Being Reluctantly Drawn by Darkness.

A little over seventy years ago a man called Timothy Evans was hanged for the murder of his wife and baby daughter. The police investigation into the case was tragically – and it would be reasonable to suggest, criminally – flawed, but the trial went against Evans and he was sentenced to execution. Not long afterwards, a curious turn of fate revealed that the real murderer had been one John Reginald Christie, a neighbour of Evans, and subsequent investigation showed that he had murdered several other women over a number of years. He, too, went to trial and was also executed. The Wiki version of the story is here if anybody wants to read it.

I first came across this story many years ago when I watched the movie 10 Rillington Place based on the book of the same title by Ludovic Kennedy. It woke something in me, and ever since then I can’t stop myself being drawn to watch or read everything I encounter about the case (I watched a YouTube video a couple of nights ago.) I don’t know why this should be because I’m far from salacious by nature. In fact, I’m quite the opposite. I’ve always loved supernatural horror movies, but I avoid real horror because real suffering disturbs my empathic tendency too much.

So why do I feel compelled, essentially against my will because I know it always depresses me, to read or watch everything I can find on the subject? (I’ve even tried to find the exact location of the murders, but it’s now impossible because the whole street of houses was demolished some time after the war, and the site redeveloped.) It’s hard to say, but it has something to do with the feeling that I need to know everything there is to know, even those details which will never be known. And, more disturbingly, because I feel a deep sense that I am somehow personally connected with it.

Explain it as you will. I have my suspicions but that’s all they can ever be. And they are speculative at best, and probably fanciful.