He has been commonly referred to as the Acid Bath Murderer. His parents were members of the Protestant sect Plymouth Brethren. He was a choirboy at Wakefield Cathedral. He was executed via hanging in August John George Haigh is 40 years old.
Last update: If you are a model, tiktoker, instagram Influencer It is a Platform where Influencers can meet up, Collaborate, Get Collaboration opportunities from Brands, and discuss common interests. His firm, he told people, was the Union Engineering Group, with branches in four towns. That autumn, Haigh later claimed in his tacked-on confession, he killed a young man named Max from Kensington, but there was no way to test the truth of his statement.
However, he was certainly ready to kill again. Within two years of the McSwan family deaths, Haigh had spent all of the money he had gotten from their estates, so he looked around for another way to enrich himself quickly. An ad for selling a house brought him in contact with Dr. Archibald Henderson, 52, and his wife, Rose Henderson, Haigh offered more for the house than they were asking but could not come up with the money, so the deal fell through.
However, he had never intended to buy it. What he wanted was a way into their lives. He continued to see the Hendersons and to develop a friendship based on common interests in music, although they were not the type of people of which he would normally approve. They lived expensively, drank, and were fairly worldly.
Rose had been married before and was divorced. Yet the fact that they obviously had money appealed to Haigh, so he cultivated an association and formed a plan. He encouraged them to talk about themselves and through those conversations learned all that he could about their properties and their habits. He claims that he often played the piano for them and performed many acts of kindness.
Their association lasted five months, showing just how patient Haigh could be with his intended prey. During this time, Haigh rented the storehouse on Leopold Road in Crawley from Hustlea Products for his experimental work, and moved his possessions there from Gloucester Street. On December 22nd, , he ordered three carboys of sulfuric acid and two forty-gallon drums without tops. In February of , Haigh visited the Hendersons and spent several days with them.
He claims that a "dream cycle" began, indicating the blood dreams that drove him to murder. At the same time, his debts were mounting. On February 12th, he drove Dr. Henderson to Crawley and shot him in the head with his own revolver, which Haigh had stolen. He left Henderson in the storeroom while he went to get a gas mask, which he also had taken from Henderson's place. He then returned to Mrs. Henderson, told her that her husband was ill, and drove her to her doom. She was irritated with this interruption in her life and did not want to go into the storehouse, but Haigh asked her to help him carry some of her husband's things on their way to seeing him at the home of a friend.
She begrudgingly went into the building. Haigh shot her as well. He trussed up both bodies and left them there overnight. His diary for the February 12th entry indicates the Henderson's initials next to two red crosses. He dissolved them in the acid baths, as he had done with the McSwans. Henderson's foot was still intact, but Haigh dumped the sludge along with the foot in one corner of the trashy yard without bothering to take care of such obvious evidence.
Apparently he felt immune to capture. The following morning, the night porter at the hotel where the Henderson's were staying was asked to take their dog, an Irish setter, out for a walk. Haigh then went to the hotel, paid the bill, showed a letter of authority from Dr. Henderson, and took the Henderson's possessions and dog away with him.
The items he sold, along with their car, but he kept the dog with him in his hotel. He also acquired and sold the Henderson's house. Rather shockingly, he sold Barbara Stephens some of Mrs. Henderson's clothing. To Mrs. Durand-Deacon, whom Haigh had met at the hotel, he sold a handbag. From these transactions, he gained almost 8, pounds. He wrote to people whom the Henderson's knew, copying Rose's handwriting and forging her signature-even writing out a full fifteen pages to satisfy her brother, Arnold Burlin, who wanted to go to the police.
Haigh explained to this man that the Hendersons had decided to emigrate to South Africa. Burlin was worried, but did not know how to find them. When he pressed again about the police, Haigh told him that Archie would get into trouble because he had performed an illegal abortion. Burlin did not quite believe this, but he had no proof otherwise.
Although Burlin was a shrewd businessman, Haigh managed finally to convince him. He accepted Rose's letter, mailed from Glasgow, as authentic. Haigh later claimed that he had killed the Hendersons to get their blood, but his actions subsequent to the double murder, and the state of his finances, indicate otherwise.
Next, according to him, he killed a girl named Mary from Eastbourne. This, too, was never proven, and it is not certain that she ever existed. In June of Haigh claimed that his car was stolen. The Lagonda was found smashed at the foot of a cliff. Less than a month later, an unidentified female body Briffett says male was found nearby, but the police decided that one incident was unrelated to the other. Haigh insisted that he had nothing to do with either incident, even after his arrest and lengthy confession of other murders.
However, he did show the wreck to Barbara Stephens and aroused her suspicions when he told her not to mention it to anyone. People had heard him say that he was tired of the car and wished someone would steal it. Whether he simply rid himself of it or rid himself of a body is anyone's guess. He was well insured and used the money to purchase a new Avis saloon. Going through the funds he had accumulated by the end of the year, Haigh was once again in debt. He squandered a lot of money by gambling.
He noticed an obituary in the paper of the father of a schoolmate so he wrote a kind note to the widow, saying he would like to come and visit her. She thought it was sweet of him after all these years, but she died before he could get there. No doubt he had a deal in mind for her. He went about inviting several other people out to his "factory" in Crawley, but got no takers.
Now he really was getting desperate. He owed money to the hotel and had borrowed enough to pay it, but the loan had to be repaid within five days. When Mrs. Durand-Deacon approached him with the idea of inventing false fingernails, he invited her to his place of business. Even the murder of Mrs. Durand-Deacon, however, failed to cover his debts and had he not been caught, he would have had little choice but to murder again, and quickly. Just as the pressure of this murder was about to come upon him, Rose Henderson's brother, who needed to find out more information about her whereabouts, contacted him again.
Burlin was determined to go to Scotland Yard and wanted Haigh to go with him. Their mother was ill and Rose must be contacted. Haigh apparently contemplated doing away with this nosy man as well, because he offered to provide accommodations for him when he came into London. Things did not get quite that far because Haigh was arrested.
His killing spree was over. As a boy, Haigh had written a prophetic paper in which he described his own irredeemable nature: "We may well learn the lesson that one fall, even though it be met by perfect grace and full restoration, does not cure a natural disposition Perhaps the person most strongly affected by all of this, besides Haigh's distraught parents, was young Barbara Stephens.
She visited him in prison, expecting to find a broken man, falsely accused. Instead she saw a man who seemed to be reveling in the attention and who admitted to everything. As she read the accounts in the papers, she realized that he had killed all of these people while he and she were together and all of them had been his friends.
She asked him why he had not killed her, and he was astonished by the question. He assured her that he'd never even entertained such an idea. It did not reassure her, however, to realize that he had admitted his love for her the same week he had killed Mac; they had spent a wonderful day together only two days after he had disposed of Mac's parents; they had talked about marriage while he killed the Hendersons-even selling her a dress from the deceased; and the day after Olive Durand-Deacon died, they had a very pleasant tea together.
Barbara could not comprehend how she could have known so little about the person she had planned to marry. Even so, she wrote him letters throughout his prison term and visited him once a week. For his fortieth birthday, she sent him a good luck charm. Yet she grew increasingly aware that he would have killed her as well, had it been necessary. Haigh claimed to have killed nine people, but nothing was ever discovered about three of them, except for the unidentified body near Haigh's crashed car.
It may be that he told about the three extra victims because there was no evidence that he had profited from killing them and he could better support the story of killing for blood. However, his comment to the reception officer when he first arrived at Lewes Prison was, "This is the result of doing six people, but not for personal gain. In the yard outside the storehouse, the police found the acid sludge that Haigh had described. They also noted a lot of zigzagging marks from where someone had rolled and dragged something heavy over toward that area.
The ground was covered in debris and the sludge was mixed up with dirt and trash. Its depth was some three to four inches covering an area of four to six feet. The doctor's practiced eye detected something unusual, about the size of a cherry, which to anyone else might look like one of the stones lying around.
However, it was a significant find: a gall bladder stone. The acid had not dissolved it. Also embedded in the greasy, undissolved fat were some good specimens of human bone. One of these appeared to be from a left foot.
Haigh was to say that he believed this was from Henderson, whom he had not fully dissolved, not Durand-Deacon. The forensic team gathered pounds of grease and earth to cart back to a lab for closer examination. They also brought in a gallon green drum that had the same greasy substance inside. At the bottom of this drum, a hairpin was stuck in the grease. Inside the building, a fine spatter of bloodstains was noted on the wall and carefully photographed. The wall was then scraped for analysis.
The inspector thought the spray was consistent with someone getting shot while bent over the bench, possibly looking at paper, as Haigh had described Mrs. Durand-Deacon doing. Tests indicated that the blood was human, but it could not be specifically grouped. For three days, the sludge was carefully sifted, and technicians had to wear rubber gloves and cover their arms in Vaseline to protect themselves from the acid.
The painstaking search paid off. What they found was:. A further test on one of the gallstones proved that it was human.
The bone fragments were identified as a left ankle pivot bone, center of the right foot, right heel, right angle pivot bone, femur, pelvic bone, spinal column, and others too eroded for precise identification. They had been dissolved in sulfuric acid, just as Haigh had described. The investigators' great luck lay in the fact that sulfuric acid did not work on plastic as it did on human tissue.
It would take at least three weeks for the acid to finally eliminate it. Thus, if Haigh had been arrested later or had chosen to wait with his confession, the forensic team would have had much less success in finding identifiable evidence. The dentures were an important find. The team could now go to Mrs. Durand-Deacon's dentist to see if they had a match.
Durand-Deacon's gum shrinkage problems had sent her to her dentist, Helen Mayo, on many occasions. Mayo kept a cast of her patient's upper and lower jaw.
She knew that she had supplied Mrs. Durand-Deacon with the dentures found at Crawley. Simpson took the bones to his laboratory and discovered evidence of osteo-arthritis in the joints. He soon determined that Mrs. Durand-Deacon had suffered from this bone ailment. The police made a plaster cast of the left foot and it proved to fit perfectly into one of her shoes.
Bloodstains were also found on the Persian coat, which was traced back to Durand-Deacon from repairs made to it, and blood was found on the cuff of one of Haigh's shirtsleeves. The handbag strap was identified as having belonged to a bag owned my Durand-Deacon-the one she had carried when she drove to Crawley with Haigh.
Later the rest of the bag was found in the yard-apparently thrown there casually by Haigh--and matched to the strap. The police also collected witnesses who had seen Mrs. Durand-Deacon with Haigh at various times on the last day she was alive. They both left the hotel after lunch, although not together, and at , they went into the George Tavern for about five minutes.
Around , Haigh told Mr. Jones that the woman he was expecting to meet there in Crawley had not arrived. He was seen after 5 getting things out of his car and taking them into the storehouse. He then went out for a snack at At , he went to The George for dinner and returned to London at In Haigh's room was a "shopping list" of the things he had needed to buy prior to killing Mrs.
Taking it one step further, Dr. Turfitt, the police scientist on the forensic team decided to experiment with sulfuric acid to test Haigh's theories.
He used an amputated human foot, a sheep's leg, and other organic materials, finding that the acid worked at varying speeds, depending on how much water was present. Fat proved highly resistant, and it had been Mrs. Durand-Deacon's weight that had preserved those items found in the sludge. Within a month of Haigh's arrest, the prosecution was ready for trial. Proving Murder Without a Corpse. On April 1, , E. Robey opened the case for the prosecution before ten Sussex magistrates.
Haigh was present and he appeared to bask in the attention. He took notes and made light banter throughout the proceedings, with no apparent awareness that his situation was quite serious. Morris, Haigh's defense counsel, called no evidence during the two-day process. He and the prosecution agreed to stick only to the Durand-Deacon case and to refrain from mentioning Haigh's statements about drinking his victims' blood.
For his part, Haigh envisioned a decade-long stint in a mental institution and then freedom to continue to prey on people. He had seen the exaggerated newspaper accounts describing him as a blood-mad vampire and he was only too happy to go along. As an added flourish, he once had drunk his own urine while in his cell. Robey called thirty-three witnesses to prove premeditation of murder for gain. He laid out his case in the form of a basic chronology that showed how rational Haigh's movements were:.
Monday, Feb 14th, Haigh is in debt, with an unpaid hotel bill of fifty pounds. He meets with Mrs. Durand-Deacon for lunch to offer a business proposition by showing her a box of plastic fingernails. Tuesday: Haigh asks a local engineer at Crawley to fetch some acid from London.
He borrows fifty pounds from Mr. Jones, the managing director of Hurstlea Products, and tells him about the artificial fingernails. Wednesday: Haigh pays his hotel bill with Mr. Jones' money. He confirms his order for ten gallons of acid. Thursday: The acid is delivered to Crawley. Haigh gets a gallon black drum from one company, and then exchanges it for a green one, prepared to resist corrosive acids.
Friday: Mrs. Durand-Deacon is seen carrying the handbag that is found later outside the storehouse in Crawley. She is also seen by someone who recalls that she was wearing her Persian coat, and later that day, Haigh and Durand-Deacon drive away in his car. She is not seen again. At , Haigh tells Jones that the person he expected to meet regarding the fingernails has not shown up.
Saturday: Haigh tells Mrs. Lane that Durand-Deacon did not show up for their appointment. That day he goes to Bull's to have some jewelry evaluated, but the licensed appraiser is out. Another jeweler buys a wristwatch from Haigh, later identified by her sister as belonging to Mrs.
Reigate cleaners also receives a Persian lamb coat, which is valued at about fifty pounds-the sum Haigh needs to repay his debt to Mr. Jones, now overdue. Sunday, Feb 20, Haigh takes Mrs. Lane to the police station. Monday: Haigh promises Jones a quick repayment of his debt.
He again takes jewelry to Messrs. Bull for valuation. It is assessed at pounds. Tuesday: Haigh partly repays Mr. Jones what he owes. Over the next few days, he adds money to his bank account, reducing an overdraft, and goes to pay Mr.
By then, Jones has been interviewed by the police and he urges Haigh to stay away. Haigh continues to make statements professing his ignorance of Mrs. Durand-Deacon's whereabouts. Saturday, February 26th: Sergeant Heslin breaks into the storehouse. He finds a mackintosh, rubber gloves, a gas-mask case, a rubber apron, carboys that had contained sulfuric acid, and an acid-eroded stirrup-pump.
Sulfuric acid and animal fat are found on the gloves, mackintosh, and apron. Human bloodstains are later found on the gas-mask case and apron. Heslin also finds papers referring to other people who are missing, and a square case containing a revolver with eight rounds of ammunition; it has recently been fired. Monday: A bag found at the hotel where Mrs. Durand-Deacon lived contains portions of fabric that match patches on the bottom of the coat and left sleeve.
Inspector Symes collects the jewelry from Bulls'. He brings Haigh to the police station, where he makes his lengthy and calculated confession.
Tuesday: Chief-Inspector Mahon goes to Crawley to take charge. He also finds in Haigh's hotel room a shopping list that itemizes several things found in the Crawley storehouse.
He discovers a shirt with a bloodstained cuff. Wednesday: Mahon finds a bloodstained penknife in the cubbyhole of Haigh's car. Haigh is formally charged with murder. Friday, March 2: Haigh makes a written statement that adds three more people to his list of six. Durand-Deacon are found where Haigh said they would be.
Saturday, March A handbag is found outside the Crawley storehouse that matches the handle pulled intact from the acid sludge. It is the bag that others saw Mrs. Durand-Deacon carrying on Feb. Inside are items identified as belonging to the victim. This listing of witnesses and events was essentially the backbone of the trial that was to come. Its location-London or Sussex-was uncertain at first, but when Haigh's counsel was unprepared for the London date, it ended up in the Lewes Assizes.
Psychiatric Evaluation. Twelve medical doctors in all examined Haigh in prison, some before and some after his trial. They were particularly interested in his claims to have a compulsion to kill for blood.
Most often, such a compulsion is part of a sexual deviation and is incidental to the sexual frenzy itself. Haigh gave no indication of such a perversion.
In fact, he seemed to have little interest in sex. Haigh went through several examinations, including an electroencephalogram.
The results were normal. Most of the doctors were of the opinion that he was sane and was merely malingering, or faking, his insanity. Four psychiatrists examined him for the defense. Not one was able to give the opinion that Haigh was not responsible for his actions. Henry Yellowlees, when told of the opinion of his colleagues, came up with a different result.
He believed that Haigh was mentally ill, consistent with the description of paranoia, but even that diagnosis was not conclusively deemed a mental disease. Nevertheless, this professional opinion was all that the defense had. Yellowlees, 61, was a physician with a degree in psychological medicine. During the war, he had been a consulting psychiatrist to the British Expeditionary Force in France. He was also examiner in mental diseases for the University of London.
He visited the prison on five different occasions between July 1st and July 6th. During three of those visits, he interviewed Haigh. He also had examined Haigh's two confessions thoroughly, as well as looking over all other documents in the case. To Yellowlees, it was obvious that Haigh had a "paranoid constitution"-the same mental disease as Hitler.
According to descriptions in the 'forties, such a condition results partly from heredity and partly from environment, in particular the early upbringing.
It is a preliminary stage to the "paranoid insanities. Based in part on what Haigh had told to Dr. Matheson about his childhood and upbringing, Yellowlees explained how Haigh had been sheltered in a fanatical and paranoid religion and raised by a mother who gave a lot of credibility to dreams as tools of divination.
He was made to fear the wrath of God for every false step, and he was not allowed to have friends. Perry Smith, "is the potential paranoiac. A youth raised in such a place is bound to escape into fantasy. Yellowlees also noted how important it was that Haigh had been raised in one extreme form of religion and then had plunged into another extreme, which essentially was considered a sin within his primary religion.
He also mentioned the recurring dream Haigh had as a teenager of the bloody Christ. They develop a private mystic life, "which they treasure because it is apart from the cruel world.
Such a person then believes he is cleverer than others are and can get away with things. That is the first stage of the paranoid personality. He begins to live two lives. He has to be part of society and also to avoid having his clever bluff called, so he becomes vain and takes delight in taking advantage of others for his own gain. Yellowlees used as his point of reference a book written by Professor Tanzi on mental disorders.
There are various types of paranoia and the one that he felt fit Haigh was "the most rare and terrible" of the lot. It was one of the "egocentric paranoias," sometimes referred to as "ambitious" or "mystical" paranoia.
The patient's fantasy world becomes his psychological home. He views himself as omnipotent. He is in touch with some outside force that guides him. Yellowlees mentioned that Haigh had told him that he had been divinely guided by an interpretation of a verse in the Old Testament to drink his own urine. He claimed to have followed that instruction quite regularly. Paranoiacs are also uninterested in sex, because the sexual instinct is "sublimated" into self-worship, and Haigh apparently was consistent in that respect.
He believed that by killing these people he was fulfilling some destiny. He knew that what he was doing was punishable by law, but he believed he was above the law. While he did not think the blood dreams were invented, he thought that Haigh had exaggerated their effect on him.
He thought, too, that while Haigh had tasted blood, it was doubtful that he drank it as he claimed to do. Yellowlees thought he was too lucid and intelligent not to know what he was doing. Haigh wrote a note to him identifying the various unusual personalities throughout history, including Christ and Hitler, in an effort to get the doctor to understand the full scope of his abnormality.
He didn't bite. What Yellowlees failed to find out is that Haigh had befriended an employee of Sussex psychiatric hospital and over the years had gathered a lot of information about mental illness.
He knew about the behavioral patterns, traits, and habits of various disorders. The subject fascinated him and he never ceased to ask questions. In the past, he had posed as many other things-a lawyer, an engineer, a doctor-so it would not be difficult for him to pose as a person suffering from a mental condition. Most people were of the mind that he was doing precisely that-although not in a way that convinced most of those who examined him.
Yellowlees' diagnosis was put to the test in court. Justice Humphries was to preside at the trial, which opened on July 18th, An estimated four thousand people crowded into the small town of Lewes in the hope of getting a seat.
The lines were long and most were disappointed. A few attempted to sell their seats, but the police officers guarding the courtroom put a stop to that practice. In Haigh's defense were Maxwell Fyfe, G. Morris, and David Neve Eric Neve's son. Although Haigh had no money to pay for his defense, journalist Stafford Somerfield had made a deal with him: The News of the World would pay for his counsel if he would provide to them exclusively his life story. It could come out only after the trial, but they had made a huge journalistic coup.
For his part, Haigh avoided the ignominy of legal aid and had a task to do that he relished-writing about himself. It was a controversial manoeuvre, but legal. One other paper, however, went over the line. Newspapers were always pushing the limits, but it was illegal to publish sensitive material about a crime prior to the trial. The police commissioner had warned the press about their spate of sensational stories, which all but named the killer before he had been proven guilty of anything.
Haigh's legal advisors issued a complaint against the Daily Mirror, one of the papers that emphasized the vampire aspect of the crimes. The editor, Silvester Bolam, was brought in on charges of contempt of court, but the judge decided to punish the publishers of the newspaper as well.
He also warned the directors of the newspaper that they, too, could be held liable. The editor was sentenced to three months in prison in the same place where Haigh was incarcerated and the company was fined 10, pounds, plus court costs. It was an unprecedented move, but served its purpose. On the day of the trial, Haigh pleaded Not Guilty, and no question was raised regarding his mental competency to plead or to understand the proceedings.
The prosecutor presented the case and supported it with thirty-three witnesses, none of whom were challenged by the defense. Only four were even cross-examined. By the afternoon of the first day, the prosecution rested its case of deliberate premeditated murder for gain. It became clear that Fyfe was going to rely on a defense of insanity. He wanted to show Haigh's aberrant behavior. He tried to show that Haigh was in a good mood at a restaurant following the murder; he entered Haigh's confessions into evidence; and he questioned Inspector Mahon about the penknife in Haigh's car with the implication that it had been used to take blood from Mrs.
Then Fyfe described for the court the type of mental illness from which Haigh suffered and how it would affect his ability to appreciate the morality of his acts: He could not know that what he was doing was wrong. For this, he called Dr. The psychiatrist talked about his interviews with Haigh and described how Haigh's mental condition was consistent with the description of paranoia in the Text Book of Mental Diseases.
Since he could not satisfy himself that Haigh's condition prevented him from appreciating right from wrong, his testimony was limited to describing the illness. He did not commit himself on the position of the prisoner's actual thinking processes at the time of the murder. Because of this, on cross-examination he offered as much to the prosecution as to the defense.
Under pressure, Yellowlees admitted that he had not seen Haigh each time he visited the prison. All in all, he had spent a total of about two hours with the man, forming his conclusions. He admitted that he had no objective evidence to corroborate anything that Haigh had told him.
The prosecutor also pointed out that Haigh had been seen to drink his urine on only one occasion and a motive of wanting to produce an effect could not be ruled out. Yellowlees acknowledged this. He also said that he was not prepared to express an opinion on whether Haigh knew that what he was doing was morally wrong.
He was forced to admit that Haigh seemed to know that what he was doing was wrong by law, as evident from his attempt to cover his crimes. With that admission, the defense collapsed. Fyfe called no further witnesses and the prosecution decided that no rebuttal witnesses to this medical testimony were necessary.
Yellowlees had not proven Haigh to be insane. Throughout the trial, Haigh toyed with a crossword puzzle, making no move to speak on his own behalf. He paid little attention to the proceedings until the two sides made their closing speeches. Fyfe spoke mostly of Haigh's mental illness, which Yellowlees had insisted was the most difficult of all illnesses to feign, and the fact that Haigh's world was filled with fantasy.
He mentioned the drinking of urine, which Haigh had claimed to do as a habit since he was a teenager, which indicated the possibility of a primitive throwback.
He also pointed out that the dreams, combined with the blood drinking, were an important example of Haigh's disturbed fantasy life. When his delusions pressured him, his rational side slipped away, Fyfe insisted, and ceased to have any importance. Delusion, he said, is the true character of insanity.
In that case, Haigh could not appreciate the nature of what he was doing or that it was wrong. The Attorney General rose and pointed out that there was only one issue to be decided: the question of the prisoner's sanity. The defense's psychiatrist failed to prove his speculations in fact or with evidence. His entire case was dependent on the prisoner's statements, which were suspect. In fact, Haigh had asked about getting released from Broadmoor, as if he already had an insanity plan up his sleeve.
To Shawcross, it seemed a simple case: a man thought he had discovered the perfect method of concealing a crime, committed murder for gain, and then raised sanity as an issue when he got caught.
Then for another hour, the judge summed it up. In Haigh stopped attending his parents' church and married Beatrice Hammer, a year-old woman he barely knew. Haigh's parents allowed the couple to live with them although the marriage lasted only about four months, ending when Haigh was arrested in October and sent to prison for fraud. While he was incarcerated, Beatrice gave birth to a baby daughter, whom she gave up for adoption. Haigh saw her only once more; briefly, to lie by telling her that they were never officially wed because he already had a wife at the time.
Despite his abilities Haigh spent a considerable amount of time in prison for mainly fraudulent practices that involved various illegal enterprises. The family liked Haigh, promoted him in the business and were sorry to see him leave when he decided he wanted glittering prizes elsewhere. It was while he was incarcerated that he thought up a new scheme to become rich quickly, instead of toiling for a living. His plan was simply to go after rich, older women. Haigh had also convinced himself that if there was no corpse, then there could be no conviction.
Such a belief no doubt prompted him into working with sulphuric acid in the prison's tin shop where he experimented on mice and made studies of the effects of acid on animal tissue. After Haigh was released from prison, he set out to carry his heinous plan. In the interim he stayed with the Stephen family, beginning a close friendship with one of the daughters, Barbara, who, despite the year age gap, believed that she could become the next Mrs Haigh.
In Haigh was involved in a car accident where he suffered a wound to the head, which bled into his mouth. He later referred to this event as having been the catalyst that reawakened his blood-filled nightmares. Haigh finished his life story for the newspaper that had paid for his trial. He also wrote letters to Barbara Stephens and to his parents who did not see him before he died.
His mother sent greetings through a reporter. Haigh told Barbara he believed in reincarnation and that he would be back to complete his mission. On 6 August , Haigh was hanged at Wandsworth Prison. On 18 July four thousand people crowded into the small town of Lewes hoping to get a seat in the court. Mr Justice Humphries presided. Haigh had no money to pay for his defence so 'The News of the World' newspaper did a deal with him and offered to pay for his counsel if he would provide them with an exclusive.
The 'Daily Mirror' newspaper was also found in contempt of court for emphasising Haigh being a vampire. The editor, Silvester Bolam, was sentenced to three months in prison. Haigh pleaded not guilty. The prosecution rested its case of deliberate premeditated murder for gain. It was clear that Haigh was aware that what he was doing was wrong in the eyes of the law, as evidenced by his attempt to cover up his crimes. With that admission the defence collapsed.
There was only one issue to be decided, the question of the prisoner's sanity. The prosecution declared that Haigh was simply a man who believed he had discovered the perfect crime, committed murder for gain and then pretended he was insane when he was caught. The jury were left to decide whether paranoia could be considered a mental disease or defect.
It took them only fifteen minutes to come to a conclusion. Haigh was found guilty. The judge asked Haigh if he had anything to say for himself. Haigh cocked his head and said, "Nothing at all". Donning a black cap, the judge sentenced him to be hung until dead. Beside his parents, the one person who was profoundly affected by news of Haigh being a callous mass murderer was Barbara Stephens, the woman he was supposed to love and marry.
She visited him regularly in prison trying to understand what kind of man she had been involved with. Did he intend to kill her, she asked? He never entertained the idea, was the seemingly genuine reply.
However, Barbara knew that at some point she may have succumbed to a similar fate when Haigh saw her as an inconvenience. ForensicsEven although the acid had destroyed a great deal of evidence, not everything had been eliminated.
Technicians had to wear rubber gloves and cover their arms in Vaseline to protect themselves from the acid. They found the following items. Part of a left foot, not quite eroded4.
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