John Wayne Gacy painting and door key to 10 Rillington Place added to auction
Published September 13th, 2005
When John Reginald Halliday Christie was arrested in March 1953, it was for a series of macabre sexual killings. A former model scout during the first world war, then a Special Constable, balding, bespectacled John Christie will be remembered instead as one of the UK’s worst serial murderers. An obsessive necrophile, he would gas and strangle his female victim’s to death and after performing disgusting assaults on their corpses, would entomb them in his walls and bury them below his house and back garden.
‘The New Criminologist’ is now hosting an auction page where murder memorabila can be purchased from our select sellers. Alongside letters from Dennis Nilsen, Peter Sutcliffe and Richard Ramirez, is the front door key to the genuine House of Horror that was 10 Rillington Place. Renamed Ruston Close many years ago, to deter curiosity seekers, this key once granted access to the home where Christie murdered his women, and where they lay buried.
Also featured on the site is an original painting by one of the US’s most fiendish killers – John Wayne Gacy.
As twenty-nine bodies of young men and boys, all brutally, raped, tortured and eventually slain by the portly building contractor, were unearthed from beneath his garage, a barbecue pit in his back garden, and the crawl-space beneath is ranch-style home in Norwood Park, Des Plaines, the media watched in horror.
The crawl-space, where 27 of the bodies were discovered in shallow graves, some still with a noose around their neck or materials crammed into their throats and rectums, is one of the most frightening personal graveyards, kept by a serial killer, in the annals of criminal history.
Although Gacy would ultimately be charged and convicted of thirty-three murders – the final four victims were dumped, out of necessity as the man’s house was already full to capacity with decomposing corpses, in the Des Plaines river in Illinois – it was the idea of this monster being a pillar of his community, who dressed as a clown to entertain sick children, was active in politics and was a successful businessman, that could not be comprehended. How could someone so outwardly gregarious and even respectable, all the while be systematically eliminating and burying the bodies of violated young men under his house?
Shockwaves ripped not only through this man’s community, but the world at large, as people shook their heads in disbelief, wondering how he could have been killing, so prolifically for so many years, and getting away with it.
Gacy was executed in May 1994, but during the fourteen years he spent on Death Row at Menard Prison in Illinois, he busied himself with painting. The now notorious Gacy pictures have courted contoversy
A blue 10″ by 14″by John Wayne Gacy titled “Christ”. Signed by the killer is featured on our auction page.
