the ground and first floors each contained a bedroom and living room, with a kitchen/scullery in the adjacent extension, but the second-floor flat had two rooms only: a kitchen/living room and a bedroom. Living conditions were "squalid"—the building's occupants shared one outside lavatory, and none of the flats had a bathroom. The street was close to an above-ground section of the London Underground's Metropolitan line (now the Hammersmith & City and Circle lines), and the train noise would have been "deafening" for the occupants of 10 Rillington Place. After three years of working as a foreman at the Commodore Cinema in King Street, Hammersmith, at the beginning of the Second World War, Christie applied to join the War Reserve Police and was accepted; the authorities failed to check for the existence of a criminal record. He was assigned to the Harrow Road police station, where he met a woman called Gladys Jones with whom he began an affair. Their relationship lasted until mid-1943, when the woman's husband, a serving soldier, returned from the war. After learning of the affair, he went to the house where his wife was living, discovered Christie there, and assaulted him. Murders Christie committed his murders over a ten-year period between 1943 and 1953, usually by strangling his victims after he had rendered them unconscious with domestic gas; some he raped as they lay unconscious. First murders The first person Christie admitted to killing was Ruth Fuerst, a 21-year-old Austrian munitions worker who supplemented her income by occasionally engaging in prostitution. Christie claimed to have met Fuerst while she was soliciting clients in a snack bar in Ladbroke Grove. According to his own statements, on 24 August 1943, he invited Fuerst to his home to engage in sex (his wife was visiting relatives at the time). Afterward, Christie impulsively strangled her on his bed with a length of rope. He initially stowed Fuerst's body beneath the floorboards of his living room, then buried it in the back garden the following evening. Soon after the murder, at the end of 1943, Christie resigned as a special police constable. The following year he found new employment as a clerk at an Acton radio factory. There he met his second victim, colleague Muriel Amelia Eady. On 7 October 1944, he invited Eady back to his flat with the promise that he had concocted a "special mixture" that could cure