The Serial Killer Files (48 page)

John George Haigh, The Acid Bath Killer

People who believe that posting the Ten Commandments in public schools is the cure for today’s social problems would surely be confounded by the case of John George Haigh. Born in 1909, Haigh was raised in a strict religious sect known as the Plymouth Brethren, whose members not only abjured the usual puritanical bugaboos—alcohol, tobacco, gambling, theatergoing, and the reading of novels—but refused to socialize with people of any other persuasion, all whom they derided as “gentiles.” Despite (or possibly because of) this godly upbringing, Haigh grew up to be an inveterate hedonist with a taste for fast cars, fine food, and expensive clothing. He was also a lifelong criminal, who spent much of his young manhood behind bars and ended up becoming one of the most notorious figures in the history of modern British crime.

To be sure, his upstanding background did endow him with some attractive features: a keen intelligence, fastidious personal habits, and a polite and charming manner. More than one constable and prison official who came to know him near the end of his life attested that he was the “nicest murderer they ever met.”

After leaving school in his late teens, Haigh worked at a succession of jobs: government clerk, insurance salesman, apprentice engineer. The knowledge he gained from each of these occupations—coupled with a gift for calligraphy that made him an excellent forger—would prove useful in his future life of crime.

At twenty-four, Haigh married a vivacious young woman named Betty Hamer, who had no idea that her suave, well-spoken husband was supporting himself by swindling. She discovered the truth four months later when he was arrested for fraud. While Haigh was serving his fifteen-month sentence, his wife gave birth and immediately put the child up for adoption. Apart from one brief meeting after his release, Haigh would never see her again.

Nor would he ever remarry. Despite his easy charm and dapper appearance—the Brylcreemed hair, pencil mustache, handsome suits, and lemon yellow gloves he wore indoors and out—he was not a ladies’ man. Unlike other serial killers, his crimes were not motivated by depraved sexual compulsions.

His madness took a more mercenary form. Like other serial killer con men—H. H. Holmes, for example

—Haigh was blessed with many admirable qualities: industriousness, intelligence, ingenuity. Had he put those traits to legitimate uses, he would undoubtedly have done very well in the world. But he was undermined by his psychopathology. Making money by killing acquaintances wasn’t necessarily easier than earning an honest living—indeed, Haigh devoted a great deal of time and energy to his terrible crimes—but it was more gratifying. It fulfilled his darkest, most twisted needs.

Released from prison in 1935, Haigh, the prodigal son, returned to his parents’ home. He worked for a while at the dry-cleaning business, then moved to London, where he befriended a young man named William McSwan, owner of a pinball arcade business, who offered him a job as secretary/chauffeur.

Haigh stayed on the job for just a year before striking out on his own. Setting up a phony solicitor’s office, he contrived an elaborate stock scam which eventually landed him behind bars again, this time for four years.

He put his time in prison to productive use, studying law books to learn how to commit the perfect crime. It was during this period that he acquired the notion that a murder could not be legally proved without a dead body, a misconception based on his flawed understanding of the term corpus delecti (which does not refer to a corpse but rather to the body of evidence that proves a crime has been committed). Within a year of his release, he found himself back in jail for scamming money from a female acquaintance. While there, he managed to steal some sulfuric acid from a tinsmith’s shop and experimented on field mice to see how long it took for their bodies to dissolve.

Released in 1943, the thirty-four-year-old Haigh got a legitimate job as a bookkeeper, saved up his money, and, after about a year, moved to London, where he set himself up in a basement workshop, passing himself off in public as a company director with an engineering degree.

In September 1944, after he and his old pal, William McSwan, ran into each other at a pub and renewed their friendship, Haigh invited the young man down to his basement workshop, bludgeoned him to death with a lead pipe, then dissolved his body in a forty-gallon oil drum filled with hydrochloric acid. When nothing was left of “Mac,” Haigh poured the stinking, porridgelike fluid down the drain. After persuading McSwan’s parents that their son had gone to Scotland to avoid the draft, Haigh—using his skills as a forger—managed to get power of attorney over his old friend’s property. Later, when the parents began asking too many questions about their son’s abrupt departure, Haigh dispatched them in the same way, luring them to his workshop, smashing in their skulls, turning them into sludge, and dumping them into the sewers.

More victims followed, including a well-to-do couple named Henderson. Haigh killed each with a pistol shot to the head before liquefying them in his acid-filled oil drum. Afterward, he managed to get hold of the Hendersons’ substantial estate, though he soon squandered the money at the track.

His final victim was a sixty-nine-year-old widow named Mrs. Olivia Durand-Deacon. When the well-to-do widow failed to return from a visit to Haigh’s workshop, her friends notified the police, who soon turned up incriminating evidence in Haigh’s possession, including some of the missing woman’s jewelry. Realizing that the jig was up, the audacious con man made a startling admission, confessing not only to the murders of Mrs. Durand-Deacon, the Hendersons, and all three McSwans, but to three other killings as well. With the arrogance typical of psychopaths, he then challenged the police to convict him, declaring that—since “every trace” of the victims had been dissolved in acid—he couldn’t possibly be found guilty. “How can you prove murder without a body?” he asked with a smile.

His smug belief that he had left no physical evidence of his atrocities was quickly shattered. Searching Haigh’s premises, investigators turned up twenty-eight pounds of human fat, three gallstones, eighteen fragments of human bone, part of a foot, and Mrs. Durand-Deacon’s undissolved dentures.

As if the case weren’t already gruesome enough, Haigh began to lay the groundwork for an insanity plea by claiming that the real motive for his crimes was a lifelong vampiric compulsion. For many years, he claimed, he had been tormented by the same recurring nightmare of driving through a forest of crucifixes while blood rained from the sky. He would awaken each time with an overwhelming thirst for human blood. In each of his murders, he had slit the victim’s carotid artery with a penknife, drained off a glass of blood, and drunk it.

Needless to say, these ghastly revelations turned the trial of Haigh—alternately dubbed the “Acid Bath Killer” and the “Vampire Killer”—into a media sensation. Unsurprisingly, psychiatric witnesses disagreed about the defendant’s mental condition, even after Haigh—as though to prove just how disturbed he really was—drank a cup of his own urine in prison. In the end, the jury found him guilty, agreeing with the prosecution’s argument that the inveterate con artist had committed his atrocities out of greed, not vampiric need. He was hanged on August 6, 1949.

When the so-called Beltway Snipers were at large in the fall of 2002, many people were outraged over the nonstop saturation coverage of the case. Television and radio talk shows were deluged with callers, complaining that such unrelenting media attention only glamorized the gunmen and encouraged other potential psycho-killers to seek their own fifteen minutes of notoriety.

Though understandable, such reactions aren’t especially valid. For one thing, it’s hypocritical for people to stay glued to their TV sets, eagerly lapping up every morsel of information about a grisly murder case, while simultaneously clucking their tongues over the crass and insensitive behavior of the media.

After all, when cable news networks devote twenty-four/seven coverage to a particularly ghastly crime, they are only giving the public what it wants—and what it has always wanted.

The fascination with gruesome murders existed long before there was such a thing as “the media.” In preliterate times, people learned about sensational crimes through orally transmitted ballads. Every time a dissatisfied wife poisoned her abusive husband, or a jealous young man hacked to death his unfaithful lover, or a desperate mother smothered her sleeping children, or a band of brigands slaughtered a party of travelers—the details were turned into a song and transmitted from person to person, village to village, until everyone had heard the news.

When movable type was invented, these so-called murder ballads were printed on cheap sheets of paper and sold for a penny apiece. Many of these “broadsides” still exist, and their titles make it abundantly clear that people have always had an insatiable appetite for news about the latest horrific crimes:

“Horrible and Atrocious Murder of a Woman at Wednesbury,” “Frightful Murder of the Rev. Mr Huelin and His Housekeeper at Chelsea,” “Shocking Murder of a Wife at Oving, Near Aylesbury,” “Horrid Murder Committed by Mary Wilson Upon the Body of George Benson, Through Disappointment in Marriage.”

Serial murder was big news back in the Victorian era, as the frenzied tabloid coverage of the Jack the Ripper case attests. There is no question that, had cable TV existed back then, Geraldo Rivera would have been on the scene, interviewing the residents of Whitechapel about their reactions to the latest disemboweling. When the atrocities of Dr. H. H. Holmes were uncovered a few years after the Ripper horrors, the American public couldn’t get enough of them. Publishers churned out instant true-crime books on the case, newspapers printed every trivial detail they could dig up, and one entrepreneur even opened an H. H. Holmes museum, complete with replicas of his victims’ remains.

Indeed, popular nineteenth-century museums often appealed to the public’s interest in macabre crime.

From the moment Madame Tussaud’s first opened its doors for business in 1835, the exhibition hall known as the “Chamber of Horrors”—featuring wax effigies of world-famous murderers, along with torture tableaux and other macabre dioramas—has always been the biggest attraction, far outdrawing the high-minded displays of politicians, philosophers, and artists. The character played by Vincent Price in the 1953 movie House of Wax understood this. Planning to open his own Madame Tussaud-like museum, he announces: “I’m going to give the people what they want: sensation, horror, shocks!”

There is no doubt that the possibility of being immortalized—if not in Madame Tussaud’s wax museum then in a made-for-TV movie or best-selling true-crime book—is an appealing prospect to many serial killers, who revel in the celebrity that their crimes confer on them. There’s nothing surprising about this.

Most serial killers are complete nonentities: total losers who have failed in every important area of life.

Even those who have managed to forge respectable careers—John Wayne Gacy, for example, who ran a successful contracting business—feel like nothing inside. Having been subjected, almost without exception, to brutalized upbringings, they are instilled with a sense of utter worthlessness. Seeing their names in the papers or their faces on TV fills their hollow souls with an intoxicating sense of power and importance. Murder is their only means of making a mark on the world, of proving (to themselves as much as to anyone else) that they exist. As Pete Hamill said of David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz: “He was a nobody who became somebody by killing people.”

Berkowitz, in fact, is an interesting case, a perfect illustration of the slogan used in the ads for the movie Chicago: “If you can’t be famous, be infamous.” As noted by Dr. David Abrahamsen, who got to know him through extensive interviews, Berkowitz had a desperate lifelong need “to be noticed, attract attention, create a sensation.” His transformation from obscurity to notoriety—from being an unknown postal clerk to the world-famous “Son of Sam”—openly thrilled him.

Certainly, in the twenty-five years since his chubby face was first plastered on the front pages, Berkowitz has remained addicted to his infamy, periodically finding ways to get his name in the papers.

In 1997, he made headlines when he announced that he had found God, changed his nickname from

“Son of Sam” to “Son of Hope,” and begun preaching the Gospel on public access TV. Two years later, the New York Times ran a page-one story, describing how distressed he was over the release of Spike Lee’s movie Summer of Sam, which was re-awakening painful memories of his 1977 reign of terror. And when the Beltway Snipers were at large, Berkowitz insinuated himself back in the papers by releasing a letter to the press in which he declared that the current serial shooter rampage was causing him to “relive a nightmare.”

David Berkowitz

(Button pin courtesy of Roger Worsham)

Clearly, media notoriety is an important fringe benefit for many serial killers, another sick gratification they derive from their crimes. Whether it is also the cause of their behavior is another question. To be sure, at least one homicidal maniac—not a serial killer but a mass murderer named Robert Benjamin Smith—is on record as saying that he committed his crime because “I wanted to get known, to get myself a name. I knew I had to kill a lot of people to get my name in the newspapers all over the world.”

Even in this case, however, it is legitimate to wonder if the desire for media attention was really what made Smith walk into a Mesa, Arizona, beauty parlor in 1966 and execute four victims, including a three-year-old girl. After all, anyone who thinks that cold-blooded mass murder is a good way to become well-known has to be deeply psychopathic to begin with.

In short, while many serial killers certainly enjoy being the center of the media attention, they are motivated by far darker compulsions. The sinister celebrity they achieve from their atrocities may afford them a twisted satisfaction—what psychoanalysts call a secondary gain. But the root causes of their monstrous behavior lie elsewhere.