The Girlfriends S3/Bonus Ep 4: Live from Wilderness with Kate Summerscale

Transcript

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Speaker 27 Hey girlfriends, it's Anna here. This is bonus episode 4, the final one.
And this one's really special special because it was recorded live at Wilderness Festival back in August.

Speaker 27 It's going to include a lot of discussion about murder and violence against women. And it's going to touch on the topic of abortion.

Speaker 27 But it's also a really fascinating discussion about the ethics of true crime and the roles we all play as part of it. So, to the festival.

Speaker 28 Hello, and welcome to our very first live podcast recording of The Girlfriends.

Speaker 29 It is so great to be here at Wilderness Festival. I've got a crick in my neck because I slept badly last night in a tent.

Speaker 27 Awful, but it was so nice as well.

Speaker 29 I'm Anna Sinfield and today I'm joined by Kate Summer Scale, the author of The Peep Show, which is a true crime book about a set of eight shocking murders that happened in London in the 1940s and 50s.

Speaker 29 The book deep dives on the serial killer John Christie, his female victims and the circumstances that allowed him to go uncaught for so long and potentially caused another man to be hanged for his crime.

Speaker 29 But it also brings up lots of interesting questions about the impact and role of true crime reporting, which is basically what we're going to be talking about today.

Speaker 28 So, without any further ado, from the teams at Novel and iHeart Podcasts, this is The Girlfriends, Jailhouse Lawyer.

Speaker 29 Okay, so fans of The Girlfriends will know that our latest series, Jailhouse Lawyer, I wrestle with figuring out my role in reporting that story and also more broadly with the ethics of true crime reporting, of turning something so kind of awful into a sense of like morbid entertainment.

Speaker 29 And I know that that's something that you've had to wrestle with yourself in your book, The Peak Show, Kate.

Speaker 29 And so before we get a little too existential about our jobs, I was wondering if you could tell me first what drew you to this story out of all the grisly murders in the world.

Speaker 32 It felt as if I'd always dimly known about it, like a horrible fairy tale.

Speaker 32 I saw the wax statue of Reg Christie at the Madame Two Swords Chamber of Horrors when I was about eight,

Speaker 32 and I saw the film Ten Rillington Place on late night TV when I was in my teens.

Speaker 32 And I remembered it when there were the murders of several women in London in 2020-21

Speaker 32 who had been killed by strangers, Sarah Everard among them.

Speaker 32 And I started thinking about that phenomenon: men who kill women who are strangers to them just because they are women. And I started wondering why.

Speaker 32 And I remembered the Rillington Play story. I didn't even remember Reg Christie's name at the time, but when I looked it up, I saw various parallels and echoes with the more recent crimes.

Speaker 32 And I thought that by studying him and his world, I could get a better sense of the connections between a culture, a society, and the violence it produces than by looking at my own time, which is almost too close up to see.

Speaker 31 Yeah, I mean, when you looked at those crimes of before and compared them to the crimes that you'd been experiencing in the early 20s, seeing these women murdered by strangers.

Speaker 31 Did you feel like there was a difference? Did you notice a difference between them, or does it just feel like this sad trope of male violence has just continued in the same form?

Speaker 32 I did notice more the similarities than the differences, yes. Not least

Speaker 32 Christie, I discovered, like Wayne Cousins, was serving as a policeman when he committed his first known murder.

Speaker 32 He was a reserve policeman during the Second World War, which was an amazing opportunity for catching women unawares and concealing crimes of violence.

Speaker 32 So, yes, I noticed the parallels, but it was sort of easier to see at a distance in the 50s the way that Christie's attitudes were so closely echoed in the press, in the police force, in the way that pathologists talked about the victims.

Speaker 32 And so it felt easier to understand him as a product of his society as well as of his individual life.

Speaker 31 You brought up the press there, and a big part of your book focuses on this crime reporter called Harry Proctor.

Speaker 31 And you say in the book, and I'm going to quote this, that he was successful because he didn't just tell a story, he infiltrated it, he embedded himself.

Speaker 31 I know that I lose myself in so many of the cases that I work on, and they're pretty kind of hardcore stories of people being killed or experiencing violence in some respect.

Speaker 31 Are you as obsessive about your stories as Harry Proctor and me?

Speaker 32 Yeah, I love the research more than any other part of the composition of a book. I mean, most of my research, because I write historical stories, is in archives.

Speaker 32 And so I'm going through old papers, witness statements in police files, transcripts of trials, photographs, maps, floor plans, and I get completely lost in it.

Speaker 32 And it feels, you know, as you literally are sort of touching the past, you're holding the same documents as the people who you're writing about and thinking about.

Speaker 32 And so I find it very, very absorbing. Yeah.

Speaker 31 I mean, I don't know about you, but on my desk, my writing desk at home, now I've got a kind of really quite weird and perverse collection of belongings and things that have been owned by victims in some of my stories or their families and I've been gifted them or you know loaned them so that I can do my research and it always feels so different holding you know for example I've got a version of a book that was owned by this woman called Heidi's family in the second series of the girlfriends we identify this woman called Heidi who had been murdered and I've got her dad's version of a book that was written about her murder

Speaker 31 and it feels so strange to own that artefact and to hold it in my hand it feels different from the version that I had when it was just from the library.

Speaker 31 Do you feel strange touching the past in that way?

Speaker 32 Yes, I have. I mean, maybe because they happened 70 years ago, I don't have so many objects in my possession, but they are just open to the public.

Speaker 32 It feels kind of miraculous that you can just order up these papers and artefacts sometimes and sort of be with them and touch them. And sometimes there are weird coincidences.

Speaker 32 I'll order a second-hand book on the internet, and when it arrives, open it and find it's sort of been inscribed to one of the characters in the story.

Speaker 32 And then you feel part of actually a strangely close-knit network or world, and you feel like you're sort of participating in it, albeit over time.

Speaker 32 You're not there live, but the aspiration is to sort of be live, and in moments like that, you feel like it almost is unfolding in real time.

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Speaker 31 There's a line in your book that really stood out to me because it's been something I've been pulling my hair out a little bit over.

Speaker 31 You wrote, being complicit in a culture that made morbid entertainment of women's bodies.

Speaker 31 I believe you're talking about the journalism of the time, but as a true crime writer today,

Speaker 31 do you think that's changed? And what do you think your role is in that?

Speaker 32 I think it's much more starkly visible in the 1950s, the ways in which the tabloid press in particular, but also movies and posters and adverts represented women were so sort of glaringly sexualised and objectified and for entertainment, you know, for pleasure, for male pleasure principally.

Speaker 32 But of course, there are versions of that now, but it's less in your face, so you kind of see it more clearly.

Speaker 32 And in fact, there were murders that took place in North London in 2020, near where I live. Biba Henry and Nicole Smallman, two sisters, were killed in a park.

Speaker 32 They were killed by a stranger who had a mission to kill a certain number of women.

Speaker 32 And afterwards, the police circulated photographs of their bodies and talk about a peep peep show, talk about making a morbid entertainment. But the press does the same.
A book like mine does that.

Speaker 32 It's trying to tell a story that will engage, engross, script the reader. And the subject is the suffering of these women.

Speaker 32 So there's some degree of complicity, but there are different ways of doing it. There are different ways of thinking and feeling about it and presenting it.

Speaker 32 And in fact, in my book, book, I made the decision to not include a photo section because there seemed no way of illustrating this book without having a sort of gallery of victims' mugshots.

Speaker 32 So I sort of tried to use Harry Proctor in a way who was also troubled by some of these issues

Speaker 32 and was the star crime reporter for one of the best-selling tabloids in the country.

Speaker 32 I'd use him to help me think about what I'm doing and what we do and what we do as readers of true crime or listeners to true crime podcasts and so on and to at least reflect on that as I go.

Speaker 31 Yeah well I mean that was going to be one of my next questions was in Harry Poctor's autobiography in relation to people criticizing his reporting, he says it was tougher for me to do than for you to read it.

Speaker 31 So why the hell do we do it?

Speaker 32 That sounds very defensive to me of Harry Proctor. It does a little, doesn't it? It does a little.
I mean, I wouldn't do it unless I did enjoy it and find it rewarding and feel I was

Speaker 32 gripped and learnt things by doing it.

Speaker 32 And he goes on in that passage to sort of he blames his editors for sending him out on these stories, and in fact, he did eventually have a nervous breakdown because they wouldn't take him off.

Speaker 32 So, he blames his editors, he blames his bosses for sending him out on the stories, and he blames his readers.

Speaker 32 He says, I only give it to you because you want it. You know, before you back with moral outrage at me, you're the ones who want it.
So it all sounds very troubled and defensive to me, as if he really

Speaker 32 is struggling with his role in this material. And the ways in which he and many in Fleet Street carried out their inquiries at the time is quite shocking by

Speaker 32 today's standards, but that doesn't, you know, it's still a, it's all on a spectrum.

Speaker 31 Yeah, I mean, obviously, as a true poem writer, I also am going to endorse that it's a good medium, but I do think that there are some genuine upsides to some of the stuff we do, and you point out some in your book.

Speaker 31 For example, some of the essays and works around Tim Evans, the man who was hanged prior to Christie's arrest, that helped move the needle on conversations around the death penalty.

Speaker 31 So like actually that writing helped make a difference.

Speaker 32 Yeah, and Harry Proctor was desperate to get Christie to confess to the murder of the little girl, one-year-old girl, for which Tim Evans had hanged.

Speaker 32 And it wasn't just a search for justice in this particular case, but also to expose the way that the justice system could malfunction and innocent people, because there was capital punishment, could be sent to their deaths, and so there was no way of correcting the error.

Speaker 32 So, the Evans case was really instrumental in getting the death penalty abolished in the 1960s. It took that long, but Harry Proctor was part of that push to expose the truth.

Speaker 32 And the government was very keen to move on and cover up this stuff because they wanted to defend the justice system but also the existence of the death penalty, the continuation of the death penalty.

Speaker 32 So, it was quite a political story in those ways.

Speaker 32 But it also

Speaker 32 brought to light the reporting on the case, the publicity given to it, also brought to light quite a lot of fractures and

Speaker 32 tensions in British society, and quite a lot of desperate practices, such as an awareness about illegal abortion and how dangerous it was, and how desperate single women often were when they became pregnant, and this was their only recourse at Backstreet abortion.

Speaker 32 Because Christie posed as, and I think acted as, a backstreet abortionist, and this was one of the means by which he lured women to his home.

Speaker 32 And so, the vulnerability was a you know, a particularly dramatic manifestation of the dangers of backstreet abortion.

Speaker 32 You wouldn't normally expect to be murdered, but it was a fairly risky procedure in which women did did sometimes die.

Speaker 31 And were very easily exploited. Yeah.

Speaker 31 I mean, both of those examples are examples of crime reporting that's actually making a difference, it's having a cultural impact. Do you think that crime reporting always needs to,

Speaker 31 you know, the North Star needs to be we have an impact, we change things, we do something different?

Speaker 32 I don't think you always know what the impact will be. So I don't think

Speaker 32 needs to be justified by that. I think stories are worth telling.
Terrible events are worth exploring to find out where they come from, what form they take, how they manifest themselves.

Speaker 32 And also, some stories, I'm very interested in the way that some of these terrible stories express the fears and fantasies, often the unspoken fears and fantasies, of a wider world.

Speaker 32 So, as a writer, as a researcher, writing about crime feels like getting access to a kind of underground emotional life of a society, of a culture, as a nation.

Speaker 32 You start to see the things that animate people, that scare them, that they fantasize about.

Speaker 32 And so, there are lots of ways, not all of them practical, in which a crime story, a story of violence, can help us learn who we are and where we come from and how the world worked.

Speaker 31 Well, that was one of the things that I thought was great great about your book because you really pointed the finger back at the audience, at all of the kind of sickos in the room today who like to listen about murders and read about murders and grisly things and the darkest parts of society.

Speaker 31 And you kind of say, why is it that you want to participate in this grisly peep show?

Speaker 31 And there are examples of it in the book as well.

Speaker 31 There was a group of women who tried to break in after it was kind of all boarded up just because they presumably wanted to be in this place where so much darkness had happened to other women. And

Speaker 31 people want to know the worst details, don't they? Why do you think people are so obsessed with true crime?

Speaker 32 Oh, such a big question. When I read about the women who tried to break in through the bay window at Ten Rillington Place, and I thought, whoa, weird, you know.

Speaker 32 And then I thought, it's what I'm doing.

Speaker 31 You're breaking into the window.

Speaker 32 I'm breaking into the window.

Speaker 32 I'm trying to to get inside the house. You know, it's not so different.
And people clamoured at the courthouses to see Christie, to see him.

Speaker 32 And it was remarked upon sometimes that a lot of them were women. And now, true crime podcasts, two-thirds of the audiences are women.
So that has a route to why are we so fascinated by it.

Speaker 32 I mean, one quite compelling idea to me is that there are stories that get told through these crimes that are not often aired.

Speaker 32 Stories about domestic violence, about marital unhappiness, about betrayal, about problems between parents and children, about unwanted pregnancies.

Speaker 32 That a lot of the domestic difficulty that many women kind of deal with isn't aired so much in the pages of the press and

Speaker 32 certainly didn't used to be in the 1950s, unless through a story of a violent crime. So it gives us access to things that we sort of know about, or half-know about, or want to talk about.

Speaker 32 Another thing would be that it's a kind of knowing your enemy impulse.

Speaker 32 Do you want to see the man who might kill you, or what that kind of man looks like, or what makes him, how to identify him, what circumstances the women who were killed by him found themselves in that that happened to them.

Speaker 32 So, a self-protective instinct perhaps is at work as well.

Speaker 32 Also, I think there are just our own anger, fear, maybe even violent stories that find an outlet in thinking about and learning about these things. It can act as some kind of vent or self-expression.

Speaker 32 Reading as well as writing can be that kind of self-expression.

Speaker 31 I get that.

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Speaker 17 Malcolm Glabwell here.

Speaker 37 I recently recorded the first episode of Smart Talks with IBM where I learned how AI agents are joining AI assistants as a major productivity tool. Let's start with AI agents.

Speaker 37 AI agents can reason, plan, and collaborate with other AI tools to autonomously perform tasks for a user.

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Speaker 25 As a new student, you may not know, how do I deal with my health and wellness issue? How many credits am I going to get for this given class?

Speaker 25 You could talk to someone and find out some of that, but maybe it's a little bit sensitive and you don't want to do that.

Speaker 37 Bissell told me, you could build an AI agent, a resource for new students that helps them navigate a new campus, register for classes, access the services they need, and even schedule appointments on their behalf, which in turn buys them more time to focus on their actual schoolwork.

Speaker 25 We can see patterns of how agents and assistants can help employees and customers and end users be more productive, automate workflows so they're not doing certain types of repetitive work over and over again, and streamlining their lives and making data more accessible to them 24 hours a day.

Speaker 37 To learn more about IBM's AI agents and how they can help your business, visit ibm.com slash agents.

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Speaker 31 Okay, so now I've called you all sickos. I was just wondering if any of you had any questions for me or Kate.

Speaker 31 No pressure.

Speaker 30 Lovely. Over here.

Speaker 31 Oh, wait for the microphone. We've got to get it on the podcast.

Speaker 32 So, dark stuff.

Speaker 32 So, do you have some sort of cleansing for yourself once you've done some detailed research and you've written the book to step away? Do you need to do that at all?

Speaker 32 It feels a big relief.

Speaker 32 Maybe this is the case for any writer, but with a story as intense as this, and I did work on it very intensely, partly because there was so much material I needed to go fast to kind of keep it in my head, to keep the story straight.

Speaker 32 And

Speaker 32 there's a great relief in sharing it with other people. In the first instance, your editor, a publishing team, that it stops being just yours.

Speaker 32 So publication is in itself a kind of lifting of the story from a private sphere into a public sphere, and people can read it, converse with you about it.

Speaker 32 So something that has been internal conversations becomes something that can be talked about. And that feels good, that feels really nice.

Speaker 32 I mean, perhaps you're asking about during the process of writing, I think it feels like any job I need, you know, company, different things going on.

Speaker 32 I don't feel that it's a particularly more difficult thing to bear than any other. It's something I'm interested in, I enjoy.
I don't feel poisoned by it.

Speaker 32 You know, I don't feel I need to be cleansed as I go. I just need sort of light and shade as anyone would doing things for fun instead of things that are intense and purposeful.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 I think, in short, Kate's made of strong stuff because I definitely need some cleansing after all of my shows.

Speaker 31 Any more questions?

Speaker 31 Got one over here, just in front.

Speaker 33 Hello. Do you, when you go back to the start of your career to now, do you reflect on how it's perhaps shaped you as a person and your response to the world?

Speaker 32 Well, I've had a big change of career in that I worked as a journalist for many years for newspapers.

Speaker 32 I was an editor rather than a writer, and I left to write a book which was successful beyond my dreams and enabled me to continue writing books. That's all I do.

Speaker 32 That's been a huge change because I get to decide what I do every day. I get to sort of follow my nose, follow my curiosity,

Speaker 32 and I miss the company of the newspaper office. It's quite a solitary work I do now, but I

Speaker 32 love being able to determine my own path all the time. And I'm sure that has changed me as a person and how I feel my place in the world.

Speaker 31 I think we've got time for one more question, then I've got to wrap it up.

Speaker 39 Hi. So you were talking about like why people listen to true crime.

Speaker 39 Do you think that because in the media killers are kind of shown as like monsters and stuff, do you think there's like a need to feel separated from

Speaker 39 those people?

Speaker 30 What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker 32 Oh, I think totally, yes. I really noticed

Speaker 32 in the coverage of Christie how eager the press was to sort of monster him, you know, to either talk about him as a psychopath, a word I find quite problematic, just a way of saying like not like me, you know, a monster, a creature,

Speaker 32 and the the desire to distance oneself from the murderer and to be reassured that you're not that is, I think, one of the pleasures of reading about crime, whether it's fictional or factual.

Speaker 32 And it's a totally understandable impulse, but it one of its effects is to sort of say that this person has nothing to do with the society in which he lived.

Speaker 32 And I think there is more complicity than that.

Speaker 32 I was eager neither to glamorise Christie as this sort of great serial killer, you know, cunning, but nor to distance him in the way that the press did at the time and to make him so

Speaker 32 different,

Speaker 32 so kind of exceptional. And I could see he was in some ways he wasn't exceptional.

Speaker 32 The things he ultimately did were, but his sort of fantasies and assumptions and prejudices were perfectly ordinary, I mean, frighteningly ordinary. And I'm sure it's shared across the society.

Speaker 32 And I totally agree with you that one of the pleasures of, especially like if you read a crime novel and you get to the end, and you're one of the pleasures is it wasn't me, you know, nothing to do with me.

Speaker 32 So

Speaker 32 feelings of kind of unease or guilt are dispelled by the identification of the murderer and the assignment of blame.

Speaker 31 Yeah, on the Girlfriend's Jailhouse Lawyer, which is the podcast that's coming out at the moment, we've actually tried to go on the other side of kind of exploring exploring what it means to be a villain.

Speaker 31 We're trying to understand what happens when you fall in the in-between, which is where all of us fall, I'm sorry to say, as we're neither perfect nor are we totally bad.

Speaker 31 And even the perpetrators that I actually spend time interviewing, I'm interviewing people who've been convicted of murder on the show.

Speaker 31 And it's realizing that they have paths that have led them up to that point.

Speaker 31 And when you start to kind of try and stop seeing them just as monsters, but as people who are a product of their circumstances, it forces you to look inwards as well, which is a scary place to be looking.

Speaker 31 Okay, well, that is a fun note to end on.

Speaker 31 Look, that's all we've got time for today. So, thank you so much, Kate.
This has been brilliant. Could everyone give her a big round of applause?

Speaker 31 So, do make sure to pick up Kate's book, The Peep Show, at all the usual spots and check out The Girlfriends, wherever you get your podcast which is where you hear me

Speaker 30 thank you

Speaker 27 thank you so much to kate and to wilderness festival for having me and thank you for listening we've finally come to the end of season three The Girlfriends will return with a brand new season very soon.

Speaker 27 And I won't give you any spoilers, but let's just say I've heard some of it and you are in for one hell of a story.

Speaker 27 Plus, make sure you check out the girlfriend's spotlight too where you can hear more incredible stories of women winning. That's it from me so I'll see you soon.

Speaker 27 The Girlfriend's Jailhouse Lawyer is produced by Novel for iHeart podcasts.

Speaker 28 For more from Novel, visit novel.audio.

Speaker 27 The show is hosted by me, Anna Sinfield, and is written and produced by me and Lee Meyer, with additional production from Jayco Tyvich and Michael Ginnow. Our assistant producer is Madeline Parr.

Speaker 27 The editors are Georgia Moody and me, Anna Sinfield. Production management from Cherie Houston, Joe Savage and Charlotte Wolfe.
Our fact checker is Dania Suleiman.

Speaker 27 Music supervision by me, Anna Sinfield, Lee Meyer and Nicholas Alexander. Original music composed by Nicholas Alexander, Daniel Kempson, and Louisa Gerstein.

Speaker 27 Story development by Nell Gray Andrews and Willard Foxton, creative director of Novel. Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are our executive producers for Novel.

Speaker 27 And Katrina Norvell and Nikki Etor are the executive producers for iHeart Podcasts. And the marketing lead is Alison Cantor.
Thanks also to Carrie Lieberman and the whole team at WME.

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Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.