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

By Jonathan Oates

What motivated John George Haigh to murder at least six people, then dissolve their corpses in concentrated sulphuric acid? How did this intelligent, well-educated man from a loving, strongly religious family of Plymouth Brethren become a fraudster, a thief, then a serial killer? In the latest of his best-selling studies of criminal history, Jonathan Oates reinvestigates this sensational case of the late 1940s. He delves into Haigh's Yorkshire background, his reputation as a loner, a bully and a forger during his years at Wakefield Grammar School, and his growing appetite for the good life which his modest employment in insurance and advertising could not sustain. Then came his move to London and a rapid, apparently remorseless descent into the depths of crime, from deceit and theft to cold-blooded killing. As he follows the course of Haigh's crimes in graphic, forensic detail, Jonathan Oates gives a fascinating inside view of Haigh's attempt to carry through a series of perfect murders. For Haigh intended not only cut off his victims' lives but, by destroying their bodies with acid, literally to remove all traces that they had ever existed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781473841239

Jonathan Oates

Dr Jonathan Oates is the Ealing Borough Archivist and Local History Librarian, and he has written and lectured on the Jacobite rebellions and on aspects of the history of London, including its criminal past. He is also well known as an expert on family history and has written several introductory books on the subject including Tracing Your London Ancestors, Tracing Your Ancestors From 1066 to 1837 and Tracing Villains and Their Victims.

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Introduction

‘When a clever man turns his brain to crime it is the worst of all.’

Sherlock Holmes

John 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 usually only stop when arrested or hospitalised. Their method and motive are similar throughout their killings. They can be divided into organised and disorganised killers, with the former more likely to plan their murders than the latter.

We should also take a note of money values. There is no point in translating those of the 1940s (when most of the action in this book occurs) to those of the present day, but remember that a working man might expect to earn £5–£8 per week and a professional man about twice that. Those unacquainted with pre-decimal currency should note that twelve old pence made up one shilling and twenty shillings equated to one pound. One guinea was twenty-one shillings.

Pseudonyms, often invented by the press, are frequently used to label notorious criminals and it is often these that miscreants are known by rather than their actual names. Although The Daily Mirror dubbed Haigh ‘The Vampire’ in March 1949, this appellation did not stick. In 1934 George Sarret, a French criminal, had been given the nom de plume ‘The Acid Bath Murderer’ by the British press. Haigh was known in the press by the same appellation by the summer of 1949, despite the fact he did not use baths to dissolve his victims, and this has stuck.

Chapter One

Childhood and Youth, 1909–34

‘He is a smart, polite, intelligent boy and has had a good education. He has an excellent character’.

A biographer’s task is always made difficult by the scarcity of sources for a subject’s childhood and youth, unless he was one of those rare individuals who kept a diary or wrote letters, or was one of those important people whom contemporaries would write about. Haigh was not one of these. Almost all the sources for Haigh’s early life date from 1949 or afterwards. Most of these came from the man himself, after his arrest for murder, given to his defence lawyers to try and exonerate him and to a newspaper after his trial. Accounts of criminals’ early lives, as given by themselves, should not be taken at face value. This is because they tend to be self-serving and an effort to portray themselves in a favourable light, both to contemporaries and for posterity, by attempting to minimise the enormity of their crimes and to show their personalities and interests positively. Haigh was no exception to this general rule. He had no siblings and no close childhood friends to shed much light on his early years; his mother and his father said little. So we must bear all this in mind when we examine Haigh’s own statements, which form the bulk of this chapter, although there are some observations by others, mostly made decades later.

As far as is known, Haigh’s parents’ backgrounds were unremarkable. His father, John Robert Haigh (1872–1954), was born in Altofts, a suburb of Wakefield in the West Riding of Yorkshire, on 29 March 1872; his father was a coal weighman, aged forty-six in 1881, and his mother was Ellen, aged forty-two. He was the second of three children. They lived in Robinson Row, Altofts in 1881 and in 1891 John was a fitter’s assistant, living with his parents in Altofts Lane. On 21 July 1898 he married Emily Hudson (1868–1955). She had been born in November 1868 at Wellington, Shropshire. Her father, Richard, was a coalminer, aged thirty-nine in 1871, her mother was Mary, five years his junior, and they had four other children. The family had moved to Co-operation

Terrace, Altofts by 1881 and were still resident there in 1891, when her father was a coalmining deputy. Both the young couple’s parents were involved in the Nonconformist church; either as Primitive Methodists or as Plymouth Brethren. Both families were apparently of solidly respectable working-class Yorkshire stock.¹

In 1901 the couple lived at 34 Andrew Street, Brightside, Sheffield. John Robert Haigh was now a mechanical engineer employed by the Sheffield Corporation Electrical Supply Department. They also founded a successful Sunday School there. They moved to Stamford, Lincolnshire, sometime after July 1902. In 1909 the town was described thus:

an ancient municipal borough, head of a union and county court district, market town and railway station, of considerable agricultural importance, on the borders of Northamptonshire and Rutland, separated from the former by the River Walland, which flows on the south side of the Lincolnshire portion of the town.

Stamford had a population of 8,229 in 1901. The Haighs lived in a terraced house, 3 Salisbury Villas, 22 King’s Road, just north of the town centre, and worshipped at the Plymouth Brethren meeting house on Pleasant Place. In 1903 John Robert Haigh was the Station Superintendent at the Stamford and Grantham Works, where he was responsible for the erection, running and repairs of the whole place. Mr Edmundson, the manager, said of him in December 1909: ‘He is a capable Engineer, having successfully erected 1,000 KW of direct current machinery including Watertube Boilers, High Speed Engines, dynamos, Switchboards and Batteries. He is a good organiser, and can be relied upon to look after his department in every way, paying strict attention to economical working, and our cost sheet shows a considerable improvement as a result of his careful supervision’.²

It was on Saturday 24 July 1909 that John George Haigh was born at home and the birth was registered just two days later. He was an only child, born after eleven years of marriage. Between November 1910 and April 1911 the family moved to Grange View, a five-roomed house at 112 Ledger Lane, Outwood, a mining community of 9,826 residents in 1921, just to the north of Wakefield, described as ‘a nice big terraced house’ and ‘a comfortable house’. They were to remain there for a quarter of a century. John Robert Haigh was then employed at Lofthouse Colliery as a colliery engineer (his mother is never stated as having an occupation; this was not uncommon among married women, even without children, at this time) until his retirement in 1935. He was as well thought of as ever and his manager wrote of him, ‘During the whole of that time he has had exceptional opportunities of acquiring a good practical knowledge of pit-work; of the equipment of collieries, of tactfully dealing with workmen and others. He is a man of earnest purpose, much pertinacity, ability and discretion and his personal character is irreproachable’.³

This was not an affluent household, yet the Haighs were not poverty-stricken and the reference quoted above seems to give the lie to the oft-told tale that Haigh’s father was unemployed when he was born and that the family were in dire want at that time; his mother later said that her son’s murderous career was due to mental sickness dating from when he was born as she was suffering stress and strain due to poverty. Like Haigh’s grandparents, he and his parents were of the respectable skilled working class. During the 1910s, John Robert Haigh is listed among the ‘Principal Residents’ of Outwood in the directories, an indication of either social pretension or social status. In some ways the road the family lived in was an unpretentious one, with various shops including a newsagent, grocer’s, a post office and a fish and chip shop. However, there were other inhabitants who listed themselves as ‘Principal Residents’ and gave their houses names such as May Villas, Woodlands and The Cedars; one of these was a justice of the peace.⁴

All those writing about Haigh have stressed the religious nature of his domestic upbringing, which was the basis of his defence at his trial in 1949; but the validity of this must be questioned. Killers are usually irreligious (most religions, including that of Haigh’s parents, forbid murder). Yet Haigh played his religious background up for all it was worth, as the following quotations from his will (written in 1949) demonstrate.

My own life is the complete demonstration of the fact that destiny is shaped by the hand that rocks the cradle. The atmosphere in my home, which even now I can feel and sense with a vividness beyond words to convey, was rather like that of some monastic establishment. It had the quietness of a stranger certainty. It did not belong to the world outside.⁵

His parents were emphatically not cruel, but his background was unconventional, Haigh wrote:

Though my parents were kind and loving, I had none of the joys, or the companionship which small children usually have. From my earliest days my recollection is of my father saying: ‘Do not’, or ‘Thou shalt not’. Any form of sport or light entertainment was frowned upon, and regarded as not edifying. There was only, and always, condemnation and prohibition.⁶

He added:

Their sect was known as the Peculiar people. Their religious beliefs were more important to them than anything else in life. They lived by precepts, and they talked in parable. It is true to say that I was nurtured on Bible stories, mostly concerned with sacrifice.⁷

The Plymouth Brethren, to which Haigh’s parents belonged, was a Protestant Nonconformist sect, founded in Ireland in about 1827. John Nelson Darby (1800–82), a former Anglican clergyman, established the movement in England, at Plymouth, in 1830. The teachings borrowed much from Calvinism and Pietism with an emphasis on the second coming of Jesus. Their moral outlook was Puritanical and conservative in their interpretation of the Bible’s teachings. Their numbers were small and widely distributed. There was no organised hierarchy, no clergy and the autonomy of the local meetings was sacrosanct. Outward signs of devotion, such as crosses, were forbidden. The Haighs believed they were a cut above their neighbours because of these views. Haigh’s mother later said, ‘We used to despise the people in the village because we thought we were God’s elect’.⁸

Haigh senior was clearly a respected member of the Brethren, for in 1899 he was chosen to answer, in writing, complaints from an erring member, who was ‘railing’ against the Brethren. He told him that the Brethren were ‘deeply grieved’ by the member’s behaviour, while hoping that he would be restored to God’s grace, concluding with, ‘We recommend you to God and the word of his Grace’. Two years later he was again called upon as the group’s mouthpiece in a disciplinary action. The member had disregarded the pleas of the other Brethren and so could no longer remain a member, Haigh writing, ‘We feel distinctly that your action is independent in its nature, and therefore opposed to all that goes to make up the fellowship which is owed to God’.⁹

Haigh said of his father:

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 to meet somebody, he would say: ‘It will not please the Lord’.¹⁰

Haigh’s father was deeply religious:

He was constantly preoccupied with thoughts of the Hereafter, and often wished the Lord would take him home. It was a sin to be content with this world, and there were constant reminders of its corruptness and evil… Often I pondered my father’s references to the Heavenly places, and to the ‘worms that will destroy this body’. It was inevitable that I would develop an early inhibition regarding death… So great, in fact, was my father’s desire to separate himself and his family from the evil world, that he built a great wall round our garden so that no one could look in [verified by the current occupiers; between six and eight feet high].¹¹

Yet we must not forget that Haigh was much loved by his parents, unlike many others who later became serial killers. Many had an absent or dead father, and/ or suffered abuse. Haigh, however, reminded his readers: ‘But it is true, also, that my parents loved me deeply, and they devoted themselves to moulding my life. Their hopes were high, and to me they reminded me of all that is noble’. A contemporary noted, ‘Whatever may be said in criticism of the severity of his upbringing, with its ultra-religious bias, it is also true that the devotion of his parents was intended to provide their son with scope, both educationally and otherwise, for the utilisation of those gifts’.¹²

Haigh loved his mother and his father nurtured such views:

On my father’s forehead is a small blue scar shaped like a distorted cross. Explaining the mark to me when I was very young, he said, ‘This is the brand of Satan. I have sinned, and Satan has punished me. If you ever sin, Satan, will mark you with a blue pencil likewise.’ Naturally I remarked: ‘Well, mother isn’t marked’. My father answered: ‘No, she is an angel’. My dismay was acute when at school this story was received with scorn. I soon dropped the idea that I must be an extraordinary person to be the child of an angel and the one man who had sinned. I have, nevertheless, always cherished, in a less literal sense, the thought of my mother as an angel.¹³

Haigh claimed his family life was fraught with fears brought on by his parents’ religion:

It is odd to recall that in those early days, my father’s story of Satan’s mark filled me with anxiety. Often, while I lay on my bed at night after a day in which I might have done something which to my mind was sinful, I passed my hand over my forehead to feel if the mark was there… Only when I had convinced myself otherwise, could I sleep. And even years later, after I knew that my father’s ‘brand’ had been caused by a piece of flying coal in the mine, I found myself looking at the foreheads of passersby to see if they carried Satan’s mark of sin.¹⁴

Secular recreations were frowned upon, as Haigh wrote:

One of the delights of my boyhood was to visit my maternal aunt, and at her house I used to enjoy reading the comic strip in a newspaper. When I asked my father why we didn’t have a newspaper at our house I was told: ‘It is a thing of the world: there is not time enough to read the Bible’… At school, Treasure Island was one of the set books which I thoroughly enjoyed; but my father told the headmaster that a book about pirates and murder was not fit for children.¹⁵

Haigh later claimed that he inwardly rebelled against such restrictions:

But even at that early age, I could not reconcile this argument with the blood and horror of the Old Testament. The answer that the Lord was Jehovah, and, therefore, totally different, I found very unsatisfactory… The introduction of wireless, and the sight of school friends playing with cats’ whiskers and crystals, prompted the question: ‘Why don’t we have a wireless set?’ My father’s answer to that was that it was an instrument of the devil – a sign of the times – and one day the anti-Christ would use the instrument to speak to the world and organise insurrection against God and his Saints. The Brethren were always spoken of as Saints. Those of the Church of Rome were no such thing.¹⁶

It is uncertain whether Haigh enjoyed or endured his early years. He said that he resented them, ‘but apparently [he] couldn’t do anything else but submit to it’. Yet his father thought otherwise: ‘John was brought up in a strict religious atmosphere and he accepted it with delight. He loved to be among God’s people. He was a member of the Plymouth Brethren’. Which is the truer assessment is hard to know, for each had his own reasons for the differing statements. We should note that there is no evidence that any of the sect were more criminal than the rest of society, and therefore blaming Haigh’s murders on his religious upbringing is inappropriate. Those who emphasise the horror of the Old Testament in Haigh’s upbringing neglect to refer to the Ten Commandments and its sixth commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill’. In any case, Haigh had abandoned any Christian faith he had before embarking on his murderous career. However, it is possible that his upbringing led him to look down upon others and to develop a superiority complex.¹⁷

Haigh’s family and personal medical history were unremarkable. Dr Harvie Kennard Snell, prison doctor at Wormwood Scrubs, later wrote, ‘Enquiry into his family’s medical history reveals nothing of relevant importance, and a report from his father confirms that there is no history of mental abnormality on either side of the family’. Haigh did not suffer from any major illnesses and had no operations; there were no fits nor any mental or nervous diseases. He hurt an ear falling on furniture aged seven, and aged ten he fell downstairs and cut his scalp. On neither occasion was any professional medical attention required. Apparently he was afraid of the dark as a child and had a liking for keeping his hands clean; perhaps this was a form of what would now be called Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).¹⁸

Although Haigh was of the Plymouth Brethren, his religious experiences were mixed because of his involvement in the more conventional and hierarchical Church of England. Perhaps aged ten or eleven, he began to leave home at five in the morning to reach Wakefield Cathedral; it was a three-mile walk. He sang in the cathedral choir. Wakefield Cathedral had been the parish church, All Saints, until it was elevated to cathedral status in 1888. The Rev. Cyril Armitage knew him at this time and recalled that he was, ‘slightly beyond control in a mischievous way’. Later he taught in Sunday School in Leeds and attended morning services for the Plymouth Brethren.¹⁹

Although the Cathedral was High Church Anglican and thus a world away from the religiously austere Plymouth Brethren, Haigh’s parents encouraged him because they believed it would be of educational benefit, enabling him to attend the Grammar School as a scholarship boy. Yet this may have created an inner conflict in Haigh, as he later explained:

There was considerable conflict of thought during this period. The views of my Cathedral teachers were being constantly fought out with those of the Brethren. My father had always impressed me with his indisputable knowledge of being right. But the disquieting thing was that it appeared possible to produce two equally satisfactory interpretations of the same text. Which was right?

Haigh found himself impressed and fascinated by the ritualistic and ceremonial aspects of worship at the Cathedral.²⁰

Haigh had few friends. Instead he took comfort in the friendship of animals.