164. The Monster Downstairs

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When you go to bed at night, you have to hope and assume that your partner, your family members or roommates aren't going to hurt you in your sleep while you're vulnerable. Each time you cross the street, you're counting on drivers to follow traffic laws, stop before they hit you. And when someone has power over you, it is especially important that you can trust them, that you know your boss isn't going to throw you under the bus if something goes wrong at work, or that your doctor or your dentist will keep you healthy and won't take advantage of you during a surgery or a medical crisis. The police officers will protect us from criminals, and they won't falsely accuse us of things that we haven't done. But sometimes people with power get it wrong, and the individuals who are supposed to keep us safe can actually end up being the ones who put us in danger. And few people know that better than Miss Barrel Thorley. Back in 1946, when Barrel was 17 years old, she had her whole life ahead of her. She lived in London, in a neighborhood called Notting Hill, and that is where she met the man that she would end up spending the rest of her life with, Tim Evans. Now, Tim was only two years older than Barrel, he was 19, but he had already had to deal with a lot of setbacks in his life. When Tim was a young boy, he'd developed a medical condition that affected his foot. Again, this was like back in the 20s, 30s, and it was serious enough that for long periods of time, he wasn't able to walk or even get out of bed, and this meant he also couldn't attend school for nearly 10 years, and he never graduated. In fact, as an adult, Tim still didn't know how to read, he could barely spell his own name, and worse, his foot never actually healed correctly, which meant now he couldn't work any jobs that required a formal education or anything that called for hard labor, because when he was standing or walking around for too long, Tim would find himself in horrible pain, and this doesn't leave many professional options. It is also worth noting that his family had always been poor, so they couldn't afford to support him either, and it's possible that on top of everything else, Tim may have also been neurodivergent. It's hard to say for sure, he was never diagnosed, conditions like autism and ADHD weren't very understood at the time, but based on descriptions of his behavior, experts today think it's likely that he was on the spectrum or had a related condition. However, at the time, most people just assumed that Tim wasn't very smart. They didn't bother to teach him coping mechanisms or anything about how to deal with his possible diagnosis. So all of this to say, Tim was in a pretty rough situation when he met Barrel, but he also knew just what to say to charm her. They flirted, they spent a lot of time together, and before long, Barrel agreed to date him, and they fell for each other hard, and eventually Tim proposed, Barrel said yes, and on September 20th, 1947, they got married. And then they moved into a flat, again, they're in London, at 10 Rillington Place. Now, Barrel and Tim had the entire top floor to themselves, and the bottom floor was home to their neighbor, a doctor named John Christie. And it's also worth noting that before he got a medical degree, their downstairs neighbor, John, had worked as a police officer for a while. So he was the sort of person who felt very safe to be around. If you can't trust doctors and the police, who can you trust? Plus, it was really helpful to have a medical professional living so close by because just a few months after their wedding, 19-year-old Barrel realized she was pregnant. Her baby, a girl named Geraldine, was born on October 10th, 1948, and this was just three weeks after Barrel and Tim celebrated their first wedding anniversary. So this whirlwind romance had brought them to a modest home with now a child. Except the two of them did not live happily ever after. You know what show you are listening or watching. In fact, they had serious relationship problems right from the start. One major issue was that Barrel didn't want to be a housewife, and she also wasn't good at it. Again, it's the 1940s. There weren't many other options for married women at the time. Barrel was under a lot of social pressure to spend all day cooking, cleaning, and taking care of their baby. Except she didn't like doing housework, and a lot of the time she just refused to do it. The flat became dirty and disorganized, which is fine. We've all had days where we don't pick up, we don't pick up a broom or a sponge, but Barrel's friends and neighbors at this time judged her. They began spreading rumors that she was a bad wife. Again, just because she wouldn't keep the house clean. And people were even more dismissive of Tim, because again, he didn't know how to read. He still couldn't do much manual labor with his foot. So he was never really able to get or keep a stable job that paid well, which is what a husband was supposed to do. And on top of that, Tim was bad with the little money he did make. Each time he got a paycheck, he'd head to the bar with his friends, they would drink all night, and by the time he paid the tab, there wasn't even enough cash left over to cover all of his and Barrel's bills. So Tim always promised Barrel that he'd set some money aside for things they needed around the house, some new furniture, some clothes for the baby, groceries, other supplies, but he never came through. And baby Geraldine had a lot of needs that couldn't be ignored. I mean, she's a baby, diapers, clothes, toys, so on. It's not like Barrel could raise her daughter without any money. So when she needed something, she would go out and buy it on credit, hoping that they would make it work eventually and pay off the debt later. But instead, Tim kept wasting all of the money and their financial situation got worse by the day. And as I'm sure you can imagine, Barrel and Tim began fighting about finances all of the time. They were loud enough that their neighbors could hear them shouting all the way up and down the block. Both of them were obviously miserable, and as time went on, Tim began coming up with excuses not to come home at night. He was avoiding Barrel, and he seemed unhappy in his marriage. He had always claimed he had to work late or he'd been out drinking with his friends, but Barrel obviously began to suspect that maybe there was something else going on. See, rumors were flying all over town that when Tim would go out to the bars at night, he acted very friendly toward other women, a little too friendly. He begins this reputation for, number one, not being a good husband, and number two, being very flirtatious. The more time Tim spent away from home, the more Barrel began to wonder sitting at home if Tim was cheating on her. But when she confronted him and asked him what was going on, Tim became angry and defensive, and then he refused to give a straight answer, which didn't do much to reassure Barrel. This just seemed like even more evidence that she couldn't trust him. So all of this to say life in the Evans household was strained and unpleasant and becoming worse each day. Barrel and Tim's marriage had turned toxic, and just when it seemed like things couldn't get any worse, Barrel received some absolutely terrible news. Toward the middle of 1949, when Barrel was now 20 years old and her daughter wasn't even one yet, she learned she was pregnant with her second child. Now, Barrel and Tim absolutely could not afford another kid. They couldn't even support the baby they already had. Plus, Barrel knew that she could not deal with the stress of caring for another son or daughter. So she went to Tim with her concerns, and I guess the good news here is that they were on the exact same page. They both agreed, and the obvious next move was to get an abortion. Problem was that in London in the 1940s, this procedure was illegal, which meant Tim and Barrel had to be very careful and cautious with their next steps. They were secretive because they had to ensure that nobody would figure out what they were up to. Which is why very few people even suspected Barrel was pregnant until November 30th of that year. On that day, which was a Tuesday, Tim went to the police station instead of reporting to work, and he asked to speak to an officer. And once they were sitting down together, Tim shared a pretty alarming story. He said that he and Barrel had tried to perform the abortion themselves. They had bought a bunch of poisonous chemicals, mixed them together, and Barrel drank it. The hope was that the drink was toxic enough to make her miscarry, but not poisonous enough to hurt Barrel. Except of course it was impossible for either of them to know exactly how much poison to use. This was one reason why at-home abortions were extremely dangerous. And sure enough, they had gotten this recipe wrong, and Tim is now telling police that Barrel had died. Then, Tim had panicked, hidden her body in their backyard, and now he was at the police station trying to turn himself in. Now of course, the officers had a lot of follow-up questions about what sorts of poisons he and Barrel had used and where they had bought them. And these were questions that seemed like Tim didn't know how to answer. It was almost like he didn't even know how he had made the drink or what he had been putting in it. Needless to say, this had the detectives feeling pretty suspicious. I mean, these weren't difficult or tricky questions. Like, what did you put in the drink? If Tim was being honest, he should have known the answers. They went out and bought it. They made the drink. He admitted to that. So they decided to investigate further and figure out what had actually happened to Barrel. The officers went to the couple's flat at 10 Rillington Place to search it. And they found nothing. There was no sign of Barrel's body anywhere in the backyard, not even in the area where Tim had described hiding her. And they also couldn't find any trace of the poison that she had supposedly drunk. So the officers go back to Tim and they're like, hey, you came in and you tell us this story, but it's not adding up. And this is when Tim gives a different confession, one that contradicted his first. He said, okay, actually Barrel still did die in an abortion gone wrong, but now he's telling police it wasn't because of a poisonous mixture. The felt abortion had actually been performed by a doctor, namely by Tim's downstairs neighbor, John Christie. So Tim now tells police that John had been trying to perform the abortion, but then Barrel had died under his care. And then just like in the original story, John and Tim had now hid in the body in the backyard. Except detectives are still suspicious. They're like, well, why even change the story? What was that first one? If you wanted to come clean, like you voluntarily came to the police station, why even make up a story about drinking a poisonous concoction? And again, Tim doesn't give him a straight answer. He just kind of keeps contradicting himself, changing little details, talking in circles. So again, they're like, okay, we'll go back and try to find evidence of this. So there's another trip to Tim's flat at 10 Rillington Place. And it includes a search of John's unit. But the detectives couldn't find any of the equipment a doctor might need to perform an abortion. There were no obvious signs that anything had gone awry in his apartment. So then the officers took another walk out to the backyard, to the area where Tim has said two times now that he had dumped Barrel's body. And that is when they find something unexpected. The remains of two people. Because Barrel was dead, and she had been dumped there, just like Tim had said, but they also found the body of baby Geraldine, who was barely past her first birthday by this point, 13 months old. Sadly, she's now laying dead next to her mother. And as soon as the police discovered them, they knew Tim had not been telling the truth again about how his wife had died and what had happened to his daughter. Even if she had had a botched abortion, that wouldn't explain why Geraldine had also passed away. And on top of that, both mother and daughter had Barrel's on their necks, clear signs that they had most likely been strangled. So the officers go back to Tim and they're like, okay, we found the body, but we also found your daughter exactly where you told us to find your wife. We know you're lying. And they say, did you do this? Did you kill them? And he says, yes. The detectives are like, okay, but what's the motive here? But luckily for police, there were plenty of witnesses who were willing to fill in the gaps once they figured out that Tim had murdered his family. The neighbors reported that Tim and Barrel's marriage had always been an angry one, with a lot of noisy fights. They also repeated the rumors and gossip about Tim's possible affairs. Seemed almost everyone believed and told police that he had cheated on Barrel at least twice, with two different women. And everyone agreed he was a bad husband. He was unfaithful, he was selfish, he made life for Barrel hard. So of course he was the sort of person who would kill his wife and daughter in a drunken rage. Except right as the evidence against him really starts stacking up, Tim decides to change his story again to police. He now comes forward and claims that Barrel and Geraldine had been strangled by the neighbor John. Except again, this story's not making sense. First, Tim couldn't explain why John would have wanted to murder them. He doesn't even have a clear motive. And now this is the second time he's dragging John into a murder. Also, the police couldn't find any evidence to support this story, not to mention that John was very well respected, both for his medical work and his former career in law enforcement. They did yet another search of Tenrellington Place just to be sure. And the investigators didn't see any evidence of a violent crime in John's flat. But they still decide to question John and his wife. They're like, listen, he's told us multiple stories, this is his most recent one, what do you have to say? Both of them denied having anything to do with Barrel or baby Geraldine's deaths. John also assured the police he would never perform an illegal abortion. He respected the law too much and he wasn't willing to risk his license. So there was literally nothing connecting him to Barrel and Geraldine's murder, other than the fact that they lived in the same building. And the husband who had changed his story multiple times was pointing the finger at them. So all of this to say nobody is believing Tim's story. And he went on trial for murder on January 11th, 1950. Now the entire time Tim continued to insist he was innocent, he kept pointing the finger at John. And interestingly, neighbor John took the stand during the hearing to testify against him. He was a very credible witness because of his background and like I said before, he was a doctor and a former police officer. And he said that in the weeks before her death, he had seen Barrel several times and he noticed that she looked sick. He had suspected she'd been taking small doses of poison to try and cause a miscarriage. But apparently this hadn't worked in part because Barrel became worse by the day. And on top of that, the prosecutors knew her autopsy showed she was still pregnant at the time of her death. She'd never actually lost the baby. John also said he believed Tim had murdered his wife in a moment of passion. He's testifying about this at trial. He claims he knew them both. He knew their dynamics as a couple. So this seemed like the most likely explanation to him. Several other witnesses shared similar testimony over the course of the three-day trial and then the jury only needed 40 minutes to deliberate. When they issued their verdict, they found Tim guilty of murder and they sentenced him to death. His execution was scheduled for just two months later in early March. And right up until the day he died, Tim is still insisting no. My neighbor John, the doctor, the ex-police officer, is the real killer. But nobody listened or took him seriously. And on March 9th, Tim was hanged. He was only 25 years old. But this isn't the end of the story. So now we're going to fast forward. We're going to jump ahead to March of 1953, which is roughly three years after Tim's execution. This was when, all of a sudden and for no apparent reason, John and his wife, the downstairs neighbors, moved out of their apartment. They hadn't given notice or told anyone they were relocating. It was just like one day they were home and then the next they were gone without a trace. It was pretty odd and mysterious and with a town that loved to gossip, everyone heard about it. But the landlord figured if the flat was empty, it's time to find a new tenant. So they cooperated with another renter to do some renovations. They needed to get the unit cleaned and updated before signing with another resident. Except while they were working in the kitchen, the renovators found something odd. There was a hidden door that opened to a secret cabinet. Now of course, the workers opened the door and inside they find a dead body, a badly decomposed woman. So right away, the workers call police and a team of investigators are now back at 10 Rillington Place. They're already very familiar with, they've searched this exact unit and now they're searching again because a dead body has been found once again. And when they go out to the garden behind the flat, they find the remains of six more women and buried under the floorboards in the living room. They discovered John's wife. Apparently she hadn't moved out with her husband randomly. She had been dead the entire time and he moved out alone. Now some of the bodies were fresh. Others were old, had probably been buried for years since before Barrel and Baby Geraldine's murders. So this is incredibly frustrating. You may remember when the police were investigating Tim, they searched 10 Rillington Place multiple times. But they must have not been paying very close attention because they had missed multiple bodies and only found the two that Tim had come in about. One woman's leg bone was actually out in the open, being used to prop open a garden gate and the police had completely failed to spot it back then. They'd been so focused on finding evidence that implicated Tim, who had come in and changed his story, that they missed literal human remains, the evidence of a serial killer living in Tim's basement. There were other clues that they had failed to pick up on over the years too. Apparently for a long time now, the flat at 10 Rillington Place had smelled really bad. The neighbors regularly complained about the terrible stench coming from it and enough people had brought this issue up that John had developed a habit. He regularly bought the strongest disinfectants he could find and scrubbed the flat from top to bottom but this never completely got rid of the odor covered it up, just kind of added to the stink. The neighbors had also noticed that John's wife was missing several months ago because she'd actually died and been buried well before John moved out and a bunch of people thought it was weird that they always saw John out running errands or coming to and from work. However, no one had seen his wife and John couldn't explain where she was. So again, as all this is happening, people know Tim had been executed for murdering his wife and daughter but now they discover that the person he pointed the finger to both times in two of his three stories might be a serial killer. Rumors are swirling, police completely ignored them until the discovery of these bodies but it was now becoming clear. At least eight women had died in this house not counting Barrel or Geraldine. It is possible there were even more remains than that but it's hard to say. In some cases the officers found partial bodies. Since this was a time before DNA testing they had no way of saying how many people they had come from and as much as possible the police arranged post-mortem exams for the remains that were more complete and each autopsy showed the victim had been either poisoned or strangled meaning they hadn't died in accidents or medical emergencies or even botched abortions. They had all been murdered. There were also signs that some of the bodies had been sexually assaulted after death which meant John was definitely a serial killer and all of a sudden all of Tim's old claims that his downstairs neighbor had murdered his wife and daughter start to seem a little more credible and possible. So sure enough John was arrested on March 30th. Since moving out of the house he had been living off his dead wife's money which he had withdrawn from her account after her murder. He had also pawned a lot of her jewelry for cash and as soon as he was in custody he began making very disturbing confessions. John openly admitted after being arrested that he hated women all women. Apparently he was afraid that if he ever had sex with someone his partner might make fun of him for the way he made love. So in John's mind the best way to prevent that from happening was to murder as many women as possible. Basically hurt them before they can make him feel inadequate. He says he had a goal to kill at least 10 female victims including many who he didn't even know and who had never done anything to him. So for several years John admits that he had been luring different ladies to his home just so he could murder them. Some were sex workers who he had hired and then strangled others were pregnant women who had come to him seeking abortions. John had used his medical equipment to sedate them but then instead of terminating their pregnancies he choked them while they were unconscious and then assaulted their bodies. And obviously there's one huge question on your minds as well as everyone's minds back then and that was okay so did you actually hurt Barrel and baby Geraldine? And John openly admits yeah he had killed Tim's wife Barrel. However the story he told about her murder was different from the others. John claimed Barrel actually didn't want an abortion instead she came to him and asked him to kill her. According to John Barrel felt hopeless she didn't want to stay married to Tim or have another baby she didn't see divorce as an option and in her mind she just wanted to go away. She was too afraid to do it on her own. So John claimed she came to him and asked him to do it for her because he was doctor he'd know how to do it quickly painlessly. Except John also admitted that Barrel's death was anything but painless. Instead he says while they were alone together in his flat he tried to sexually assault her he wasn't able to. It's unclear if Barrel fought him off or if there were biological issues on his end but John said he tried and failed twice. Eventually he gave up and he used a poison as gas to knock Barrel out and then strangled her. Now we don't know how much of that is true. We don't know if she actually wanted to die. We don't know if she actually even went to him but the important thing was that John had just admitted to killing Barrel. Except for whatever reason he never confessed to murdering Barrel's 13 month old daughter Geraldine. He doesn't deny it. It's more like he just completely forgot about it and didn't find it important enough to be worth mentioning when he was admitting to everything. In spite of that lack of a confession the prosecutor still had plenty of evidence against John. Within months of his arrest he went on trial for murder. John tried to plead insanity but it didn't work. The prosecutors laid out a lot of evidence to show he was logical, he was rational, and methodical when he committed these crimes. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. And then in July of 1953 John, the downstairs neighbor, faced his fate. Notably the hang man who executed him was the same person who had also killed Tim three years before for possibly the same murder. So far as irony goes this situation is bitter because by this point everyone began to admit that they actually think Tim was innocent of the murders. To this day it's unclear why he gave so many false confessions to the police, how he knew the bodies were in the backyard if he had nothing to do with it, why he claimed he had accidentally killed Barrel by giving her poison chemicals, then later said he had strangled her himself. One possibility is that either John or the police manipulated Tim into incriminating himself. Again if you if you remember he might have been neurodivergent, he might have had disabilities. People who suffer from this can give false confessions at much higher rates than the rest of the population. They can be manipulated into things. So maybe John realized he could trick Tim into taking the fall for him and that's why Tim showed up at the police station that day, but obviously this led to a massive miscarriage of justice that couldn't be set right. Tim had been executed. There's no way to undo that. All his surviving loved ones could do was fight to clear his name, which is exactly what a woman named Mary Westlake tried to do. Mary was Tim's half-sister. From the very beginning she believed him was innocent, she never thought he did it, or that he was even capable of that kind of violence. And when the news broke that John Christie had was not only a serial killer but had confessed to killing Barrel, who was who is a lot of the reason why Tim was even hanged, she was upset. She wanted Tim's conviction to be overturned, so the official records showed that he was not a murderer, except she faced a lot of challenges as she navigated the process. And one of the big problems had to do with the judge who was in charge of London's appeals court. He was the father of the lawyer who had prosecuted Tim during his trial, so in order for Mary to clear Tim's name, she needed this judge to admit that his own son had majorly screwed up, which he refused to do. In 1953, Mary managed to get the government to open an inquiry into Tim's case, but they ultimately concluded that nobody in the legal system had done anything wrong. And even though John had confessed to the murder and he'd been executed for it partially, the inquiry said that they still couldn't prove Tim was innocent. They couldn't prove John was telling the truth, despite the fact that they knew he was a serial killer. They couldn't prove that this meant Tim hadn't also killed in that house. To a lot of people this made no sense, that was their ruling. So in 1965, Mary managed to secure another inquiry, and this time they ruled that Tim had been wrongfully convicted and sentenced. This finding got the ball rolling on another legal process. Several lawmakers realized that if they had already executed one innocent man, it was definitely possible that other people had wrongfully been sent to death row too, so they worked to abolish the death penalty, and eventually, Britain outlawed capital punishment. That way, this mistake could never be repeated. They would never kill the wrong person again. Problem was that none of this advocacy actually changed Tim's old verdict. Instead, the inquiry formally issued a pardon, which isn't the same thing as clearing someone's name. Guilty people can be guilty and get pardoned. So Mary kept fighting. She wanted Tim's conviction to be overturned. She wouldn't settle for anything less. Unfortunately, she spent decades fighting without ever winning that fight, and finally in 2024, she passed away at age 94. She never achieved her goal, and with her death, there was no one left to fight for Tim's memory. His history is well known. It has been adapted into multiple movies, TV specials, books, but Mary was Tim's last living relative. He didn't have any surviving friends, nobody to keep filing appeals to try and change the record, which is why to this day, Tim is still legally considered guilty of murdering his wife and baby daughter. Pardoned, but still guilty. It's tragic to think how many people rely on police, lawyers, judges, and juries to uphold the law only for that trust to be broken. And this story is all about people misusing power over others. It's about a husband who failed to support his wife, a doctor who was a dangerous murderer, and the people who were responsible for keeping Barrel, Tim, and Geraldine safe. Not to mention all of John's other victims, who could have lived if the investigators had caught him sooner, but instead, officials let them all die senselessly. Let me know in the comments what you think about this case. Is there any chance at all that Tim happened to murder his wife and baby daughter and then go to his death pointing the finger at his downstairs neighbor who turned out to be serial killer? Is there any chance that both happened to kill people in that house? Or did Dr. John kill everyone and Tim was taking advantage of, manipulated, and end up giving his life for it? Let me know what you think and I will see you next time as we go further into the dark together. Goodbye. Every Wednesday. Listen now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.