The Press: I Was a Vampire

For five months Britain's press had been prevented, not by squeamishness but by law, from printing all the details of "Vampire" John George Haigh's nine murders. One editor had even gone to jail for hinting too broadly at the truth. But when Haigh's counsel, in an effort to prove him insane, finally read his astonishing confession in court last week—Haigh said that he drank a glass of his victim's blood after each murder—the press was finally free to let the blood and acid run.

The Sydney Telegraph rushed Australian Crown Prosecutor Charles Rooney 12,000 miles to London by air to cover the...