The mistake that hanged John George Haigh was a legal one. He believed that English law required a body before a murder could be proved, and he built six killings on that belief. Each victim was shot or clubbed, dropped into a forty-gallon drum of concentrated sulphuric acid, and left for two or three days until what remained could be poured away. When Scotland Yard detectives put it to him in February 1949 that a wealthy widow from his hotel was missing, he told them she was gone for good and asked how anyone could prove a murder without a body. The doctrine he was leaning on, corpus delicti, means the body of the crime, not the body of the victim. A pathologist working through a heap of greasy sludge in a Sussex yard proved the rest.
Haigh was a swindler first and a killer only when swindling stopped paying. He was born in Stamford, Lincolnshire, on July 24, 1909, the only child of John Robert Haigh, an engineer, and his wife, Emily, born Hudson, who had married late in life and belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, and raised in Outwood, near Wakefield, in a house where the wireless and the newspaper were kept out and a high fence was built around the yard. He won a scholarship to Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield, sang in the cathedral choir, and learned the piano well enough to play for company all his life. He was apprenticed to a firm of motor engineers, left after a year for jobs in insurance and advertising, and at twenty-one was dismissed on suspicion of stealing from a cash box, after which he moved on to forging car documents. He married Beatrice Hamer, known as Betty, who was twenty-three, on July 6, 1934, and was in prison for fraud within months; she gave birth while he was inside, placed the child for adoption, and left, and from then on his family would have nothing to do with him. By 1943 he had served three sentences, one of them four years for posing as a solicitor named William Cato Adamson, with offices in Chancery Lane, Guildford and Hastings, and selling shares in estates that did not exist, a scheme that came apart when a customer noticed he had misspelled Guildford on his letterhead. Forgery, he later said, had taught him a lesson: it left living witnesses.
He also learned about acid in prison. The French case of Georges Sarret, who had dissolved two bodies in a bath of sulphuric acid in 1925, was known in England, and Haigh worked in a tinsmith's shop at Lincoln where acid was kept. He said afterward that he had tested it on field mice and found that a mouse dissolved in about thirty minutes.
The McSwans were the people who had been kind to him. Donald McSwan, born near Menstrie in Scotland in 1878, had come south as a shorthand clerk and, with his wife Amy, had bought several London houses that they rented out. Their only son, William Donald McSwan, born in 1911, ran pin-table arcades and a sweet shop, and in 1936 he hired Haigh, fresh out of prison, as his chauffeur and rent collector. William called him charming. Out of prison in 1943, Haigh took a job as an accountant with an engineering firm, and in 1944 the two men met again by chance in a Kensington pub. William was thirty-three, a registered conscientious objector who had been dodging his call-up papers by moving from address to address, and he was frightened of being sent to the war. On September 9, 1944, after a drink at the Goat on Kensington High Street, he went with Haigh to three basement rooms Haigh had just rented at 79 Gloucester Road. Haigh struck him on the head, with a cosh by some accounts and a length of lead pipe by others, and put him in a drum of acid. Most lists of the dead give the date as September 9; other accounts date his disappearance to September 6. Two days later he emptied the drum into the drain in the floor.
Then he became William McSwan. He wrote to Donald and Amy in their son's name from Glasgow and Edinburgh, telling them William had gone to Scotland to avoid conscription, and he drew down William's bank account in monthly installments while he did it. By the summer of 1945 the war was over, the excuse was wearing out, and Haigh's landlord had given him notice to leave the basement. On July 2, 1945, he brought Donald and Amy McSwan to Gloucester Road separately, telling each that William had come back for a surprise visit, and killed them the same way. Sixteen days later he was in Glasgow again with forged papers, arranging power of attorney over the McSwan properties, which he sold. The McSwans were worth something over eight thousand pounds to him. He spent the next two years gambling it away from a room at the Onslow Court Hotel in South Kensington.
Dr. Archibald Henderson had inherited more than twenty thousand pounds when his first wife died in 1937, and that July he married Rose Erren, born Burlin, the divorced wife of the German engineer and inventor Rudolf Erren. They had bought the building at 16 Dawes Road in Fulham that housed a century-old toy shop called the Doll's Hospital, and they lived in the apartment above it. Haigh met them by answering an advertisement for a house they were selling in Ladbroke Square. He did not buy it, but he stayed in touch, and when the Hendersons gave a housewarming party Rose invited him to play the piano for their guests. During one visit he took Henderson's .38 Webley revolver. He had by then rented a brick storeroom at 2 Leopold Road in Crawley, and moved the drums and the carboys of acid down from London. On several occasions he stayed at the George Hotel in Crawley.
On February 12, 1948, Haigh drove Dr. Henderson from Brighton, where the couple were staying at the Metropole, to Crawley to look at an invention, and shot him in the head in the storeroom. He went back for Rose, told her that her husband had been taken ill, and shot her when she walked in. He forged a letter in the doctor's hand explaining that the Hendersons had left the country, and over the following months he sold their car, their jewelry, and the Doll's Hospital itself, transferred on a forged deed to a toy dealer named Albert Clarke, for about eight thousand pounds in all. He kept their red setter, Pat, and by some accounts their car as well. The couple's relatives received letters, in Haigh's forgery of Rose's handwriting, that grew stranger over time, and a brother had begun asking questions before the year was out. Nobody had gone to the police.
By February 1949 the Henderson money was gone too. Haigh owed the Onslow Court Hotel for his room and had a bank overdraft, and he had been living among the residents for four years as a well-mannered engineer with a car. Olive Durand-Deacon was one of them. She was sixty-nine, the widow of a solicitor, John Durand-Deacon, and a woman of means who dressed well and took an interest in business. She had an idea for manufacturing artificial fingernails, and Haigh told her he had a factory in Sussex where they might make them. On Friday, February 18, 1949, she went with him to Crawley wearing her Persian lamb coat. Inside the storeroom he shot her in the back of the head, took her coat, her rings, her earrings, her necklace and her crucifix, and put her into the drum. He went to a cafe for a poached egg on toast while the acid began its work, then drove back to London and pawned the jewelry over the next few days. He left the coat at a dry cleaner in Reigate.
What undid him was that she had a friend. Constance Lane, another Onslow Court resident, had expected to see Mrs. Durand-Deacon at dinner. Haigh volunteered, unprompted, that the widow had never turned up for their appointment, and on Sunday morning he offered to drive Mrs. Lane to Chelsea police station to report her missing. The officer who took the report was a woman police sergeant, Alexandra Lambourne, and she did not like Mr. Haigh. He was too smooth, too helpful, and too quick to make himself part of the story. On her word a records check was run, and it came back with three convictions for fraud. Detectives went to Crawley on February 26. In the storeroom they found the drums, the carboys, a rubber apron, a gas mask and a stirrup pump, and in Haigh's attaché case a dry cleaner's ticket for a Persian lamb coat along with papers belonging to the McSwans and the Hendersons. Five people were now missing, and all their paper had ended up with one man.
Haigh was brought to Chelsea police station on February 28. Left alone for a moment with Detective Inspector Albert Webb, he asked what the chances were of anyone ever being let out of Broadmoor. Webb said he could not discuss that. Haigh then told him that if he told the truth nobody would believe it, and dictated a statement admitting the murder of Mrs. Durand-Deacon, the three McSwans and the two Hendersons. He added three more he could not name: a young man called Max, a girl from Eastbourne and a woman from Hammersmith. He said he had opened a vein in each victim's neck, drawn off a glass of blood and drunk it. The police never found a trace of the extra three, and no missing person matched them.
The Gloucester Road basement had a drain. The Crawley storeroom did not. Haigh had been tipping the drums onto a rubble heap in the yard, and that heap was where Professor Keith Simpson, the Home Office pathologist, went on March 1. Within minutes he had picked something the size of a cherry stone from the greasy earth and identified it as a human gallstone. Over the following days the yard yielded twenty-eight pounds of human fat, three gallstones, fragments of a left foot, part of a pelvis, a lipstick case, the handle of a red plastic handbag and, most important, a full upper denture and part of a lower one in acrylic. Mrs. Durand-Deacon's dentist, Helen Mayo, had made them for her two years earlier and identified them from her records. Simpson later wrote that the remains were identified as surely as if the body had never been in the acid.
Before the case reached a jury it made legal history in another way. On March 3, the Daily Mirror ran the front-page headline VAMPIRE HORROR IN LONDON, SW7, and followed it over three days with the claim that a maniac who drank his victims' blood was in custody and that other murders were being laid to him. Haigh's name was not printed; it did not need to be. On March 25, in the Divisional Court, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard, called the coverage a disgrace to English journalism, fined the paper ten thousand pounds, and sent its editor, Silvester Bolam, to Brixton prison for three months for contempt of court. It remains the standard case cited in Britain when an editor is warned about prejudicing a trial.
The trial itself lasted less than two days. It opened at Lewes Assizes on July 18, 1949, before Mr. Justice Humphreys, and four thousand people crowded into a town of a few thousand hoping for a seat. Haigh was charged with the murder of Olive Durand-Deacon alone. The Attorney General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, appeared for the Crown himself, and the defense was led by Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, his fees paid by the News of the World in exchange for Haigh's life story. The Crown called thirty-three witnesses and put the case as premeditated murder for gain, with the pawnshop tickets and the bank statements to prove it. The defense rested its case on a psychiatrist, Dr. Henry Yellowlees, who had seen Haigh in prison; most accounts say he was the only witness it called, though some describe several. He described a paranoid constitution built on the childhood dreams, the blood-drinking and the religious upbringing, and told the court that "the absolute callous, cheerful, bland and almost friendly indifference" of the accused to the crimes he freely admitted was unique in his experience. The dream, as Haigh told it, had come back to him after a car accident in March 1944: a forest of crucifixes that turned into trees streaming blood, and a man going from tree to tree filling a cup who came to him and told him to drink. Shawcross asked him whether Haigh had known that what he was doing was wrong and punishable by law. Yellowlees said he thought it was probable that he had. That answer disposed of the insanity defense under the M'Naghten rules, and Haigh's own conduct disposed of the rest: a man who buys acid in carboys and a rubber apron, drives a hundred miles to sell a dead woman's jewelry and asks about release from Broadmoor before he confesses is not a man who did not know what he was doing.
The jury went out at 4:23 on the afternoon of July 19 and was back in seventeen minutes. Haigh did not appeal. In the condemned cell at Wandsworth he asked whether he might rehearse the execution so that it would go smoothly, and he left his suit to Madame Tussauds on condition that the trousers were kept creased and the figure was maintained. Albert Pierrepoint hanged him at eight o'clock on the morning of August 10, 1949. He was forty years old. In his last weeks he joked about dropping in on God unexpectedly and said he expected to be reincarnated and come back to carry on his work. The evidence from the trial went to the Crime Museum at New Scotland Yard.
The dead have their own stories, and the record keeps them. Donald McSwan was sixty-seven and Amy about the same; the son they had believed was hiding in Scotland had been poured down a drain eight months before they died. William McSwan was a frightened man of thirty-three whose worst fear was the army. Dr. Archibald Henderson was fifty-two and Rose was forty-one; the toy shop they owned went on repairing dolls sent by post from all over the world for another forty years, and a Fulham newspaper in 1976 was still describing the building as the one where the doctor and his wife had lived. Olive Durand-Deacon, born Henrietta Helen Olivia Robarts Fargus, is the only one of the six whose death was ever put to a jury, and it was her teeth that did it.