A Serial Killer Helps Abolish the Death Penalty

March 20, 1953. A middle-aged man named John Christie packs up a suitcase and leaves his apartment in Notting Hill, London. No one knows where he’s gone. But a few days later, people realize why he left… a new tenant makes an unsettling discovery: bodies, hidden in the walls of the kitchen. Today: the case of serial killer John Christie. Why, decades later, are parts of his story still a mystery? And how did that very mystery play into a big change in the UK – the abolition of the death penalty? 

Thank you to our guests: Professor Kate Winkler Dawson, author of the book Death in the Air and the forthcoming book All That is Wicked.Jonathan Oates, author of the book John Christie of Rillington Place: Biography of a Serial Killer. And Sir Julian Knowles, author of The Abolition of the Death Penalty in the United Kingdom; How it Happened and Why it Still Matters.