John George Haigh was born in Stamford, Lincolnshire, on July 24, 1909, and raised in Outwood, West Yorkshire, in a Plymouth Brethren household of extreme severity. He was clever, played the piano well, and had a long record for fraud and forgery, with three prison terms behind him by 1943. He was a confidence man before he was anything else, and every one of his murders was committed for money.
He killed William McSwan, the son of a former employer, in a basement in Gloucester Road in London in 1944, and then McSwan's parents Donald and Amy in 1945, forging documents to take over their property. In 1948 he killed Dr Archibald Henderson and his wife Rose, having lured them from Fulham to a small storeroom he rented at Leopold Road in Crawley, and sold everything they owned including their house. He shot each of them and put the bodies into an oil drum of concentrated sulphuric acid. The British press called him the Acid Bath Murderer.
On February 18, 1949, he took Olive Durand-Deacon, a wealthy sixty-nine-year-old fellow resident of his hotel in South Kensington, down to Crawley on the pretext of a business idea about artificial fingernails, shot her in the back of the head, and put her in the drum. Two days later he drove her friend Constance Lane to Chelsea police station to report her missing, which was a mistake. A policewoman thought him too smooth. A records check produced his fraud convictions, and the storeroom was searched.
He had misunderstood the law. He believed corpus delicti meant a body was needed to prove a murder; it means the fact of the crime. And the acid had not done its work. The pathologist Keith Simpson found in the sludge in the yard twenty-eight pounds of body fat, three gallstones, part of a foot, and a set of acrylic dentures that Mrs Durand-Deacon's dentist identified without hesitation. Haigh confessed to nine murders, three of which appear to have been invented, and claimed he had drunk a glass of each victim's blood.
The vampirism claim was a bid for a verdict of insanity, and it did not work. He was tried at Lewes Assizes in July 1949, and the jury took seventeen minutes. He was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint at Wandsworth on August 10, 1949, aged forty. He had willed his clothes to Madame Tussauds, on condition the figure was kept up to date.