‘The facts of the case were so disturbing’: Kate Summerscale on our obsession with true crime

When the author began investigating the case of a London serial killer in the 1940s and 50s, she found chilling echoes with current events – and was forced to confront her own fascination

Sometimes, in the three years that I spent researching the murders at 10 Rillington Place, I wondered why I had chosen to immerse myself in such dark& material. John Reginald Halliday Christie, an apparently respectable middle-aged office worker, was& charged with murder in 1953, when the remains of six women were found in his dingy flat in Notting Hill, west London. He had strangled and raped his victims, then hidden their bodies under the floorboards in his front room, beneath the flowerbeds in his tiny garden and inside his kitchen wall. I had written two accounts of murder before (The& Suspicions of Mr Whicher, about an infanticide, and The Wicked Boy, about a matricide), but this was the& first time I had studied a serial killer, or a crime in living& memory.

I knew that I was not alone in being drawn to such stories. True crime documentaries and podcasts have soared in popularity in the past few years, and women are twice as likely as men to watch and listen to them. Increasingly, women have been telling these stories, too: Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder made the podcast Serial, which has been downloaded more than 340m times; Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos produced and directed the award-winning Netflix show Making a Murderer; and authors such as Helen Garner, Becky Cooper, Hallie Rubenhold and Michelle McNamara have published acclaimed books about murder.