John Reginald Halliday Christie (8 April 1899 – 15 July 1953), known to his family and friends as Reg Christie, was an English serial killer and alleged necrophile active during the 1940s and early 1950s. Christie murdered at least eight people—including his wife, Ethel—by strangling them in his flat at 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill, London. The bodies of three of Christie's victims were found in a wallpaper-covered kitchen alcove soon after he had moved out of Rillington Place during March 1953. The remains of two more victims were discovered in the garden, and his wife's body was found beneath the floorboards of the front room. Christie was arrested and convicted of his wife's murder, for which he was hanged. Two of Christie's victims were Beryl Evans and her baby daughter Geraldine, who, along with Beryl's husband Timothy Evans, were tenants at 10 Rillington Place during 1948–49. This case sparked huge controversy after Evans was charged with both murders, found guilty of the murder of his daughter, and hanged in 1950. Christie was a major prosecution witness; when his own crimes were discovered three years later, serious doubts were raised about the integrity of Evans' conviction. Christie himself subsequently admitted killing Beryl, but not Geraldine; it is now generally accepted that Christie murdered both Beryl and Geraldine and that police mishandling of the original inquiry allowed Christie to escape detection and enabled him to murder four more women. The High Court quashed Evans' conviction in 2004, accepting that Evans did not murder either his wife or his child. Early life John Christie was born in Northowram near Halifax in the West Riding of Yorkshire, 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. John was also alternately coddled and bullied by his mother and older sisters. On 24 March 1911, Christie's grandfather David Halliday died aged 75 in Christie's house after a long illness. 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. At the age of 11, Christie won a scholarship to Halifax Secondary School, where his favourite subject was mathematics, particularly algebra. He