One Denture From Murder

John George Haigh was born in July of 1909 into an affluent, conservative family in Yorkshire England. He grew up attending classical music concerts and was academically successful, being awarded several scholarships in his early life. He grew up in a fanatically religious household under the Plymouth Brethren religion. Household references to the Lord were used frequently to remind him that he was always being watched by a disapproving God. His parents even built a 7 foot fence around the house and wouldn’t let him bring any school friends back in case they may be “contaminated” by the outside world. His childhood was bleak and lonely and his only friends were his few pets and caring for a neighbor’s dog. The Plymouth Brethren were purist and anticlerical. Bible stories were the only form of acceptable entertainment. Even participating in sports was forbidden. John’s father believed the world was evil and they needed to keep the family separate from it. His father had a permanent blue blemish on his head that he claimed was the result of “sinning” in his youth. John grew up terrified of developing a similar sign of the devil upon his own forehead for even the slightest wrongdoing. He was told his mother was an angel, and this was why she didn’t bear a similar mark. John claimed he suffered from recurring religious nightmares in his childhood. These dreams were dominated by blood but the memories of those were vague until a car accident in 1944 caused the dreams to return. In his dream, he saw a forest of crucifixes that gradually turned into trees. At first, there appeared to be dew or rain, dripping from the branches, but upon his approach, he realized it was blood. The entire forest began to writhe and the dark trees oozed blood. A man went to each tree, collecting the blood and brought it to him, telling him to drink. From the age of 6, it’s said he would lick scratches and wound himself to suck his own blood. A turning point in his childhood and his developing psyche came when John realized that no mark of the devil was going to appear on his forehead after he had lied or committed some other questionable action. His beliefs swung so thoroughly to the other side, that he began to believe he was invincible and could get away with anything. He became such a manipulative and compulsive liar, that he was prone to say just about anything to get himself out of compromising positions. Despite his contentious upbringing, he became an accomplished pianist, learning it all at home on his own. He won a scholarship to the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield and another to Wakefield Cathedral where he became a choir boy. After finishing school, he was an apprentice at a firm of motor engineers. After a year of apprenticeship, he took jobs in insurance and advertising. However, at 21, he was fired after being suspected of stealing from a cash box at one of these jobs. In July of 1934, John married his 23 year old girlfriend, Beatrice ‘Betty’ Hamer. That same year, a now 25 year old John was jailed for fraud. While in jail, Betty gave birth to a baby girl who she put up for adoption and subsequently left John. John’s conservative family ostracized him afterwards for the divorce. After serving just two years, he was released from prison and moved to London, where he became a chauffeur to William McSwan, a wealthy owner of amusement arcades. He also worked for McSwan doing maintenance on the amusement machines. Shortly after his chauffeur stint, He pretended to be a solicitor going by the name of William Adamson. He frequently sold fraudulent stock shares from the estates of his “dead” clients at below-market rates. Eventually he was caught when one of his clients noticed he had misspelled a town name on his letterhead, an unlikely mistake for an educated solicitor. In 1939, he was arrested and imprisoned again, this time sentenced to four years for fraud. While in prison, John realized that his biggest downfall was that he had left his fraud victims alive to report the crimes. John became intrigued by the crimes of the French murderer, Georges-Alexandre Sarret, who had disposed of his victim’s bodies using sulphuric acid in 1925. While still in prison, John had lots of time to think which he used to his advantage. He devised a method of destroying the body of a victim by dissolving it in acid. John believed that if no body could be found, no conviction would be achieved and he decided he would go after rich, older women once out of prison. He experimented in the prison tin shop with field mice and sulphuric acid and found it took only about 30 minutes for the rodent’s bodies to completely dissolve. From these experiments, he was able to calculate how much acid and time it would take to dissolve a full grown man. In 1943, John was released from jail and he found employment as an accountant with an engineering firm. It’s so incredible to me how he could find gainful employment so consistently but couldn’t help trying to swindle people. Here’s where we’ll take a break before I tell you how John used his new macabre acid skills. So John is working at the engineering firm as an accountant. While at the Goat Pub in Kensington, John ran into his former employer William McSwan. William introduced John to his parents, Donald and Amy. William worked for his parents as a landlord on their London properties collecting rent from tenants. The McSwan family was quite well-to-do. John was envious of William’s lifestyle and badly wanted it for himself even though he had a great paying job of his own. I eluded to this earlier, but in 1944, John was in a severe car accident where he had suffered a head wound which had bled into his mouth. He referred to this incident as a catalyst that reawakened those blood-filled dreams from his childhood. Shortly after the accident, he rented a basement space in London where he created a sort of death workshop. He installed non-corrosive metal drums, carboys of sulphuric acid, a pump, tools and protective clothing. On September 6, 1944, John lured William McSwan into his London basement and hit him over the head. He then put William’s body into a 40-gallon drum and poured concentrated sulphuric acid onto it. He came back 2 days later and found that William had been reduced to sludge which he then poured down into a manhole. Feeling invigorated from the successful murder, John took over William’s landlord duties, telling William’s family that he had run away to Scotland to avoid the draft. Eventually, when William didn’t return after the draft was over, his parents became suspicious. On July 2 of 1945, John lured William’s parents, Donald and Amy to his workshop by telling them that William was coming back for a surprise visit. He hit them both over the head and disposed of them in the same fashion as he had with William. He then stole William’s pension checks and sold the family’s properties, stealing about 8,000 pounds and then he moved into a posh hotel in Kensington. John developed a gambling problem and by 1947, he was running short on money. Running through his cash quicker than he expected, Haigh was forced to find another wealthy couple to kill and rob. Dr. Archibald Henderson and his wife Rose were selling a house and John feigned interest in purchasing it. He was invited to their flat to play the piano at their housewarming party. While there, he stole Archibald’s revolver, thinking it would be much easier to use in future murders than his usual tactic of hitting victims over the head. He felt that his basement workshop was now too small and he needed a larger workshop for the future murders he was planning. So he rented a larger warehouse and moved some acid and drums there from the other workshop. On February 12, 1948, John lured Archibald to his workshop saying he wanted to show him an invention. While Archibald’s wife waited in the car, John took Archibald into the workshop and shot him in the head with the revolver. He then went out and told Rose that Archibald had fallen ill and he needed her help. When she entered the workshop, he shot her. After putting the couple’s bodies in drums of acid, John forged a letter from them and sold all of their possessions for 8000 pounds, but he did keep their car and their dog for himself. John now appeared well-to-do with all this money he was drumming up. He lived the life of luxury, living in an expensive hotel, driving fancy cars and wearing tailored suits. To his friends, he was cultured and charming. He would invite them to afternoon tea or an evening drink at the hotel and taking them to concerts at the Royal Albert Hall. Until he would get to know then well enough to find out about their properties and where they kept their savings. He was vague about how he made his money. Most believed he was an inventor because of the workshop and he made up details about business deals. A wealthy widow in her 60’s, Olive Durand-Deacon lived at the same hotel John did. Olive was kind and talented and she was the widow of a war hero and had been an active suffragette in her day, even spending a night in jail after throwing a brick through a window. She thought of herself as an inventor and when she heard that John worked at an engineering firm, she wanted to talk to him about an idea she had for artificial fingernails. John seized the opportunity for another kill that could earn him even more funds. He told her he loved her idea and asked her to come to the workshop to look at some blueprints he’d prepared for her project. Shortly thereafter, when Olive seemed to have vanished off the face of the Earth, her friends and family became desperate. It was John himself who took Olive’s best friend to the police station to report her missing. Fortunately, there was an observant female sergeant on duty who was suspicious of John’s jaunty demeanor. They began investigating him and they found John had sold off Olive’s jewelry and had even taken her fur coat to be cleaned. Police set off to look further into John and his warehouse. They searched through rubble in the yard outside of the workshop where a pathologist spotted what he recognized as a couple of human gallstones and a set of false teeth. While sulfuric acid does melt down human bodies into sludge, it doesn’t melt down plastic, so dentures and other things don’t tend to dissolve in the same way. Upon closer examination of the rubble, they unearthed 28 pounds of melted human body fat and part of a human foot. Unlike his previous warehouse, John didn’t have easy access to a manhole to dump the sludge in. Once inside the workshop, police found a large metal drum and several containers of acid along with a revolver, gloves and an apron splattered with acid. We’re going to take a quick break here to regather our stomachs and when we return, I’ll tell you about John’s confessions and trial. After the police found all the evidence, John didn’t even try to deny anything. He quickly confessed to the murder of Olive. He even disclosed that after shooting Olive, he’d had time for a cup of tea and a fried egg on toast at the café before putting her in her acid bath treatment. He told investigators that his main purpose behind the murders was his urge to drink the blood of his victims. He’d slice their necks and fill a glass or two that he would drink. Of course, we know the real reason for the killings was monetary and him telling the vampire stories was a way to present himself as insane. He was arrested and charged with murder and became known as the Acid Bath Murderer. He pleaded insanity and claimed that drinking the blood of his victims and driven him mad. John asked one of the arresting officers what the chances were of being released from a psychiatric hospital versus prison. John confessed further to the murders of not only Olive, but also William and his parents, Archibald and Rose and others including a young man named Max, a girl from the town of Eastbourne and a woman from Hammersmith. Those last three couldn’t be substantiated. After his arrest, John remained in custody at a police station, and the cell door of his particular incarceration is now on display in Horsham Museum. During his trial, John’s attorney called witnesses to attest to John’s mental state. A British physician claimed John had what they called, a paranoid constitution which was considered “a mental illness characterized by paranoid delusions, and a pervasive, long-standing suspiciousness and generalized mistrust of others. People with this personality disorder may be hypersensitive, easily insulted, and habitually relate to the world by vigilant scanning of the environment for clues or suggestions that may validate their fears or biases.” The doctor added: "The absolute callous, cheerful, bland and almost friendly indifference of the accused to the crimes which he freely admits having committed is unique in my experience." John mistakenly believed that if the bodies couldn’t be found or identified, that a murder conviction wasn’t possible. But, despite the absence of bodies, there was still enough forensic evidence for him to be convicted for the murders. After the trial, it took the jury just minutes to find him guilty and he was sentenced to death. He was so meticulous in details that while awaiting his execution, he asked the warden if he might meet the executioner ahead of time to make sure his weight was accounted correctly in calculating the drop on the gallows. The warden assured him that the executioner was quite experienced and would make proper provisions without having to meet him. John was so charming, that he made friends even in prison. The police liked him, the chaplain who prayed for him minutes before his execution had nothing but nice words to speak of him. His parents still believed God would forgive him and even the judge at his trial thought John was so interesting that he decided to take his retirement in the same hotel John and Olive had lived in. You’ve heard of Madame Tussauds – the wax museum? They came into his cell and spent three hours making a life mask for the wax model they put up the day after his death. The wax dummy even wore clothes specially chosen by John himself. John was hanged on August 10 of 1949 after he was allowed a glass of Brandy. At the museum of London, a collection of John’s grisly relics are open for public viewing including the gloves and apron John used to protect himself from the acid as well as Olive’s gallstones and dentures and the revolver John had used in some of the killings.