Neat clusters of condiments ornament the tables in the quiet, tobacco-free dining room of South Kensington's Onslow Court Hotel. There, in a silence broken only by the tinkle of chinaware, an occasional polite belch or a muffled platitude, retired colonels and well-to-do widows dine in respectable isolation without recourse to spirits. One of these was stately Mrs. Olive Henrietta Roberts Durand-Deacon, a widow of 69. She had few close friends at the hotel, but over a period of three years had struck up an acquaintance with a youngish (39) gentleman named John George Haigh, who was, he said, an inventor.
Now it was Mrs. Durand-Deacon's cross that her fingernails were regrettably stubby and she had long nursed an idea for making plastic nails for other women similarly afflicted. One day last February, Mr. Haigh suggested they drive down to a factory he had in Crawley, Sussex. Three days later Haigh reported that Mrs. Durand-Deacon had never met him and never returned to the hotel. Scotland Yard sent out a routine tracer.
"Some Human Substance." Near an old factory in Crawley, detectives soon found some interesting evidence: a piece of red plastic like that on a handbag which the missing widow carried, a ten-gallon carboy, one of several used to store sulphuric acid, and ashlike specimens of what a Home Office pathologist called "the residue of some human substance." Haigh was promptly taken into custody.
British reporters soon found that Scotland Yard was also investigating the disappearance of a wealthy retired official named Donald McSwan, his wife Amy and their son William, Dr. Archibald Henderson, well-to-do proprietor of a doll hospital, and his pretty young wife, Rose.
"A Penknife, I Think." This week dapper John George Haigh himself walked jauntily up to the bench in a Lewes courtroom to plead "not guilty" to the charge of premeditated murder laid against him. He did not, however, deny the killings.
His counsel, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, read to the court a full statement from his client. In it Haigh explained in detail how he had killed Mrs. Durand-Deacon by shooting her in the head, "then fetched in a drinking glass and made an incision, I think with a penknife, in the side of her neck, and collected a glass of blood which I drank." In 1944 William McSwan had been disposed of in much the same way—"I hit him on the head," dictated Haigh. "I withdrew a quantity of blood and drank it. I put him in a 40-gallon tank and disposed of him with acid."
A year later, said Haigh, "I took . . . the father and mother to the same basement, disposing of them in the same way." In February 1948 he killed the Hendersons, an unidentified woman from Hammersmith, a young man in Kensington and a girl "who said her name was Mary."
"In each case," Haigh added, "I had my glass of blood as before."
Haigh, said Defense Counsel Fyfe, had been tormented for years by a recurrent dream. In it, he saw "a veritable forest of crucifixes ... the crucifixes turned into trees. Then a man appeared collecting something from the dripping trees, which seemed at first to be rain or dew. But then it became blood." The dream, said Sir David, left his client "with an overpowering desire to have blood."
The defense: insanity.