The Acid Bath Murderer of England | The Lineup Podcast The Acid Bath Murderer of England John George Haigh took the plunge into murder when he knocked out his old boss and dumped the body into acid – then set out to kill again. StumbleUpon stumbles Red wine, ice cream, a warm bath – these are wonderful ways to unwind after a long day at work. But as we’ve seen time and again, even the most soothing of activities can be twisted into terror by a madman’s dark imagination. Such is the grisly case of John George Haigh, a serial killer from England who used bubble baths of acid to dispose of his victims. Born in 1909 to an ultra-religious Plymouth Brethren family, John George Haigh was raised in Yorkshire, England. His upbringing was strict, to say the least – his father reportedly constructed a 10-foot fence around their yard as a means of blocking out the neighbors. With no playmates, young John grew up alone. At night, he was haunted by nightmares. The first signs of trouble appeared in his early 20s. After a series of odd office jobs, John was canned on the suspicion that he’d stolen company money.

His life took a brief turn for the better in 1934, when he married a woman named Betty Hamer – but the marriage fell apart. Soon after, John landed himself in jail for fraud. While behind bars, Betty gave birth to a baby girl, whom she put up for adoption. John’s conservative parents refused to accept the decision, and forever shunned their son from the family. Alone, John moved south to London, where he picked up work as a chauffeur for a wealthy businessman named William McSwan in 1936. Yet his criminal ways bubbled back up. For the next seven years, John was in and out of jail for various crimes. It was during this time that he dreamed up the perfect murder. How can one kill and then truly get rid of the body? Sulfuric acid, of course. To test his plan, John caught mice and submerged their helpless bodies in acid. There he saw it: the critters were gone within 30 minutes. In 1943 John was freshly released from prison and reconnected with his old boss, William McSwan. William invited the freed convict to dinner at his parents’ home in celebration. Shortly thereafter, William disappeared.

John told William’s parents that the man had gone into hiding to avoid being drafted into World War II. But the truth was far grislier: John had lured William into his basement where he cracked him on the head, then dumped him into a 40-gallon barrel of sulfuric acid. Within a couple of days, William went from grown man to goop. Afterward, John moved into William’s estate, claiming the businessman had asked him to do so. But with WWII drawing to a close, William’s parents wondered why their son remained in hiding. They soon voiced their suspicions to John. He knew of one way to quiet the fussy couple – give them an acid bath. With the entire McSwan family now out of the picture, John began cashing William’s pension checks. He sold off their belongings for around £8,000 (£300,000 in today’s pounds). With money in hand, the killer moved into the Onslow Court Hotel in London’s posh Kensington district. Eventually, however, the funds ran out – especially after John gambled much of it away. While on the hunt for more cash, the killer spotted a promising real estate ad in the local paper.

He traveled to the home of Dr. Archibald Henderson and his wife, Rose (pictured above). Pretending to be an interested buyer, John soon struck up a relationship with the affluent couple. In February of 1948 John convinced his newfound friends to take a drive into the country and visit his new workshop in West Sussex. Upon arrival, John gunned down the Hendersons and dumped their bodies in the baths. He then collected their belongings and pawned it off for money. Yes, the Acid Bath Murderer had cooked up quite the chilling racket – lure wealthy acquaintances out to his workshop of horrors, send them to the vats, then sell off their possessions for cold hard cash. John’s next and final victim was Olive Durand-Deacon (pictured below), a wealthy widow living at the Onslow Court Hotel. Of all possible things, Ms. Durand-Deacon wanted to meet with John to discuss a brilliant new idea – artificial fingernails. John happily invited her to his West Sussex workshop, where he shot her dead and submerged her body in acid. This time, however, the Acid Bath Murderer failed to cover his tracks.

Detectives soon connected the missing woman to John, and began looking into his lengthy record of prior arrests. When authorities searched his West Sussex workshop, they found evidence of Ms. Durand-Deacon plus some papers referring to his earlier victims. As for the body-erasing acid baths? The plan was not as foolproof as John thought. A pathologist identified three gallstones and a piece of a denture amongst the remaining sludge – objects that could withstand a slathering of sulfuric acid. Authorities arrested John and charged him with murder. He soon confessed to the killings. The man pled insanity, claiming he had been driven mad by a childhood nightmare that returned to him as an adult. “I saw before me a forest of crucifixes which gradually turned into trees,” John recounted of the dream. “At first, there appeared to be dew or rain, dripping from the branches, but as I approached I realized it was blood. The whole forest began to writhe and the trees, dark and erect, to ooze blood…A man went from each tree catching the blood…When the cup was full, he approached me. ‘Drink,’ he said, but I was unable to move.” The courtroom had little interest in John’s strange vision.

A guilty verdict was handed down on all counts. In August 1949, John George Haigh was put to death by one of England’s longest serving executioners, Albert Pierrepoint. Photos: Murderpedia; Wikimedia Commons; Hulton Archive / Getty Psychos R Us - John George Haigh (The Acid Bath Murderer) Modus Operandi John George Haigh methodically planned each of his murders, with all three stages carefully though out to prevent untidy, or messy finishes to his activities. The first stage was to isolate the victim from any familiarity around them (escorting to his glamorised "workshop", which was nothing more than an adjacent room next to a factory). In all of the above cases, his victims were always led under a pretence of discovery, which was based upon his initial friendship established with each of them. Put quite simply, they had absolutely no reason to suspect Haigh of performing anything unusual, until it was too late. The next stage was to cleanly render his target incapable of responding to his attack (via the use of a .38 Webley revolver). He concealed the gun upon his person once he had coaxed his intended target inside his workshop.

Then Haigh would seize any opportune moment to kill the victim with as little effort as possible on his part. Finally, and probably most difficult of all, was the traceless disposal of the body (vats of industrial acid). It was Haigh's mistaken (and arrogant) belief that a corpse could be completely disposed of via the acid. Unfortunately for Haigh, certain parts of the human body are more resilient to attack than most people realise, either by their very nature (such as teeth and bone) and artificial items (such as dentures) and are usually picked up as trace evidence by forensic experts. Haigh's false assumption that murder could not be proved without the body was to have lead to his downfall. One other key element in all the murders is the violations performed on the victims in the consumption of blood. Though the murders were very important to Haigh, he also saw the need to sustain himself financially, and would thus strip the body of any valuables that he could use himself (things such as jewelry, and ration cards which he later used for himself). These would later be found at his home, which provided further damning evidence against him.

Motives The initial explanation that Haigh supplied was that he was a vampire, and as such required the life blood of the living to sustain himself. The elaborate disposal methods he used on the bodies afterwards was merely a systematic way of ensuring that he would not be caught. Whatever the decision, the jury were convinced that it was a hasty ruse given by Haigh as part of an insanity plea, to prevent him being hung. It took just 15 minutes for the jury to find Haigh guilty of his crimes, and being very sane when he committed them It was a mystery how an intelligent boy from a good home could be shaped into the cool, calm and calculating killer which Haigh evolved into. It eventually was left to Haigh himself to define those seminal moments in his childhood which would culminate into life shaping events. His father was intensely religious, and as a young child was embedded deeply into his upbringing, with a focus on the more negative references in the Bible involving "Satan", "Thou shall not..", "Thy will not..." etc. This was also coupled with very vivid dreams involving crucifixes transforming into trees that wept blood (a possible reference to the crucifixion of Christ at Golgotha).

An important point to note at this stage is that whilst his childhood experiences may have had a profound effect in his actions, he kept detailed accounts of his murders, possibly as a form of recollecting the events when he needed to "re-live" the experience (as a form of "trophy"). These records make for a very disturbing, yet fascinating reading into the mind of a serial killer. Quotes Whilst awaiting execution, Haigh had this to say of his parents: "Although my parents were kind and loving, I had none of the joys, or the companionship, which small children usually have. From my earliest years my recollection is of my father saying: 'Do no' or 'Thou shall not'. Any form of sport or light entertainment was frowned upon and regarded as not edifying. There was only condemnation and prohibition..." "It is true to say that I was nurtured on Bible stories but mostly concerned with sacrifice.

If by some mischance I did, or said, anything which my father regarded as improper, he would say: 'Do not grieve the Lord by behaving so.' And if I suggested that I wanted to go somewhere, or meet somebody, he would say: 'It will not please the Lord.'" More ominously and disturbing, were Haigh's description of his recurring nightmare: "I saw before me a forest of crucifixes which gradually turned into trees. At first there appeared to be dew, or rain, dripping from the branches, but as I approached I realized it was blood. Suddenly the whole forest began to writhe and the trees, stark and erect, to ooze blood...A man went to each tree catching the blood...When the cup was full he approached me. 'Drink,' he said, but I was unable to move." ExecutedToday.com » 1949: John George Haigh, the Acid Bath Murderer 1949: John George Haigh, the Acid Bath Murderer August 10th, 2013 Headsman On this date in 1949, Britain’s “Acid Bath Murderer”* was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint at Wandsworth Prison.

The name really tells you all you need to know about this enduringly infamous serial killer. John George Haigh drained puddles of deathly sludge into the pipes at 79 Gloucester Road in London and 2 Leopold Road , Crawley, West Sussex. He wasn’t a criminal mastermind, but he had that one good idea, and the doggedness to keep going with what worked through the latter half of the 1940s. Serving a previous sentence for fraud, Haigh impressed himself with a jailhouse experiment revealing the efficacy of sulfuric acid for completely dissolving the body of an unfortunate mouse. Perhaps he had been motivated to the test by the memory of a notorious trial in France featuring the same disposal-of-remains expedient. Perhaps he thought it up all by himself. Shortly after obtaining his parole, Haigh put the insight to foul use by whacking his wealthy former employer over the head and stuffing him into a 40-gallon drum in his Gloucester Road basement. William McSwan’s body dissolved over two days in a sulfuric acid bath.

Haigh poured the remnant ooze down a manhole and moved into McSwan’s house, telling the victim’s parents that their son had ducked out to avoid World War II conscription. Once the war ended and the questions came, Haigh made slurry of mom and dad, too. Undoubtedly a sociopath, Haigh didn’t murder out of compulsive love of taking life. He had a cold, pecuniary motive. “I discovered there were easier ways of making a living than to work long hours in an office,” he wrote of the earlier, non-homicidal frauds and thefts that had started his criminal career. “I did not ask myself whether I was doing right or wrong. That seemed to me to be irrelevant. I merely said, ‘That is what I wish to do.’ And as the means lay within my power, that was what I decided.” Now the means lay within his power to appropriate a fellow’s pension and estate by disappearing him into a vat of chemicals. Why should he ask himself whether that was right or wrong? Haigh had blown through the McSwan’s fortune by 1948, and started dissolving hand to mouth.

In February of that year, the killer lured a doctor and his wife to his new acid bath station in Crawley. These he shot dead, and rendered as per usual into vitriol compote. But he got sloppy the following year by targeting a wealthy widow who actually shared his same apartment block; when she was reported missing, the neighbor with the criminal record went right into the suspect filter. A search of Haigh’s workshops turned up papers tying him to all three sets of murders … as well as a nearby dump whose “yellowish white greyish matter” yielded “28 lb. of melted body fat, part of the left foot eroded by acid, three gallstones, and 18 fragments of human bone eroded by acid.” (London Times, April 2, 1949) Preserved dentures proved a match for the late Olive Durand-Deacon. Haigh was a pragmatist, as always. “Tell me, frankly, what are the chances of anybody being released from Broadmoor?” he chattily asked one guard, referring to the high-security psychiatric facility he intended to inhabit. But his problem would be getting into it.

Haigh’s jury needed only minutes to dismiss his longshot insanity defense, and condemn the Acid Bath murderer to die.** Haigh hanged a mere three weeks after sentence, not even six full months from his last murder. * Not to be confused with the “Brides in the Bath” murderer . Best just to stick to showers. ** Legal oddity: the Daily Mirror described Haigh as a “murderer” during his trial — that is, before his lawful conviction. Haigh was able to land the editor of this paper in the clink himself for this accurate, prejudicial epithet. On this day.. The Acid Bath Murderer: John George Haigh|MurderMap - London Homicide Reported Direct from The Old Bailey Categories: Robbery Case synopsis: Between 1944 and 1949, John George Haigh killed at least six people after becoming convinced he could carry out the perfect murder. Believing that without a body it would be impossible to be convicted, he dissolved his victims in sulphuric acid. The resulting sludge could then be poured down the drain. He later claimed to have drunk their blood and was dubbed a 'Vampire' by the Daily Mirror.

He embarked on his murderous plan after being released from a four year prison sentence for fraud in 1943. On 6 September 1944, he lured 37 year-old William Donald McSwan, who had employed him as a chauffeur at an amusement park, into his basement workshop at 79 Gloucester Road in Kensington, southwest London. According to Haigh's account, he battered McSwan over the head with a hammer, slit his throat and collected some of his blood in a mug to drink. The body was placed into a 40-gallon drum full of acid and two days later the remains were poured down a manhole. To put McSwan's parents off the scent, he claimed Donald had disappeared to avoid conscription. On 2 July 1945, Haigh killed Donald's concerned parents William, 70, and Amy, 65, at the workshop in Gloucester Road. Haigh spent the next two years living - and gambling - on the estimated £8,000 he stole from the McSwans.

But by 1947 he was looking for more victims and rented a workshop at 2 Leopold Road in Crawley, West Sussex. There he shot Dr Archibald Henderson, 52, and his wife Rosalie, 51, on February 12, 1948, and forged letters allowing him to take control of their assets. On February 18, 1949, he decided to target Olive Durand-Deacon, 69, a wealthy solicitor's widow he had met while staying at the Onslow Court Hotel in Kensington. Like the Hendersons he lured her to Leopold before shooting her in the back of the head and dissolving her body in acid. Haigh was questioned ten days later and a police search of his workshop in Crawley revealed the gruesome evidence of his murders, including 28 pounds of human fat, three gallstones, a partially dissolved left foot, 18 bone fragments, Ms Durand-Deacon's dentures and a piece of the widow's red plastic handbag.

He was charged with Mrs Durand-Deacon's murder on March 2 and two days later wrote to his girlfriend Barbara Smith from Lewes Prison to explain his motives: How foolish of you to ask why I hadn't murdered you. Of course I had millions of opportunities I know that. But the idea, never even crossed my mind I wouldn't have hurt a hair of your head. The other business is something entirely separate and different. There was no affection involved there I know the papers talked of 6 widows but they haven't got the whole story yet. There were men as well as women how many I don't know probably a dozen or more, and it was not their money but their blood that I wanted. He went on trial at Lewes Assizes on July 18, 1949. His claims of insanity - backed up by his supposed confession to drinking his victim's blood - were rejected and he was convicted by the jury after only 15 minutes. He was hanged, aged 40 [24/7/09], at Wandsworth Prison on August 10.

___________ The Acid Bath murderer | John George Haigh | Sussex Murders | History | The Old Police Cells Museum The Acid Bath murderer John George Haigh 1909-1949 The Acid Bath Murderer ‘Throughout his life, Haigh suffered from a recurring dream: he spoke of a forest of crucifixes that would gradually turn into trees and drip with blood. He would see a man collecting the blood into a cup but he always awakened before he could take a drink. It was the dream, Haigh would confess to the police after his arrest, that made him believe he needed blood in order to live.’ Formative years John George Haigh was a bright student who won scholarships to Wakefield Grammar School, to Wakefield Cathedral, as a choir boy. Unfortunately accounts of his youth suggest that he would never amount to more than the fraudulent, thieving con artist he became in later life. Some even argue, including Haigh that the seeds of his future career as one of the most notorious serial killers in English history were sown during his early religious upbringing. Haigh’s parents belonged to a religious sect known as the Plymouth Brethren, who were purist and anticlerical.

Almost all forms of casual entertainment, music, carnivals, magazines and newspapers were regarded as sinful. Only stories from the bible were tolerated. Haigh as a boy According to his father the world was ‘evil’ and the family needed to keep themselves separate. As his father had also told him that the blue blemish on his own head had been the result of him ‘sinning’ in his youth, it is perhaps not surprising that the young George became terrified of developing a similar ‘sign of the devil’. It is argued that the turning point in the boy’s development came when he realised that no such blemish had appeared, despite his having lied and just about broken every rule in the book. In fact he began to believe that he was invincible and could get away with anything. Ducking and Diving As a young man Haigh was an inveterate pleasure seeker who enjoyed flouting society’s rules and sailing close to the wind. On leaving school he was apprenticed to a firm of motor engineers, however this only lasted a year and he scraped a living in sales, insurance and advertising and any job that demanded snappy dressing and the gift of the gab. By the age of 21 he had already been sacked for suspected theft.

In July1934, Haigh married the 23 year-old Beatrice Hamer, unfortunately the marriage soon fell apart. That same year he was jailed for fraud and Beatrice gave birth while he was in prison but she gave the baby girl up for adoption and left Haigh. Not surprisingly his family ostracised him from that point onwards. In 1936 he moved to London and became chauffeur to William McSwan, the wealthy owner of amusement parlours. He used his mechanical gifts to maintain McSwan's amusement machines. Following that he became a bogus solicitor and received a four-year jail sentence for fraud. He was released just after the start of World War II and somehow missed being called up, continuing as a pretty unsuccessful petty criminal and being sentenced to several terms of imprisonment. Whilst inside Lincoln Prison he began planning the most startling series of perfect murders. He learned much from other criminals and avidly read books on acids which he found easily available in the prison library. Using glass jars from the kitchens, dead field mice brought in from the fields and small quantities of acid taken from the tinsmith’s shop, Haigh carried out experiments to see how long it would take a small body to dissolve in acid.

It was not long before he had devised a formula to apply to humans. William Donald McSwan The McSwans In 1944 Haigh renewed his friendship with the McSwans and rented a small basement workshop at number 79 Gloucester Road in Kensington where he allegedly worked on his ‘inventions’. On September 9th he took McSwan’s son Donald to his workshop and bludgeoned him to death. He then placed Donald’s body in a 40 gallon barrel filled with sulphuric acid. Later he covered the drum and went home to sleep. The next day the remains of McSwan were little more than cold liquid and lumps which he disposed of down a drain. Amy McSwan By forging various documents he obtained all Donald's assets and then told his bemused mother that he had gone away to avoid conscription. He even sent fake postcards to them from Scotland pretending to be their son. Again using forged documentation, Haigh managed to obtain the McSwan’s property in Raynes Park, Wimbledon Park and Beckenham Park, not to mention around £4,000 in cash.

Before continuing with his plans to dispose of the remainder of the McSwan family, according to a police statement he also murdered a middle-aged woman from Hammersmith. The McSwans disappeared on 2 July 1945. They were killed in a similar fashion to poor Donald. Haigh hit them first, killing them and then claimed to have drunk their blood, before dissolving them in acid baths. The Hendersons Mr & Mrs Henderson In August 1947 Haigh met Dr Archibald Henderson and his wife Rosalie, a well healed couple whom he befriended. By this time he was renting a small basement property in Leopold Road, Crawley. On 12th February 1948 he drove Henderson to Crawley on the pretext of showing him an invention. When they arrived he shot Henderson in the head with a revolver he had earlier stolen from the doctor’s house. He then lured Mrs Henderson to the workshop, claiming her husband had fallen ill, and shot her also. After disposing of the Hendersons’ bodies in oil drums filled with acid, he forged a letter from them and sold all of their possessions for £8,000 .

Mrs Henrietta Helen Olivia Roberts Durand-Deacon In 1949 Haigh chanced upon his last victim Olivia Durand-Deacon, 69, the wealthy widow of solicitor John Durand-Deacon and a fellow resident at the Onslow Court Hotel. She mentioned to Haigh, by then calling himself an engineer, an idea that she had for artificial fingernails. He invited her down to the Crawley workshop and once inside he shot her in the back of the head, stripped her of her valuables, including a Persian lamb coat, and put her into the acid bath. Unfortunately this murder netted very little profit. He sold her coat and a few odd bits of jewellery which just about paid the hotel bill and covered his most pressing expenses. It was time to look for another victim. Mrs Durand-Deacon Mrs Constance Lane He found one in the form of Mrs Durand’s friend, Mrs Constance Lane, who was also a retired lady living at the hotel. She was deeply concerned by her friend’s disappearance and plied Haigh with questions one of which nearly knocked him off his perch. ‘Don’t you know where she is, she told me you were taking her down to your factory?

Well I must do something about that’ To avoid suspicion Haigh offered to go to the police station with her and report the matter. At Chelsea Police Station the officer on duty recognised Haigh and ran a background check on him. On February 28th the police brought him in for questioning whilst they searched his hotel room and workshop. The search revealed not only Haigh’s attaché case containing a dry cleaner’s receipt for Mrs Durand-Deacon’s coat, but also papers referring to the Hendersons and McSwans and a diary in which he kept abbreviated details of his other murders. Further investigation of the sludge at the workshop by the pathologist Keith Simpson revealed Mrs Durand’s plastic handbag, 28 pounds of human fat, corroded human bones, three human gallstones and part of a denture which was later identified by Mrs Durand-Deacon’s dentist during the trial. Despite the forensic evidence, it was Haigh’s very own sense of invincibility and arrogance that was to be his greatest undoing. Haigh was of the opinion that nothing could be found from his human slaughterhouse and cockily recounted in great detail his escapades of death.

As far as he was concerned, it was a case of corpus delicti, o bodies, no crime, no punishment. Police investigation When questioned by Detective Inspector Albert Webb, Haigh asked him “Tell me, frankly, what are the chances of anybody being released from Broadmoor?” The inspector said he could not discuss that sort of thing, so Haigh replied “Well, if I told you the truth, you would not believe me. It sounds too fantastic to believe”. Haigh then confessed that he had not only killed Durand-Deacon, the McSwans and Hendersons, but also three other people: a young man called Max, a girl from Eastbourne and a woman from Hammersmith. On Thursday March 3 1949, London's Daily Mirror began a series of macabre stories about murder that began with the headline, "Hunt for the Vampire." They did not name names but there were no prizes for guessing who they were referring to. Trial and Execution Haigh was put on trial on Monday 18th August 1949 at the Sussex Assizes in Lewes.

He 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 found in contempt of court for explicitly portraying Haigh as a vampire. The editor, Silvester Bolam, was sentenced to three months in prison. The paper also had to pay £10,000 in court costs. The jury retired on the second day and it took just 17 minutes to find him perfectly sane and guilty of murder. Mr Justice Travers Humphreys sentenced him to death and it was announced that there would be no appeal. It was reported that Haigh, in the condemned cell at Wandsworth Prison, asked one of his prison guards, Jack Morwood, whether it would be possible to have a trial run of his hanging so everything would run smoothly. It is likely that his request went no further but if it did, the request was denied.

He also wrote to one of his solicitors saying, ’ When I was sentenced to death by Sir Travers Humphries I couldn’t stop laughing, I saw the judge don his black cap and he looked the entire world like a sheep with its head peering out from under a rhubarb leaf.’ On Wednesday 10th August a crowd of around 500 people gathered outside Wandsworth Prison in bright sunshine. At 9am Haigh was hanged by Albert Pierpoint, assisted by Harry Kirk. AfterThoughts Haigh finished his life story for the newspaper that had paid for his trial and wrote letters to his parents who did not see him before he died. His mother sent greetings through a reporter. He also told reporters that he believed in reincarnation and that he would be back to complete his mission. Madame Tussaud’s requested a fitting for a death mask and Haigh was happy to oblige. Haigh’s motivations for his crimes, which involved luring his prey to a fate where their blood was consumed before being dissolved in acid, have never been clearly corroborated.

His claim to have been disturbed in his childhood by his strict religious parents, leading to a psychotic state of mind obsessed with religious iconography and sacrificial fantasies, has been disputed. Critics believe that instead of insanity fuelling Haigh’s vampire-like activities, he was in fact a cold-hearted killer who arrogantly believed that where there was no body, there was no crime to pin on him. He was known to be manipulative and a compulsive liar, prone to saying anything to extricate himself from compromising positions. At the time of his arrest, his personal enquiy into what would befall him if he were found to be insane is an indication that Haigh was aware that appearing ‘bonkers’ and damaged by his childhood would possibly work in his favour when it came to court. Most of the psychologists agreed that although Haigh suffered from mental health issues he was not ‘insane’ and had been perfectly aware of his murderous actions that had involved meticulous planning. One eminent psychiatrist believed without any doubt that Haigh had a "paranoid constitution” - the same mental disease as Hitler. They believed he had most likely developed a paranoid personality to escape his parents’ suffocating universe in order to relieve himself from emotional pain.

His upbringing had contributed to a mental state where the dividing lines between reality and fantasy had become blurred. The result was that Haigh had an acute sense of omnipotence and believed he was above the law. He was in effect an ‘egocentric paranoiac’ who, although aware that killing people was against the law, still thought that it was part of fulfilling his destiny. He tried to impress on the psychiatrists more details of his abnormal dreams and obsession with blood drinking, but none of them bought his efforts to portray himself as a lunatic. However, what they weren’t aware of was that Haigh had years before developed a friendship with an employee of Sussex Psychiatric Hospital and had shown a great deal of interest in mental illness. He had a talent for deception having over the years also posed as a lawyer, engineer and a doctor. The Crimes | Crime and Investigation Timeline The Crimes At a public house in Kensington, Haigh chanced upon former employer 'Mac' McSwan again. Mac was happy to see him and took Haigh to see his parents. During the friendly reunion they told Haigh of their recent investments in property. This information was to seal their fates.

After socialising with Mac for several weeks, Haigh carried out his plan on the 9 September 1944. In Haigh's diary, he claimed that he had a sudden need for blood so he hit McSwan over the head with a blunt instrument. Then he slit his throat. He says, "I got a mug and took some blood, from his neck, in the mug, and drank it." Haigh later found a 40-gallon barrel in which to put McSwan’s body and then filled it with sulphuric acid. He described in his confession how, when the body was finally submerged in liquid acid, the fumes overwhelmed him and he had to go outside. Later he covered the drum and went home to sleep, leaving his former employer and friend to dissolve into a liquid sludge. It was during the night that he supposedly suffered from more surreal and blood-filled nightmares. The next day the remains of McSwan were little more than cold liquid and lumps which Haigh disposed of down a drain. Knowing that he had killed someone and removed all traces of them gave Haigh a feeling of euphoria.

Haigh managed to convince McSwan’s parents that their son had gone away to avoid conscription. He even sent fake postcards to them from Scotland pretending to be their son. However, Haigh’s main concern was to acquire the rest of the McSwan assets. The next murder would be committed with the addition of new equipment to deal with dissolving bodies. A stirrup-pump, DIY tin face masks and even a bath tub made of steel, painted to make it more resistant to corrosion, were all employed by Haigh in his obscene workshop of death. The McSwan Murders According to a police statement, before Haigh hit upon his plan to cruelly dispose of the remainder of the McSwan family, he also murdered a middle-aged woman from Hammersmith. The McSwans disappeared on 2 July 1945. They were killed in a similarly tragic way to their son. Haigh hit them first, killing them and then claimed to have drunk their blood, before dissolving them in acid baths. After informing the McSwans' landlady that the couple had gone to America, Haigh had all of their mail forwarded to him, including Mr McSwan's pension.

He then set about forging their son’s signature on a Power of Attorney form. By forging a deed on a property owned by Mrs McSwan and appropriating it into a false name, Haigh managed to make nearly £2000 from selling the property. That, along with securities and sales of possessions, totalled £6000. For a while Haigh managed to swindle people through a variety of scams, including posing as a liaison officer dealing with patents and setting up fake branches in several towns. It was also around this time that he later claimed in a police confession that he had killed and disposed of a young man called Max from Kensington. Haigh’s spoils from the McSwans were running out fast and the evil sociopath needed money from new victims. This time he chose a more worldly couple, Dr Archibald Henderson, 52, and his wife, Rose, 41, who were selling their home. Cultivating a relationship with the couple, based on a shared passion for music, Haigh encouraged them to reveal information about their properties.

Renting a storehouse on Leopold Road in Crawley, London, Haigh moved his possessions from Gloucester Street and began setting up his obscene workshop once again. This time he ordered three carboys of sulphuric acid and two 40-gallon drums without tops. On 12 February 1946, he drove Dr Henderson to Crawley and shot him in the head with the doctor's own revolver. He then left the body in a storeroom and set off to get Mrs Henderson. After some reluctance she was driven to the storehouse. Haigh shot her from behind and after trussing up both her and her husband’s bodies, left them overnight. Haigh later claimed to the police that he drank blood from both of them. Haigh dissolved both bodies in acid but this time the grisly act did not erase all traces, as Mr Henderson’s foot was left intact. This did not seem to bother Haigh too much, as he dumped all the remains including the foot in the corner of a yard. The psychopath by now felt immune to being captured. Efforts to maintain the impression that the Henderson’s were still alive were methodical and time consuming.

Haigh even forged letters by Rose Henderson, writing a lengthy letter to her brother. After selling their properties and possessions he acquired around £8000 in total. Showing a sickening contempt for his victims he even gave his girlfriend Barbara some of Mrs Henderson’s clothes to wear. Unexpectedly, Rose Henderson’s brother Burlin was prepared to go to the police. Haigh managed to convince him that the couple had emigrated to South Africa on the grounds that Dr Henderson had carried out an illegal abortion. As an indication of Haigh’s depravity and sociopathic tendencies, he even planned on visiting the mother of a recently deceased school friend whom he had spotted in the obituaries section of a local newspaper. No doubt Haigh had intentions to dispose of the grieving mother and misappropriate any possessions he could. His plan was foiled when the frail woman unexpectedly died herself. Haigh’s money once again started to run out, mainly due to gambling and expensive tastes which included staying at an upmarket hotel. While there he had socialised with a wealthy elderly woman, Mrs Olive Durand-Deacon, and thought up murderous plans to dispose of her.

In June 1948 Haigh claimed that his car was stolen but the Lagonda was found smashed at the foot of a cliff. Less than a month later, an unidentified body was found nearby. However, the police decided that the two incidents were unrelated. Haigh denied having anything to do with the body, even after his arrest. Haigh had told girlfriend Barbara that he wanted to collect the car insurance and even took her to the spot where the Lagonda had been written off. It was then that she began to become suspicious of her soon-to-be husband. In the meantime, despite having killed Mrs Durand-Deacon, his money was running out again and he needed to pay off loans. Even although he tried to invite other people out to his Crawley den of death, no-one took him up on his offer. Also, Rose Henderson’s brother was once again causing problems for Haigh by insisting that the police locate his sister due to a death in the family. Haigh realised that he would have to silence him too. Before Haigh could carry out his callous intentions, he was arrested.

His first 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". Haigh then confessed to everything. the acid bath murderer | Tumblr the acid bath murderer Loading... Show more notes Reblog British police sift through soil and charred evidence in an attempt to solve the murder of Durand Deacon, a victim of the Acid Bath Killer, John Haigh . Loading... Show more notes Reblog “Mrs. Durand-Deacon no longer exists. She has disappeared completely and no trace can ever be found. I have destroyed her with acid. You will find the sludge that remains at Leopold Road. Every trace has gone… How can you prove a murder if there is no body?” -John George Haigh. The Acid Bath Murderer Reblog 2 “When I discovered there were easier ways of making a living than to work long hours in an office, I did not ask myself whether I was doing right or wrong. That seemed to me to be irrelevant. I merely said, ‘This is what I wish to do’.

And as the means lay within my power, that was what I decided.” John George Haigh aka ‘The Acid Bath Murderer’ was a British serial killer responsible for the deaths of at least six people. He earned his name, not from the method of killing his victims, but from the method of disposal: He would dissolve corpses in sulfuric acid before forging various documents so he could sell their possessions for financial gain. John George Haigh - Acid Bath Killer In 1949, John George Haigh burst into the headlines as an inhuman monster who had been killing for profit for many years. According to his own confession, the mass murderer had dissolved his victims in acid after drinking their blood. Though some British newspapers seized upon the morbid curiosity of their readers - describing him as a vampire and gleefully repeating his colourful accounts of the crimes - Haigh was a cunning, predatory criminal who tried to cheat the hangman by feigning insanity. Born in Stamford, Lincolnshire, England, on July 24th, 1909, Haigh was raised with strict religious discipline.

His parents were ardent members of the Plymouth Brethren - a severe religious sect for whom all manner of casual entertainment, movies, carnivals, musical shows, even the reading of magazines and newspapers, was sinful. A bright child, Haigh received a scholarship to the Wakefield Grammar School and then won another scholarship as a choirboy at Wakefield Cathedral. His life was governed by rigid routines and he was allowed no freedom to enjoy the small entertainments shared by his peers. Though the Plymouth Brethren desired to isolate their children from corrupting influences, such unrealistic and oppressive restrictions probably succeeded in inspiring as much rebellion as piety. Aleister Crowely - the black magician known as The Great Beast - was brought up by wealthy parents who belonged to the sect; like Haigh, he spent his adult life deliberately breaking social rules and seeking pleasures. Haigh scratched for a living in his early twenties, usually working as a salesman. He was a good talker and made an effort to dress well (though he leaned towards gaudy or flashy clothes which marked him as being not quite a gentleman).

He married Beatrice Hamer in 1934; their relationship quickly collapsed after Haigh was arrested in November of that year for fraud. After serving a brief prison sentence, Haigh continued his illegal schemes; living hand to mouth through the 1930s. In 1936, he worked for a businessman called W.D. McSwan as a secretary and chauffeur. He evidently left without leaving any scams or ill-feelings in his wake, for when he met Mr McSwan and Amy, his wife again about eight years later, they trusted him and he was able to lead them to their deaths. In 1937, Haigh was convicted of his second serious crime - attempting to obtain money by false pretences; he received four years in jail. The arrival of war caused the authorities to grant early release to many non-violent offenders. In 1940 he was set free; but the penal system had done nothing to alter his attitudes.

Small-time swindles gave him a steady income; by 1943, these illegal profits enabled him take up residence at a highly reputable address - the Onslow Court Hotel in South Kensington (London) where he occupied Room 404. The other paying guests were respectable, well-heeled professional people and retired persons of some wealth. Most of them regarded Haigh as a congenial entrepreneurial businessman. However, he made few friends because he was a bit too gregarious and showy to really fit into their social circles. In 1944, Haigh renewed his acquaintance with the McSwan family. The McSwans owned an amusement arcade and had considerable means. At the time Haigh rented a small basement workroom at 79 Gloucester Road in Kensington (some sources place the building on Leopold Road) where he allegedly devoted time to his "inventions." On September 9th, 1944, He took his former employers son Donald to his workshop and killed him. The murder was carefully planned - having bludgeoned his victim with a club (or a similar weapon), Haigh then destroyed the body in a vat of acid.

When bone and flesh had been reduced to a sludge-like mess, he poured the gooey residue onto the dirt surface of an open yard behind the building. Haigh spent Donald McSwans cash and converted his assets to his own use via forgery. A year later, Mr. and Mrs. McSwan expressed concern over their son's disappearance. Haigh was ready with a glib answer; he explained that Donald had gone into hiding to avoid being drafted into the army, a not uncommon desire during wartime. The couple were grateful for Haighs apparent kindness; they accepted an invitation to see the workshop. There they met their deaths in exactly the same way as Donald. By forging names on transfer deeds, Haigh was able to obtain the McSwan properties in Raynes Park, Wimbledon Park, and Beckenham, Kent, as well as £4,000 in cash. Haigh now had considerable funds; he tried to make even more money with a betting system hed devised. He believed it could predict regular winners at the dog track. However, he lost heavily and decided to restore his fortunes by turning again to murder for profit. This time his victims were Dr.

Archibald Henderson and his wife Rosalie - well-to-do middle-aged retirees. In August 1947, they advertised a house in Ladbroke Grove for sale. Haigh, though he had no money, began negotiating for the purchase of the property. He later explained that one of his business deals had fallen through, preventing him from purchasing the house immediately. The amiable Hendersons struck up a friendship with the scheming Haigh. On February 12th, 1948, he drove Dr. Henderson to his workshop where he shot him in the head and disposed of the body by dumping it into a vat of sulphuric acid. He then returned to Mrs. Henderson and told her that her husband had taken sick and needed her. She accompanied Haigh to his workshop where she met the same lethal fate as her husband. In both the McSwan and Henderson murders, Haigh emulated his victims' handwriting and sent notes to their servants, relatives and friends; he explained that they had moved to Australia or some other distant place, mentioning that "Mr. Haigh" would settle their affairs. The profits from this double murder exceeded those in the McSwan killings.

Haigh, through clever forgeries, sold off the Hendersons house and car; he also obtained more than £10,000 from their bank accounts. But, within a year, he had lost most of this money to an army of bookies. By early 1949, Haighs financial situation was bleak. He was overdrawn at the bank and the manager of the Onslow Court Hotel was pressing him for back rent. Desperate for money, Haigh looked about for more victims. His needs were answered in the dining room of the hotel. Sitting opposite Haigh when he ate there was a wealthy, retired matron, Mrs. Henrietta Helen Olivia Robarts Durand-Deacon. The 69-year-old widow knew that Haigh was then in the business of leasing and renting expensive cars to rich patrons and believed that, as a salesman, he might be interested in promoting an idea she had about manufacturing plastic fingernails. Haigh responded favourably to the idea and immediately suggested that Mrs. Durand-Deacon discuss the proposition further in his workshop. On February 18th, 1949, Mrs.

Durand-Deacon accompanied him to the Gloucester Road address. As soon as she entered the basement premises, Haigh shot her in the back of the head, killing her instantly. He stripped her and dumped her body into a 40-gallon vat of sulphuric acid. Haigh drained the receptacle through a basement sewer; afterwards, he scraped the sludge from the vat and dumped this onto the dirt of the back yard. This was hard work and Haigh, according to his later statements, paused to go to the nearby Ye Olde Ancient Prior's Restaurant where he ate an egg on toast. He then returned to his workshop to "tidy up." This killing produced little profit for the money-desperate Haigh. He sold Mrs. Durand-Deacon's Persian lamb coat and pawned her jewellery, obtaining only a few hundred pounds. He used this sum to pay his hotel bill and other pressing expenses; then kept his eyes open for fresh prey. However, Haigh worried because hed struck so close to home. To avoid being asked about the widow's whereabouts, he thought it clever to feign concern and make some inquiries. Haigh approached Mrs. Durand-Deacon's good friend, Mrs.

Constance Lane, another retired lady living at the hotel and plied her with questions: "Do you know anything about Mrs. Durand-Deacon? Is she ill? Do you know where she is?" Mrs. Lane shocked Haigh with her response: "Don't you know where she is? I understood from her that you wanted to take her to your factory." Haigh said that he had not taken the widow with him to his workshop because he was not yet ready to show her his operation. "Well, I must do something about that" Mrs. Lane said. The following morning, Haigh again asked Mrs. Lane if she had heard anything about Mrs. Durand-Deacon and she said that she had not, adding that she intended to report the matter to the police that day. In an attempt to avoid suspicion, Haigh then offered to go to the Chelsea Police Station and report the matter with her. But when Mrs. Lane and the killer appeared in the police station, an officer recognised Haigh and had his background checked. His criminal record made the police suspicious and Haigh was brought in for questioning on February 28th, 1949. At first, he denied having had anything to do with Mrs.

Durand-Deacon's disappearance. The police kept him in custody whilst his workshop and hotel room were searched. At the first location they uncovered enough gruesome remains of Mrs. Durand-Deacon to make an identification. Though most of her body had been reduced to a hardened sludge that coated the back yard, forensic investigators unearthed twenty-eight pounds of human fat, the partly corroded bones of a human foot, Mrs. Durand-Deacon's plastic handbag which had resisted the acid - a plastic lipstick container cap, a full upper denture and three human gall stones. One of the bones of the hip girdle was still partly preserved and showed clearly that the remains were female. Haigh had been sloppy in his workshop; he was equally careless in his hotel room. There investigators found a diary in which he had kept abbreviated details of his previous murders. Some personal effects from the McSwan and Henderson families were also lying around. When informed of these discoveries, Haigh exclaimed: "Mrs. Durand-Deacon no longer exists!

I've destroyed her with acid...You can't prove murder without a body." His confidence was misplaced - he had misinterpreted the latin legal expression "Corpus Delicti" and thought that it referred to an actual body, rather than the 'body of the crime'. Haigh was charged with murdering Mrs. Durand-Deacon and placed on trial on July 18th, 1949. Prior to this, while being held, Haigh asked his jailers how hard it was to escape from Broadmoor - the UKs most famous secure mental hospital for the criminally insane. Faced with damning evidence that would surely place him on the gallows, he planned to convince everyone that he was insane. He made long, lurid statements which implied that his lust for blood went beyond a mere compulsion to kill: "...in each case he said I had my glass of blood after I killed them." He then went on to describe in detail all sorts of ghoulish acts performed on his victims, before giving their bodies acid baths. The press had a field day.

No newspaper gave the story more sensational coverage than the London Daily Mirror, which, on March 4th, 1949, bleated to its fifteen million readers: "...the Vampire killer will never strike again. He is safely behind bars, powerless to lure his victims to a hideous death." Above this front-page story, the tabloid emblazoned the headline: "Vampire -A Man Held." The British courts were appalled at this coverage - so much so that the Daily Mirror was fined £10,000 and its editor, Silvester Bolam, was given a three -month jail term for contempt of court - the paper having been previously warned by Scotland Yard not to publish details of the case before Haigh's trial. Ironically, Bolam was sent to the same prison that held Haigh. The mass killer continued his deception while in prison; he purposely drank his own urine in front of guards and performed other irrational acts to convince them that he was a lunatic. Some authors who specialise in writing about Crime or the Occult have published misleading and/or badly-researched information about Haighs self-professed career as a vampire.

For example, Hans Holzer (an alleged psychic medium who claims to be in contact with the late Elvis Presley) uncritically repeated Haighs concocted stories - including a cracked explanation that the murderer drank his own urine because he misinterpreted a line in the Bible which instructed individuals to drink only from their own ewers (wells). Haigh was tried before Justice Travers Humphreys with Sir Henry Shawcross prosecuting. Sir David Maxwell defended, but could do little more than suggest that his client was insane. He brought Dr. Henry Yellowlees, a noted psychiatrist, to the stand to testify that he had examined Haigh and believed him to be a "paranoiac," because of his early childhood experiences. Dr Yellowlees said that he was "pretty certain" that Haigh drank the blood of his victims. However, when pressed by the Prosecutor, he admitted that Haigh knew that his acts were wrong - thus effectively eliminating the contention that the murderer was not (in a legal sense) sane. The jury took only fifteen minutes to render a verdict of Guilty. Haigh was sentenced to death.

While awaiting execution, he penned his brief, but nightmare-filled memoirs - recounting how all his boyhood pleasures had been suppressed by his fanatically religious parents. His father, an electrician, had an accident which caused him to bear a blue scar down the middle of his forehead. Haigh quoted his father as telling him when he was a boy: "I have sinned and Satan has punished me. If you ever sin, Satan will mark you with a blue pencil likewise." For years, Haigh, as a child, nervously ran his fingers over his forehead, frantically looking into mirrors each morning to see if a blue scar had appeared while he slept. Haigh also related a recurring nightmare he had following a 1944 (the year that the killings began) car accident in which hed been injured and blood ran down his forehead and into his mouth: "I saw before me a forest of crucifixes which gradually turned into trees. At first there appeared to be dew or rain dripping from the branches, but as I approached I realised it was blood...A man went to each tree catching the blood. When the cup was full he approached me.

'Drink,' he said, but I was unable to move." These horrifying words were penned by a man who undoubtedly still thought he might be reprieved and sent to Broadmoor as criminally insane. Haigh was highly intelligent and able to contrive such lunatic images for his own ends, just as he very probably researched the methods he used in disposing of his victims' bodies, most likely reading about the exploits of Georges Sarret of France who used remarkably similar methods in 1925 to eliminate the bodies of his victims. John George Haigh's horror stories did him no good in the end. The Acid-Bath Murderer was hanged at Wandsworth Prison on August 6th, 1949. Megan Lowry supplied the following information: During the weeks he spent in the condemned cell at Wandsworth, Haigh wrote to one of his solicitors that when he was sentenced to death by Sir Travers Humphries, quote: "It was an effort to refrain from audible laughter when the judge donned his black cap. He looked for all the world like a sheep with its head peering out from under a rhubarb leaf." Serial killer though he was, Haigh must have possessed some sense of humor !

Hosting Provided By HORRORFIND.COM A Is for Acid (TV Movie 2002) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error A Is for Acid ( 2002 ) 1h 39min John George Haigh, the notorious "acid bath murderer" in 1940s England, becomes the subject of this dramatization. Director: a list of 324 titles created 21 Aug 2011 a list of 181 titles created 20 Dec 2011 a list of 1030 titles created 22 Apr 2013 a list of 43 titles created 05 Jul 2013 a list of 7850 titles created 08 Nov 2013 Title: A Is for Acid (TV Movie 2002) 7.1/10 Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below.

You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Add Image Add an image Do you have any images for this title? Edit Storyline Dramatisation of the true story of the notorious "acid bath murderer" John Haigh, who murdered women and disposed of their bodies in vats of acid in the 1940's. He was only caught when the gallstones of one of his victims, Mrs Durand-Deacon, failed to dissolve in the acid and were detected by the pathologist who examined the residue from the acid bath. Written by van_whistler@hotmail.com 9 September 2002 (UK) See more » Also Known As: Crimes Quase Perfeitos See more » Filming Locations: Did You Know? Goofs Haigh meets the Hendersons at the seaside and comments "splendid weather for February!" (it was in fact 12 February 1948 when he killed them). He is then seen driving Archibald Henderson to his workshop down a road with trees in full leaf; this must have been filmed in May or early June.

See more » Connections When the Lights Go On Again (uncredited) A is for acid, memories of meeting Det Sgt Heslin 19 April 2013 | by peterdaphne61 (Paignton) – See all my reviews I have just seen a repeat of this TV film and was very impressed. I had the opportunity of doing some gardening work for the Sgt Inspector Heslin (Ret'd) before he died, when he lived in Torbay. As one of the detectives who interviews Haigh and discovered his gun, he showed me photographs which very much resembled the film set of Haigh's workhouse. I also specialized someone in the RAF when, as a medic, I saw just what Sulphuric acid can do. Now I am a prolific author and wish I had taken more notes about this case. Heslin and I enjoyed good conversation and he was very proud to have been one of the main detectives to interview Haigh. Peter Carroll 4 of 5 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes

Question: What was the name of the 'Acid Bath Murderer'?
Answer: John HAIGH