London in 1952 was a still recovering from the devastation wrought
by World War II: rationing was still in effect, rates of crime and
unemployment were high, and the national economy was in shambles.
In an effort to repay its massive war debt, the British government
was selling its clean-burning coal to America, and Londoners were
forced to make do with the cheap brown coal. That winter, as the
weather turned bitter, buses, trucks and automobiles, and thousands
of coal-burning hearths belched particulate matter into the air.
But the smog that descended on December 5th of 1952 was different;
it was a sulfurous type of smog that held the city hostage for five
long days. Mass transit ground to a halt, criminals roamed the
streets, and some 12,000 people, many of them elderly or ill, died.
What would later be called the Great Smog of 1952 remains one of
the greatest environmental disasters of all time. That same
December, there was another killer at large in London. John
Reginald Christie murdered at least seven women in his flat in
Notting Hill--luring women to his home with the promise of a home
remedy for bronchitis, instructing his victims to inhale
carbon-monoxide laden coal gas until they passed out. He then raped
and strangled them, burying two in the garden, stashing several
more in a papered-over kitchen alcove, and his wife of 34 years
beneath the floorboards of their parlor. The arrest of the "Beast
of Rillington Place" caused a media frenzy; moreover, Christie's
role in sending an innocent man to the gallows was the impetus for
the abolition of the death penalty in the UK. The smog, meanwhile,
was slow to be implicated. Indeed, the British government did their
level best to disavow any connection between the death rate and the
air quality, blaming the sudden spike in deaths on fictitious flu
epidemic. Eventually, however, the media and one crusading Member
of Parliament launched a fight that would be the beginning of the
global clean air movement. The Clean Air Act of 1956 was a direct
result of the Great Smog, and that legislation provided a model for
the rest of the world, including the U.S. In a braided narrative
that draws on extensive interviews, never-before published material
and archival research, Kate Winkler Dawson captivatingly recounts
the intersecting stories of the these two killers and their crimes.
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