimony on that last statement, as semen stains were found on the murderer's clothes, and his own confessions included necrophilia...having sex with the women after they were strangled.
In the end, this book has some merits; the author's dug up some fresh quotes, pulled some facts out of dusty files, and offered some photos of some of the victims and bystanders. There's even some disturbing sociology not mentioned by others; that Christie's pathetic dwellings were also home to Jamaican musicians and other blacks who he detested for their noise and their lack of civility. The author doesn't use Christie's hatred of his neighbors and his poverty as an excuse for violence or vengeance...he's careful to let motivation remain the province for amateur psychologists. Oates might even be commended for resisting an author's temptation to color in some details, if only to make the book a more vivid read. But after 182 pages, his alternating smugness and confusion lead to this confession:
"Most readers will, by now have added to their knowledge of John Christie, the mild-mannered man who made a mortuary of the house in which he lived. There is, however, much that we will never know for certain."
The most eye-opening factor here, is his belief that Evans was guilty, so for "fans" of Christie, it's a must-read to try and figure how he came to such a conclusion, when it's so opposite several other respectable opinions.
There's no paper shortage, to my knowledge, in Great Britain. The book could have been extended another 20 or so pages, to examine in detail Ludovic Kennedy's contentions about the timeline involving Evans and construction done at the house, discuss the testimony of Evans' half-sister Mary Westlake in leading the government to overturn the Evans conviction in the slaying of his wife Beryl, and to examine more closely theories of why a man with no background of violence and murder (Evans) should be considered guilty while living in the house of someone who had killed twice. Tim's sister, Eileen Ashby, is also not given a chance to voice the arguments on behalf of her brother. Many readers will remain hopelessly lost in trying to determine where Evans, Christie and his wife were at the time of Beryl's death, what motive is strongest, what kind of coincidence it would be for two men in the same house to choose strangulation as the means of crime, and what facts (or fallacies) led to Evans' death being found a "wrongful execution." It would not have taxed "fair use" to summarize some of Ludovic Kennedy's arguments on behalf of Evans and debunk them.
One thing untouched here, which was so important to Ewan MacColl and Ludovic Kennedy, is the question of capital punishment. Should it be abandoned, or at least restricted in cases as confusing as this one? Perhaps one can form a conclusion based on how Christie, most definitely the killer of six women, met his death. As described here by the executioner, he did not beg for mercy or call his approaching death a murder: "Faltering pitifully, his moevements were not so much a walk, as a dfrifting forward, his legs stumbling. I thought he was going to faint."
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