A Serial Killer, The Great London Smog, and The Strangling Of A City
Prologue
The Shiver
The teenager carefully avoided broken shards of glass, barely held together by cracked window frames, as the mist dampened her hair. She balanced on bricks and gently braced herself against the frame of the house. It was 1952—London’s winter wind, chilly and biting, prompted a shiver that began at her scalp and traveled to her toes. Thirteen-year-old Rosemary Sargent listened for the distant call of her younger brother as the mist thickened into a fog. She hopped across old pieces of wood full of rusty nails—materials that once held together a lovely house just a few homes down from her own. Now it was a bombsite, the perfect playground for mischievous kids hoping to avoid boredom. As she looked at the bricks, she could recall what her life had been like during World War II.
During the late summer of 1944, the Nazis had unloaded on Rosemary’s working-class neighborhood in southeast London—she had been just five. Her family had decided to stay, had refused to be driven out…and it was a miracle they survived. Years later, her parents still had their Morrison bomb shelter, a giant metal cage that sat in their parlor. Rosemary’s mother had draped a cloth over it and called it a table.
The teenager’s dream was to become a schoolteacher, a goal that had sprouted in her family’s front garden during the summer the Luftwaffe sent a “doodlebug” right over her house. Rosemary recalled gripping a piece of chalk, dragging it down her new chalkboard, and then hearing a hum. It was the buzz that triggered such anxiety in Londoners. She could still remember how it looked, like a torpedo with wings. It was really a V-1 flying cruise missile, carrying a warhead that weighed close to two thousand pounds. She hadn’t seen one in years, but she could imagine the thing quietly hovering over her house as she stood beneath its tail. She could recall her mother racing from the kitchen to the parlor door and shrieking: “Come in, come in, come in!”
The boys were making a ruckus nearby. As a light fog drifted in, Rosemary played hide-and-seek in the corpse of her neighbors’ house.
* * *
The year 1952 suffered a somber beginning in Britain. King George VI had died on February 6 at the age of fifty-six, leaving a war-scarred country in mourning. Albert—that was his given name—had been crowned almost fifteen years earlier, at a time when the public had little faith in the monarchy, after suffering through a royal scandal that rocked the institution to its core. Albert’s elder brother, Edward VIII, had ascended the throne first, in 1936, after their father died. Later that year, King Edward abdicated so he could marry an American divorcée, Wallis Simpson. Albert had reluctantly become king the following year.
But Albert had risen to the demands of what seemed at first to be an untenable position. When his nation needed a leader, King George VI had become a monarch the British could all stand behind. He had ushered the nation through World War II, through the bombings of London that had scarred the city’s landscape as well as its psyche, and through the messy aftermath of war. When his people needed a voice, he spoke for them, despite a debilitating stammer. King George VI’s funeral at Windsor Castle was impressive. The country was devastated by his death, but there was reason for optimism. His elder daughter, Elizabeth, ascended the throne as Queen Elizabeth II, ushering in a sense of excitement among the British. At just twenty-five, Elizabeth was the future of the monarchy, and the nation’s hopes and dreams all seemed to be exemplified by the young, pretty queen, her dashing husband, and her adorable children. Britons looked forward to her lavish coronation, set for the following summer.
But in truth, seven years after the end of World War II, London was still in crisis. Nearly seventy thousand civilians across Britain had been killed during the war—forty thousand from air raids alone, and almost half of those had been in London. The British government still faced an enormous war debt. Rationing of sweets and sugar remained in full force. Smoking tobacco was chic, one small luxury amid the fiercely regulated reality of everyday life. And there was another war sapping the country’s resources. More than twelve thousand British troops were fighting alongside American soldiers in Korea. In London, crime was becoming an epidemic in much of the city, as bombed-out buildings gave criminals safe havens. Police were increasingly outnumbered.
And yet there was one industry that was already booming to prewar numbers: coal. For years, coal had fueled the country’s growth, and by 1952 there was at least one coal fireplace per home—meaning that in London, millions of domestic grates were stuffed into an area of just six hundred square miles (just under twice the size of New York City). The fuel was cheap, effective, and crucial—it was the only major source of domestic heating in the city at that time. But the smoke could be suffocating, and the sulphur dioxide released into the air was deadly. It triggered acid rain strong enough to bend iron, erode statues, poison land, and contaminate waterways—the pollution could destroy lungs and cause cancer. But still the coal burned. In 1952, almost forty coal-fired power stations kept London electrified and more than twenty thousand steam locomotives kept the city moving.
The politics of Big Coal were no less murky than the air it produced. Coal, it turned out, was one of the few thriving international industries remaining in postwar Britain—more than 250 million tons were mined domestically every year; it was a key export for the country at a time when national budgets were tight. More than seven hundred thousand workers were employed in British coal mines. Politicians weren’t ignorant of the environmental concerns of burning huge quantities of coal every year, but their hands seemed tied.
The Conservative Party, also known as the Tories, was led by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the country’s ailing but still potent leader. The Conservatives knew that any attempt to constrain the coal industry could be devastating to a vulnerable British economy. Their main opposition, the Labour Party, was anxious to use the country’s massive debt as a weapon in the upcoming election. So the government was keeping up a brisk pace in international coal sales, but it was selling its best domestic coal to other countries and reserving the cheaper coal for its own people. This cheaper coal, a brown dust with bits of coal, was a soft material, a poor replacement for the more expensive black coal still being rationed. It went by the nickname “nutty slack,” and though it was far inferior to black coal, it was all that most Londoners could afford in those desperate postwar times.
It took enormous amounts of nutty slack to heat the average home—the cheaper brown coal was inefficient and much dirtier to burn, which created more smoke and more pollution. But most politicians in Parliament were certain that exporting black coal and selling the nutty slack domestically was a crucial cost-saving decision. Britain was desperate: smokeless fuel wasn’t economically realistic, or widely available. In 1952, London entered winter with its largest stock of coal, of all grades, in any postwar year—nineteen and a half million tons.
As Londoners warmed themselves by their fires that December, they couldn’t have possibly known there was a deadly killer gathering strength across London, around their homes—a lethal pollutant plotting to devastate an already crippled city.
* * *
But in early December of 1952, as the London air thickened and smothered the city, another killer—devious, sick, and unrepentant—eyed his next victim. He was trapped with her in that horrid fog. When the smoke lifted, she would die, three more would soon follow. It was no trouble. He had killed before.
Most mornings, fairly early, he would sip tea in his tiny kitchen while his wife tidied up their sad, filthy flat in Notting Hill. It had been such a genteel district once, but certainly not by 1952. Gamblers and prostitutes filled its homes, joined by every shade of shifty character available. Most blocks were slums, with decent people drowning inside eroding row houses. The police force seemed hopelessly inert.
Six days a week, the awkward middle-aged man with the horn-rimmed glasses bade good-bye to his wife and tried to ignore the litany of loud curses and complaints from his upstairs neighbors. He despised them. He rode the Tube to his job as an invoice clerk at a large transport company. The work was mundane, he thought, but he was lucky to have such a stable position. He wasn’t good at keeping jobs. He loathed his life, for so many reasons.
The man was quiet, meek—overlooked by most people who passed him in the neighborhood. He haunted the streets of Notting Hill like a spook, desperately searching for some time alone, away from his skittish, clingy wife. It was so suffocating, being trapped with her in that nasty flat. If he didn’t find enough of those quiet moments…someone might die.
* * *
This is the parallel story of two killers. As different as these murderers were, their similarities were striking. Both strangled their victims. Both eluded suspicion. And both nearly escaped justice. Each changed law in Britain and, in many ways, around the world. One was a toxin that ignored race, wealth, and age—a mass murderer that asphyxiated thousands of Londoners and sickened hundreds of thousands. The other was a psychopath, a serial killer, who terrorized one of the world’s most important cities. There were miscarriages of justice with both. Yet only one of the two remains infamous—the other has been all but forgotten.
Telling the stories side by side, there’s a sense of what life was like after World War II in the British capital—and what Londoners actually valued. The characters are a sampling of a society that influenced the world. And the braided narrative reveals something about the way in which humans experience fear: one man was more terrifying to Londoners than a deadly fog that strangled thousands—a naïveté that only benefited newspaper editors (promoting their salacious headlines) and the politicians who tried to cover up the choking smog that was largely of their own creation.
London was still recovering from the devastation of World War II when another disaster hit: for five long days in December 1952, a killer smog held the city firmly in its grip and refused to let go. Day became night, mass transit ground to a halt, criminals roamed the streets, and some 12,000 people died from the poisonous air. But in the chaotic aftermath, another killer was stalking the streets, using the fog as a cloak for his crimes.
All across London, women were going missing–poor women, forgotten women. Their disappearances caused little alarm, but each of them had one thing in common: they had the misfortune of meeting a quiet, unassuming man, John Reginald Christie, who invited them back to his decrepit Notting Hill flat during that dark winter. They never left.
The eventual arrest of the “Beast of Rillington Place” caused a media frenzy: were there more bodies buried in the walls, under the floorboards, in the back garden of this house of horrors? Was it the fog that had caused Christie to suddenly snap? And what role had he played in the notorious double murder that had happened in that same apartment building not three years before–a murder for which another, possibly innocent, man was sent to the gallows?
The Great Smog of 1952 remains the deadliest air pollution disaster in world history, and John Reginald Christie is still one of the most unfathomable serial killers of modern times. Journalist Kate Winkler Dawson braids these strands together into a taut, compulsively readable true crime thriller about a man who changed the fate of the death penalty in the UK, and an environmental catastrophe with implications that still echo today.