British Serial Killer, John George Haigh: Yet Another Dracula?

John George Haigh's fatal mistake was to think that 'corpus delicti' meant corpse. More specifically, he thought that the legal concept underlying the phrase meant that, if the police could not find the corpse then no one could be prosecuted for the murder. He thus reasoned that he would be safe from all harm should he dissolve his victims' bodies in 40 gallon drums of sulphuric acid and so rid the world of their mortal remains. But Haigh would eventually learn that 'corpus delicti' means body of evidence rather than just body.

Haigh, known as both the Acid Bath Murderer and the Vampire of London, was active during the years 1944 through 1949 and was fond of shooting his victims to death, drinking their blood and then dissolving their bodies in drums of sulphuric acid. His total victim count is either six or nine, depending on who you believe: he was prosecuted for, and found guilty of, six murders but he often boasted of nine. He preferred family groups and his victims included his friend William McSwan and both of McSwan's parents as well as Mr and Mrs Archibald and Rosalie Henderson. Haigh's motive for all this mayhem was to take possession of and sell his victim's assets after their deaths and, in this way, he accumulated several substantial sums of money.

His final victim was the wealthy socialite Mrs Olive Henrietta Robarts Durand-Deacon. It was well known that, on the day of her disappearance, Durand-Deacon was supposed to have visited Haigh's workshop. Consequently, when friends questioned him on her whereabouts, he found he had no choice but to assist them with filing a missing persons report. A search of Haigh's workshop by the police quickly uncovered a dry cleaner's receipt for Durand-Deacon's coat and the more detailed search that followed uncovered her handbag...and her dentures and gallstones. The game was up.

Haigh filed a plea of insanity in response to the murder charges brought against him but his strategy did not work and he was eventually found guilty of having acted with malice aforethought. His concessions that he had previously experimented with dissolving mice corpses in sulphuric acid - according to him the small bodies vanished completely in only 30 minutes - could also not have supported his argument that his behavior had been fueled by insane urges. It was, furthermore, fairly obvious to the prosecuting team that Haigh had invented the stories of his drinking his victims' blood only to increase the possibility of his being found insane. He had, he confessed, been driven to acts of vampirism by a series of nightmares that he had had - nightmares filled with gory religious symbolism. And while it was certainly true that his parents had been members of the extremist religious group known as the Plymouth Brethren, Haigh had broken away from the group fairly early in life and had not shown any signs of religious fanaticism prior to the alleged dreams. There was, simply, no explanation for his murderous spree other than his wish to acquire his victims' wealth.

Haigh was hanged in Wandsworth Prison on August 10^th, 1949, by royal executioner Albert Pierrepoint. He bequeathed his clothes to Madam Tussaud's Waxworks in London and they remain there to this day, worn by his waxen effigy.

Sources:

Schechter, Harold. The Serial Killer Files. New York: Ballantine Books (2003)
John George Haigh Wikipedia
Katherine Ramsland John George Haigh TruTV Crime Library
John Haigh The Serial Killer Database

London, Sondra. True Vampires. Los Angeles: Feral House (2004)
Winnipeg Free Press
The Lima News
The Daily News
Lowell Sun
Evening Journal
John George Haigh Murders Database