✝️ Kathleen Madeleine Maloney, age 26 – January 31 1953, London, England, United Kingdom 🏴💔
Kathleen was born in King Street, Plymouth, as the youngest of three daughters to Daniel Malones, a rag and bone man of irish descent, and his wife Lillian. She was orphaned after her parents died in quick succession in 1928 and 1929. She initially went to an aunt before going to a Catholic Home St Peter`s at Dunford and then Nazareth House in Stonehouse. Her uncle claimed Kathleen was „very wild, not in a bad way, but full of pranks“.
She was first prostituted around 1944. She received two jail sentences in 1946 after being arrested and deemed „likely to cause infection“. Further jail sentences for prostitution and being drunk and disorderly followed, as did more offences which saw her handed short jail sentences for using „most foul“ language, assaulting a police officer, being drunk and disorderly and prostitution.
She had five children between 1946 and 1950, one of whom was adopted while the rest where placed in a children’s home. In September 1952 Kathleen hitchhiked to London because she was ‚fed up because the police were always chasing her. Another former friend, Catherine Struthers, who she met in March 1952, noted how Kathleen had „no place to live and went home with any man she could find“. The pair would go soliciting together and suffer yet more fines from the magistrates when caught. At one stage Kathleen was so desperate she was found sleeping in public toilets in Edgeware Road.
Kathleen was murdered by serial killer John Reginald Christie. He gassed her first before having sex with her unconscious body, then he strangled her to death. Some reports suggest that the next morning Christie had a cup of tea with Kathleen’s corpse opposite him at the table. Then, he diapered her and shoved her corpse into the alcove in the kitchen and then wallpapered over.
Because no-one ever reported Kathleen as missing, there was no investigation into her disappearance.
