After subletting his upstairs London flat to a mentally deficient young man named Timothy Evans and his pregnant wife Beryl, John Christie announces to the impoverished Evans that he is an accomplished abortionist and agrees to perform the illegal operation on Beryl in order to help them out of their jam. Aroused by the sight of her naked and unconscious form, however, Christie rapes and strangles her instead, then convinces the half-witted Evans that although she died from surgery, the police will probably believe Evans guilty of foul play and charge him with murder. Evans flees but is caught, tried, convicted of murder, and hanged. Based on the true story of British mass-murderer John Reginald Christie, who drugged, raped, and strangled eight women (one of whom was his wife) between 1940 and 1953, hiding their bodies in the garden as well as in a large cupboard, which he then covered up with wallpaper inside his home. A shy and sickly man (he was gassed during World War I), Christie could also be quite persuasive, which explains how he was able to lure many of his victims to his murderous lair at 10 Rillington Place, an address that eventually became as well-known to Londoners as 10 Downing Street.