John George Haigh, the Acid-Bath Murderer. A Portrait of a Serial Killer and His Victims

282 Pages·2014·6.22 MB·English

by  Dr Jonathan Oates

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Pen & Sword True Crime
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
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Copyright © Jonathan Oates 2014
ISBN 978 1 78346 214 8 – Hardback
978 1 47383 793 5 – Paperback
eISBN 9781473841239
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1988.
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1 Childhood and Youth, 1909–34
Chapter 2 Matrimony and Crime, 1934–43
Chapter 3 The McSwans, 1944–45
Chapter 4 The Hendersons, 1947–48
Chapter 5 Mrs Durand-Deacon, 1949
Chapter 6 Arrest and Examinations, 1949
Chapter 7 The Trial of John Haigh, 1949
Chapter 8 Haigh’s Death and Posthumous Verdicts, 1949–2011
Final Remarks
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
M any people have kindly given of their time and knowledge in the
preparation of this book. Firstly, my thanks to the staff at a number of
institutions who have assisted with this book; at the National
Archives, the British Library, the Institute of Criminology in Cambridge,
Wakefield Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Leeds Local and Family
History Library, Glasgow University Library, Glasgow High School, Wakefield
Library and Stamford Library. Thanks also to Paul Lang for reading the text
through and helping with postcard illustrations and to Stewart McLaughlin of
Wandsworth Prison for giving a tour of the prison and for providing access to
archival material there. I have also had useful exchanges with fellow authors
David Briffett and Sean O’Connor. Members of my family have accompanied
me to many of the sites associated with Haigh (in Crawley, Horsham, Wakefield,
Outwood, Stamford and what was the Onslow Court Hotel), as well as
researching at Wakefield Library for me. Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in
Wakefield were able to assist with a snippet of information about Haigh’s
education. Thank you to Charlotte Burford, archivist at Madam Tussauds’
waxworks, for assisting with a photograph of a waxwork of Haigh and to Paul
Bickley and Keith Skinner at Scotland Yard’s Crime Museum. Antony Davis
provided information about the Haigh’s Outwood home. Martin Fido read the
text and offered useful comments. The Mayor’s office for Policing and Crime
allowed the use of the Crime Museum photograph.
This book is dedicated to my mother.
Introduction
‘When a clever man turns his brain to crime it is the worst of all.’
Sherlock Holmes
J ohn George Haigh was charming, handsome, immaculately dressed,
cultured and intelligent. A well-mannered and thoroughly ‘nice’ man. He
was also one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers of the twentieth
century. This was partly because he was the most prolific British serial killer in
the first half of that century, but also because of the alleged motive that he
claimed had driven him to murder. Haigh said that the desire to drink his victims’
blood had been his reason for such slaughter – he claimed that he was a vampire.
Then there was the novel method of disposal of his victims’ corpses in acid that
meant he was dubbed ‘the Acid Bath Murderer’. Finally, Haigh exhibited a
glamour in his looks and lifestyle, like another of that decade’s murderers,
Neville Heath (1917–46), which seemed to put him in a different sphere from the
run-of-the-mill murderer. He was described as ‘one of the most baffling
criminals of this or any other age’, and ‘one of the most notorious murderers of
this century’.1 Such a figure would have been in the limelight in any era, but in
the austerity years of post-World War Two Britain – even more economically
straitened than during the war – Haigh appeared in even more dramatic hues.
This aura of disreputable glamour, but glamour nonetheless, still attaches
itself to Haigh to an extent. The only celluloid interpretation of his murders, A is
for Acid, broadcast in 2002, cast a popular actor as the killer and presented his
life and crimes in as sympathetic a manner as possible. Unlike John Christie
(1899-1953) in 10 Rillington Place, Haigh was seen as a human being, with
attractive traits as well as moments of murderous violence. There have also been
those who have attempted to portray him as a man suffering from mental illness
and thus not accountable for his actions. It is true that he was not a sadist like Ian
Brady and Myra Hindley, Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rosemary West; nor did
he kill on the industrial scale of doctors such as John Bodkin Adams or Harold
Shipman. There was no sexual dimension to his crimes, as with Christie, and no
children were involved as in the Moors Murders.
Yet Haigh did kill six people, the same number or more than some of the
century’s other serial killers. Each of these people should also be remembered.
Usually, the narratives of Haigh’s case have downplayed the six and so put their
humanity at a discount. Yet Donald and Amy McSwan and their son, William
Donald McSwan, Dr Archibald Henderson and his wife, Rosalie, and Henrietta
Helen Olivia Robarts Durand-Deacon were all personalities in their own right, as
was Haigh himself.
There have been five full-length studies of Haigh, published between 1950
and 1988, of varying value, and several part studies. He has been portrayed
variously as an enigmatic man of contrasts, a man scarred by his parents’
religion, or simply a calculating murderer. Haigh’s crimes regularly appear in
books about famous criminals, London crime and serial killers; these synopses
are usually rehashes of existing published work, rather than being based on
original research. These have, like so many other accounts of well-known
criminals, resulted in numerous myths being created and disseminated by
successive works. This account will correct these and shed new light on Haigh
and his victims.
To do this, we must draw on original, primary, sources. Some of these have
not been available to previous writers. These include the Home Office, Prison
Commission and Metropolitan Police files on the case, held at the National
Archives at Kew. They also include the corpus of letters written by Haigh to his
parents, mostly while in prison in 1949 and held at the Institute of Criminology
at Cambridge, relevant court and prison archives, including papers held at the
London Metropolitan Archives and the Crime Museum, as well as the more
familiar transcripts of the trial and contemporary newspaper sources.
Genealogical sources, such as census returns, civil registration records, wills,
military records, parish and electoral registers have also been used to shed
additional light on the characters involved. Where other books have been used, it
has either been for the opinions therein or because they contain primary material
available nowhere else.
It is worth noting that until 1949 Haigh was known to few others. He had
appeared in local newspapers as a criminal on two occasions, but otherwise had
generally left little imprint on local or national life. But for a few months in
1949, from the time of his arrest until his execution, he was a national and an
international figure. Much the same can be said of those he killed. Most of what
we know about Haigh, and his victims, originates from this year or thereafter,
because it was only then that they became of interest to those outside their
immediate circles. Most, though not all, of the information about these people,
therefore, is thus coloured by their involvement in this case as murderer or as
murder victims. How far this distorts the value of this evidence is a moot point.
Likewise, the accuracy of memory can also be queried and this is of particular
note when Haigh’s childhood and youth are recounted.
The book considers Haigh’s reputation and his portrayal in both fiction and
non-fiction, and compares him and those he came across with other serial killers
and their victims. Finally, Haigh’s own accounts of his life and actions will be
critically examined, rather than accepted at face value. This is not a
reconstruction, in which words are put into the minds and mouths of the
principal characters; where there is speculation it is stated as being such.
The approach is to give a chronological account of Haigh’s life, and to
introduce those who played important parts therein when they first became
embroiled with him. Chapter 1 considers Haigh’s childhood and youth, from
1909–34. The next chapter begins with his brief marriage and then his rapid
descent into the world of crime in the next decade. Haigh’s last five years of life
are better documented than his first thirty-five. Chapter 3 covers his first three
murders and the lives and deaths of the McSwan family. Chapter 4 introduces
the reader to the Hendersons and recounts their demise and Haigh’s successful
avoidance of suspicion. The next chapter tells of Haigh’s last victim, his attempts
to cover up the crime and the reporting of her disappearance to the police.
Chapter 6 deals with Haigh’s arrest and his terrible statements to the police
which led to him being charged with murder. Chapter 7 tells of his trial at the
Sussex Assizes, and the verdict. Finally there is an account of his last weeks of
life, his posthumous reputation and the varying interpretations of his mental
state.
Perhaps we should define a serial killer. It is usually a man who kills at least
three people over a period of time, with ‘cooling off ’ periods between each
murder, rather than killing a number of people on the same day (this would be
the definition of a spree killer). Usually the intervals between each murder
become shorter as time passes and the killer’s confidence increases. Serial killers