A stylish dresser and fastidious groomer, John Haigh moved to London in his late twenties and began a long series of crimes in an effort to attain and maintain the wealthy lifestyle he felt was his entitlement.[1] In 1936, he met William McSwann, a wealthy owner of arcade machines, who became Haigh’s first victim: in the fall of 1944, after a night of drinking, Haigh bludgeoned McSwann to death, dissolved his corpse in acid, and disposed of the remains in a sewer.[2] To cover his trail, Haigh informed McSwann’s parents he had moved away, commenced sending them a string of forged letters supposedly penned by McSwann about his move, and, a year later, murdered the couple in the same manner as their son, posing as William and taking control of their assets.[3] In 1949, while staying at an elegant hotel in South Kensington, Haigh met the affluent sixty-nine-year-old widow Olive Durand-Deacon, who agreed to visit his workshop to discuss potential investment opportunities for his new business of utilizing acid to break down strong materials.[4] Alone in the facility, Haigh shot Durand-Deacon in the back of the head, removed her fur coat and jewelry, and dumped her body in a vat of acid. While the murder of the McSwann family drew little suspicion, the disappearance of the famed socialite aroused plenty of questions, which Haigh was first able to dismiss by claiming she had never attended their meeting; however, as his narcissism took hold, he later provided a halfhearted confession.[5] Believing the police could not convict him without a body, Haigh admitted that he had shot the affluent widow in the head, but only sludge remained.[6] As Haigh’s taunts increased, so did the evidence, with a pair of dentures concretely identified by Durand-Deacon’s dentist prompting his trial and execution in the summer of 1949.[7] While awaiting his death, Haigh relished in the attention: the press, which had followed his trial closely, labeled him “the acid-bath murderer,” an effigy of him was shown in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, and the criminal boasted from his prison cell he had killed nine people despite police evidence that it was only six.[8]
Works Referenced
Ferllini, Roxana. Silent Witness: How Forensic Anthropology is Used to Solve the World’s Toughest Crimes. Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books, 2002.
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[1] Ferllini, 40.
[2] Ferllini, 40.
[3] Ferllini, 40.
[4] Ferllini, 40.
[5] Ferllini, 40-41.
[6] Ferllini, 41.
[7] Ferllini, 41.
[8] Ferllini, 41.
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