The Terrifying Acid Bath Murderer (True Crime Documentary) | Real Stories

[Music] John George ha was the serial killer from middle England who killed the middle class he had no compunction and no conscience whatsoever about killing people to obtain his ends the sludge at the bottom of the barrels in which he's dissolved these poor people is poured down the drains you know he's literally obliterating an entire family I was just a young boy in the late 194 40s but I can remember the name John George hay as if it were yesterday the newspaper headlines were sensationalist from Vampire horror to modernday Dracula but the one that was

to stick was the Acid Bath murderer so was John George ha a callous fraudster or a killer Out For [Music] Blood [Music] I'm Fred Dage and I've been reporting serious crimes for more than 40 years now as a journalist and a television reporter as the official biographer to the cray twins I know that when it comes to Crime the myth can actually take over from the reality of what actually happened John George ha's crimes were some of the most shocking ever seen in Britain driven by greed he killed six people disposing of their bodies in

an appalling manner plunging the victims into Vats of acid he left no trace of their remains John George ha was born in 1909 in Stanford Lincolnshire he was well- loved by his parents and was an only child child he had a relatively isolated upbringing well I'm Keen to talk to experts and key Witnesses with an in-depth knowledge of the hate case sadly of course many of the key characters have now passed away but I have managed to track down a man with a keen interest in hag David briffett in the 1980s David spent a lot

of time interviewing key Witnesses and wrote a book about hag's atrocities David this is amazing because this is the very court room in which hag was tried and convicted what turn this apparently well educated and religious man do you think to Crime well I have a theory about Mr hag and I'm pretty sure that he wanted to assume the lifestyle of other people that he admired and the reason for that can be traced right back to his very strange childhood um his parents were members of the Plymouth Brethren um and he was deprived of many

things they didn't celebrate Christmas and eventually when he discovered the outside world he rather liked it and he wanted to be part of it and he was prepared to go to more or less any lengths to obtain that better lifestyle at the age of 10 hay won a musical scholarship to a Catholic School in Wakefield even at such a young age he was described by his teachers as mischievous what led him then into a life of crime well um there's evidence to show that when he was at school um he was very secretive um he

enjoyed playing tricks on people and he learned very early that he could Forge people's signatures and he used to forge the the signatures of teachers and he got a lot of pleasure out of that having these secrets and then he gradually moved into Petty crime and into forgery I want to know how hag's early life of crime led him to become a killer Professor David Wilson is a leading criminologist and he's taken an in-depth look at the crimes ha committed so tell us about the fraud I mean how did he get into that what what

what was his motivation there well he left school uh age 17 and worked for a little while in a blue collar job but very quickly transferred into white collar work and he first comes to the attention of the court or to the police because he tries to fraudulently sell cars that don't belong to him so the motivation psychologist criminologist would say his motivations were extrinsic they were outside of his own personality his motivation in other words was simply to make money but of course he had the most convincing Manner and he could talk anyone around

to do anything he was a wonderful salesman he could charm the birds out of the trees he always dressed very well he liked the best [Music] suits uh he had BR creamed hair that was flat but he had the most penetrating sparkling blue eyes which many many people noticed in 1934 hag used his Charming manner to persuade people to purchase V vehicles that didn't exist it wasn't long before the money was rolling in hag wrote many letters documenting his early life and his atrocities he said I discovered there were easier ways to make a living

than to work long hours in an office I did not ask myself whether I was doing right or wrong that seemed to be irrelevant I merely said this is what I wish to do he always I I think reading through the lines felt slightly outside of the culture to which he belonged and so a lot of his life it would seem was about playing a part so he always wanted to had drive fast cars to Loop the part to be fashionable to have money he often gives the impression of trying to live above his means

ha quickly discovered that crime didn't pay his car scam was uncovered he was imprisoned for 15 months at Leeds as sizes on his release he was soon back to what he considered to be his profession fraud one of his major frauds was committed in s and in Sussex in fact he opened three offices as a solicitor he never was a solicitor of course but he opened three offices one in Chantry Lane in London one in Guilford in s and one in Hastings in Sussex and he called himself William cat Adamson and he had some wonderful

headed Note Paper printed and then he began placing advertisements in local newspapers offering uh shares for sale shares that supposedly had come from the Estates of deceased persons and he was offering them at slightly below the market rate and of course people were very attracted to that and began sending in checks to this solicitor uh HG lived very well off the checks however he was caught out because on one of his headed note papers he had misspelled the word Guilford and he had left out the D in the middle and one of the prospective purchasers

spotted that went to the police didn't think a solicitor would make a basic error like that and hag was arrested as a result of that error well according to court records hag was imprison three times between 1934 and 1943 for theft and fraud but prison life didn't dampen his desire to make money he knew if he was to become a part of high societ Society then he'd have to learn how to commit the perfect crime hag's time in prison was far removed from the lavish lifestyle he aspired to he thought himself a class above the

petty criminals that he was now rubbing shoulders with I'm about to meet a man who knows what life is like in Britain's toughest prisons Bobby cumins was convicted of armed robbery and manslaughter he now runs a charity called unlock which helps ex offenders and he knows at firsthand the experiences you pick up from being around hardened criminals if you're in prison and you want to leave crime behind it can be a great place for rehabilitation if like H um you were a prolific offender if you like you you had it in you you wanted to

learn about crime greatest University in the world is prison because there you can Network there's there people there with different skills so he would have been planning um his next move in prison hag learned about the crimes committed in France in 1925 by the double murderer Sur to avoid capture Sur disposed of the bodies ins sufuri acid ha learned a great deal about the the British legal system while he was in prison thanks to books from the prison Library brought to him by the Padre but more importantly he learned about the uses of sulfuric acid

from the prison library books too so he learned a great deal about crime and a great deal about assets he would have been told the weakest link is your victim cuz in especially in fraud your face is going up it's not like if you're an arm robber and you're putting a mask over your face or anything like that with fraud its front on so therefore the victim can identify you in ID parades in photographs that sort of thing so if you're at the fraud game there's nine out of 10 odds that you're actually going to

get nicked for the offense so they what have said to him the weakest link is is is your victims and in any criminality what you you got to do is eliminate the weakest link ha began formulating a Sinister plan one he would put into action on the day of his release but to prepare he needed the assistance of fellow prisoners and access to sulfuric acid it was during his time in Lincoln prison that he was given a position in the tinsmith factory there he gained access to sulfuric acid he wanted to discover if like suray

he could dissolve bone and tissue he used to bribe other prisoners with small amounts of tobacco these prisoners were allowed outside the Prison Walls during the day and they would bring dead field mice back into the prison for hag and hag also stole small amounts of sulfuric acid from the stores and obviously while the waters weren't watching he would line up the jars on a workbench fill each jar with a small amount of acid and then drop a mouse into each jar and then very patiently would sit and watch to see how long it would

take a mouse to disintegrate in a certain amount of sulfuric acid so in other words he worked out a scientific formula which he thought maybe later he could apply to a human being and all he wanted was the [Music] opportunity I think that's an interesting thing this one piece will make 52 layers watch on mobile devices or the big screen all for free no subscription required I'm Fred Dage and I'm examining the life of John George ha he was known as the Acid Bath murderer because of the horrific way he disposed of his victims in

1941 John George ha was serving a sentence for theft in Lincoln prison it was his third spell in prison but hay was determined that when he was released he would make money from a life of crime no one would stand in his way but it's still quite a leap isn't it from from fraud to murder it is a big leap but again the motivation for hag simply seems to be an extension of the frauds that he committed earlier uh in the 1930s and earlier in the 1940s but essentially he wants to make money ha left

prison and began looking for a wealthy victim to exploit a chance meeting at the goat Pub in Kensington presented him with the opportunity he'd been looking for William mwan had employed hag as his chauffer back in the 1930s they'd become friends but lost touch when hag went looking for other work how close was hag then to mawan and vice versa well John hag and William mawan were both the same age and they got on very well and for a period they became quite close friends uh hag certainly uh admired young M Swan's lifestyle because he

used to collect the rents of the six mwan properties in West London and I think Hy watched him do this job and realized that he was obtaining quite a nice sum of money every week that his family lived on and he wanted that lifestyle hay regaled his old boss with Tales of his own recent business ventures although he'd actually been in prison over the next few days they would meet several more times hag was just waiting for the perfect moment to put the plans he'd hatched in prison into action ha said he had an engineering

Workshop mwan said he had some pinball machines that he wanted repaired and hag said he would do the work and he invited mwan down to the basement no one truly knows what happened to William mawan hag's own account calls that his old friend asked him to look at a pinball machine with his head bent hay pulled out a metal bar and killed William mawan with several heavy blows hay was left with the body of his murdered friend using the skills he'd learned in prison he dumped his first victim in acid it sto an an old

drum from an old wartime bomb site and he got the body of MW into the oil drum and then he began the ma business of filling it with acids in order to protect Hag from the acids he uh developed a very sophisticated uniform which consisted of a of a large rubber rain coat um rubber gloves that came up to his elbows uh long thigh length wer boots and on top of that he had an old Leathers butcher's apron and to protect his nose and his eyes and his mouth from the fumes of the acid he

stole a wartime gas mask so you can imagine this figure must have been a very very Sinister sight indeed not easy to lift people and put them in Vats of of acid is it no it it isn't easy at all and so there's obviously some physiological strength that he needs as well as the psychological strength to be able to go through the process that he would go through and that does seem to me to take a certain type of mentality a certain type of psychology to be able to do so that ability to compartmentalize his

life seems to me to be quite extraordinary and in hag's case is one of the consistent features of his behavior the first murder how momentous would that have been for him how difficult what you're talking about now is a Comm man who's glib tonged sve sophisticated knows his trade now you're going into murder totally different Bull game killing another human being is one thing being able to dispose of the body as another and be able to come to terms with that now if you can come to terms with that once you've done one half a

dozen ain't too many hag had successfully killed and disposed of his friend's body the problem he now faced was covering up M Swan's disappearance he went and saw his victim's parents and told them their son had fled to Scotland to avoid conscription naturally they were upset but they had no reason to disbelieve hag's story it was a mistake which was to cost them their lives hey began to befriend William M Swan's parents his trusting manner Charmed the couple into employing him as a rent collector it was the job that their son had been doing before

his disappearance the money he made from them afforded him a good life hag's intention was to get hold of the mwan properties and he obviously discovered that the Deeds of all the properties were in the names of the two senior M wans and it was in 1945 that he invited Donald mwan to come down to the basement and the story was that their son was making a surprise visit back from Scotland and would be reunited with the father in the [Music] basement it was a dreadful trick to play on this old man uh within a

few minutes of Donald mwan arriving in the basement he was killed with an iron bar across the back of the head and only uh an hour or so so later he then invites Amy mwan to come down to the basement and he kills her in the same fashion and he had two oil drum standing side by side ready to dispose of a husband and wife in a single weekend no one knows just what Amy M Swan saw when she walked into hag's Lair did she see her husband dead in front of her perhaps she never

made it that far whatever happened hay left that Workshop alone we never ever discover what happens to the MC swans because the sludge at the bottom of the barrels in which he's dissolved these poor people is poured down the drains of London and goes into the toms you know he's literally oblit ating an entire family I find it hard to imagine just how one man could not only kill a whole family but then also make them disappear Professor David Wilson has invited me to witness a simple experiment to replicate just how effective hag's process was

David tell us what we're seeing here well for any murderer to be successful he's got to get rid of the body and in controlled circumstances and using the lovely we're going to replicate the kinds of behavior that hag showed with his victims which we're going to use concentrated sulfuric acid not the body of a person but a piece of chicken and see how long it's going to take to dissolve which is of course what hay did with his [Music] victims now of course remember it's a microcosm so we've only got 2 lers of concentrated sulfuric

acid hey had three carboys of sulfuric acid which literally a Carboy is 40 Gall so he has 12 gallons of this stuff uh because of course he's trying to get rid of a much bigger body than our small piece of chicken the process of purchasing sulfuric acid is the same today as it was in the 1940s you can only buy it from a licensed supplier and you need to give a clear reason for its use not a problem for a fraudster like hay he set himself up uh a bogus business uh called Union group engineering

he hired a basement in the Gloucester Road in London which was supposedly his Workshop but he began to stockpile quantities of acids he bought these acids um by sending off letters and when he signed a letter it was from liaison officer John George ha and no questions were asked the delivery took place well the piece of chicken's been in there what five minutes and already it's appearing to if you like cook yes well it's going to burn this is the this is the process of how the the body fat will disappear how difficult would it

have been for him do you imagine to do this for the first time with a with a human body oh incredibly difficult um most murderers when they start if you think of murder almost as a skill you well when you pick up a skill for the first time you're not very good at it and of course most murder are dealing with a range of emotions that they're going through when they have the control over their victim some of them might be excited some of them might be frightened some of them might be anxious but of

course they're learning how to deal with somebody they've got in their complete and utter power as ha did the only people that kill on the SP of the moment are the sort of people that are domestic killers and we call that the Red Mist it's it's done in Anger they lose their faculties and they kill when you playing murder is is the systematic shutting down of your own Humanity if you like you know the same as when you're doing violence when you're doing violence for money what you've got to do you got to shut down

every emotion every feeling everything about it's just that bit of work to be done and that's what he would have practiced while he was in prison is shutting off emotion you've got to be able to shut off emotion otherwise you couldn't do it after murdering the M swans hay forged their signatures and made people believe they immigrated to America America he then successfully sold off their assets allowing him to lead the lifestyle he aspired to nobody questioned the young charmer and he made himself just over £100,000 in today's money so now he's a wealthy man

he he was for a period of some three years he lived off the mwan money uh and it amounted to several thousands of pounds which in today's money we think was probably about £100,000 and he had a wonderful life for about 3 years this was just what he was aiming at this was the lifestyle he'd been seeking from the beginning and he had achieved it ha was finally living the lifestyle he craved staying in exclusive hotels buying expensive cars and entertaining the upper classes with no other income his fortune quickly began to disappear he should

have been able to survive comfortably on the money that he' got but he squandered it didn't he yeah because easy come easy go he's got £8,000 this time and he's spent that well next time he'll get 12,000 there's a recklessness to his behavior it's not that he's complacent it's more that um once he hasn't being caught once that metaphoric hand on the shoulder didn't appear he begins to feel himself quite Invincible I suppose once you've got away with one murder and then a second then a third how do you reverse how do you stop that

behavior living the High Life hag's greed meant he needed to find another victim and kill again I'm Fred Dage and I'm investigating the crimes of John George ha The Man known as the Acid Bath murderer in 1946 he killed the three members of the mawan family and disposed of their bodies in acid their murders had netted him a small fortune but the money began to disappear almost as quickly as his victims had he's very interesting as a serial killer he's not typical by any means for one he's killing a very different group of people he's

killing wealthy middle class upper middle class people people who are going to be missed because that's not the common pattern of Serial killing in Britain by 1947 the thousands hag had made from killing the maans had been blown on on his lavish lifestyle overdrawn and being chased by creditors he knew what he had to do he needed to find new victims but he had another problem to deal with first he no longer rented the workshop in London where he carried out his previous killings he was looking for a new quiet location that's exactly what he

found here at Leopold Road in Crawley he rented the workshop and moved his acid raincoat gloves and gas mask into to his new center of operations now heg needed to find particular types of victims to charm they had to be wealthy and crucially the sort of people who wouldn't be missed I mean you've done time with fraudsters you've known a lot of frauders what's the technique that someone like hey uses to if you like con is victims it's charm um also it's I talked to a famous fraudster once man and he was probably one of

the best in the world when I was in in prison and he millions of pounds was involved and he said you can only kind a greedy person he fed their ego and and when you're talking about comment comment they got massive egos their s they really think that that they can con the world and so to him he was feeding them the food they wanted I he was stroking their ego and in return he was robbing him he answered an ad for the sale of a house in London he offered the wealthy owners the Henderson

more than the asking price telling them it was undervalued he he managed to get himself into the company of a very fashionable London couple named the Hendersons Archie Henderson and Rose Henderson they were quite wealthy they owned a block of flats and they owned a small shop called the dolls Hospital in West London and hag considered these to be ideal victims uh for for the Acid Bath and for him to take over their Lifestyles he simply is very good at trying to identify suitable victims to bump off whom he will be able to use to

gain more and more income hey LED Archie Henderson to believe that he was a successful businessman with an engineering company in Crawley he proposed a joint venture and Henderson agreed to visit hag's site on Leopold road on the 12th of February 1948 John he he bought Archie Henderson to see his new workshop here in Crawley they went inside the workshop and when the unsuspecting Henderson turned his back hay produced a revolver and shot him in the head the revolver had actually belonged to Henderson himself and hag had stolen it from the Henderson's flat uh he

taught himself how to use it and within a second or two he had shot Henderson dead he then went back to the Metropol Hotel to tell Rose Henderson that her husband had been taken early in Crawley and would she come up to see him and without any question at all she jumped into the car and was brought up to Crawley supposedly to have a reunion with her husband uh but within a few seconds of her walking into the workshop she was shot dead too and for the second time in his career he had two oil

drums standing side by side ready to get rid of a husband and wife as with his other victims hay placed the bodies in the oil drums he then pumped in sulfuric acid he went away for the weekend and when he returned he was going to pour away the sludge that had formed but there was a problem the basement in London had a convenient drain down which he could dispose of the uh the residue of the bodies when he moved to leopo Road in Crawley there was no drain and he had to wheel the drums out

of the Workshop into the the yard and it was a builder's yard but it was full of rubble and he found a nice corner where he could empty the drums into the rubble it's been an hour since Professor Wilson began his experiment to replicate how hag used sulfuric acid to liquefy his victim's bodies a murderer if he's organized and successful gets rid of the body he hides the body body he buries the body in hag's case he wants to completely obliterate the body now that's partly because heg misunderstands This legal term called Corpus dele which

means the body of evidence heg misunderstands this and thinks if there's no body as in the body of evidence he can't be charged but of course that's his misunder understanding of that phrase Corpus Dei which simply means that there is evidence a body of evidence to be able to convict the culprit and what should happen to this piece of chicken is what did happen to hag's victims yes well it's going to burn this is the this is the process of how the the body fight will disappear but remember this is part of ha's misunderstanding of

the experiment ha thinks everything is going to disappear there's going to be literally nothing left whereas in fact there is going to be a residue and it's that residue that's going to be very important in bring bringing hag to justice for now hag was still at large he' pocketed over £200,000 in today's money from the Henderson murders making people believe they'd immigrated to South Africa once again he's in the money and once again he managed to spend the money yes he made another nice nest egg out of the the Henderson's money but whereas the mwan

money lasted three years years the Henderson money only lasted a year as if his spending had accelerated at quite a rate and he's in the red yet again in 1949 and looking for another victim for the Acid Bath at Crawley heg had been a permanent resident at the enlo court hotel in Kensington for several years surrounded by a variety of wealthy targets he just had to choose his next victim flossy Franklin and her friend Sally were regular visit visitors to the hotel their nephew Richard Franklin remembers how they came face to face with the killer

tell us about your aunts and their relationship with the onsl called well my Aunt Irene known as flossy and Sally were very typical uh country women they would come up to London once a fortnite to do their shopping at harro's as you do and have their hair done and they would spend the weekend at the onow court hotel which was very comfortable they could feel at home and the sort of people who went there were similar people probably people who were living on family trusts but um I mean it is significant this because the money

that they would have was probably not as much as they would like to have had so I think it if a very smooth Operator comes along and uh chats them up and tells him about his uh wonderful business opportunity and I think they might have been thought it was that's rather rather exciting perhaps we can improve our income a little bit did your aunt ever say to you that she'd had conversations with oh yes yes he used to sit down and have tea with them he was Charming he would go around and obviously he was

susing out the field if serial killers had horns on their heads if they looked like the devil you would avoid them but of course if they're Charming if they're plausible if they're entertaining then of course you're going to trust them a lot more more and they can gain access to you to potentially become their next victim your aunt could easily have been for all we know his next victim oh I think she undoubtedly was on the list I don't think there's any question about that I mean if he'd had tea with her once with them

once and thought they were sort of not what he was looking for he wouldn't have bothered to have tea with him again um and I think they had quite a lot of truck with him would your aunt you think had he persisted in for want of a better word chatting her up yes had he persisted would she have been gullible enough do you think to oh yes oh yes I think so my aunt would rush into anything and she would be easily duped I think if it had got to an actual invitation to go to

Sussex I think my aunt said oh how lovely yes shall we drive in your car or mine bless her she was well named as flossy I think she she would have um been you know sort of upended into into the barrel of of acid straightway Richard Franklin's Aunt appears to have had a lucky Escape but the same can't be said for another Resident of the enlo hotel Mrs Olive Duran Deacon even these names sound wonderful don't they Fred the honors L Court hotel Mrs Duran Deacon you can tell the kind of character that hag is

uh attacking ha managed to sit at the same table t as her in the dining room and they got chatting about all sorts of things um he must have discovered that she had quite a nice little uh Nest Egg tucked away in the bank in fact she had £36,000 worth of stocks and shears hey befriended Mrs Jan Deacon and over several dinners she explained about her ambition to start a Cosmetics business producing false nails it was music to the fraudsters ears they agreed to become business partners and hag suggested she visited his premises in Leopold

Road what do you suppose her reaction would have been when she opened the door to this ramshackle premises she must have been pretty horrified and very surprised because on that day it was a Friday in February 1949 she was dressed in her best fur coat she had her best jewelry on a lovely handbag rings on her fingers and a pearl necklace around her neck and hay led her to this very grimy Workshop in a builder's yard in Crawley and it was a very Stark Place Mrs Jiran Deacon didn't have much time to take in the

surroundings hag led her to a workbench to show her some plans with her head lowered he pulled his revolver from under the counter and placed it on the back of her head he shot her dead with one single bullet I'm Fred Dage and I'm investigating the real motive behind the horrific murders carried out by John George hay the Acid Bath murderer his thirst for money compelled him to kill six people he thought he'd never be caught if he disposed of his victim's bodies in acid hag's sixth victim had been a wealthy Widow Olive Jan Deacon

a fellow resident of the luxurious enlo Court hotel he's running out of control Fred he doesn't know how to put the brakes on nor does he I think want to put the brakes on he once he's on this journey he's going to continue on this journey until he's actually stopped ha had to dispose of Mrs Jan Deacon's body as with his previous victims he placed her corpse into a bath of acid once she was in the drum um he took a tea break he came out of the yard he walked up the efield road and

he went to a Cafe called the ancient priors and he ordered himself poached eggs on toast um and he had a long friendly chat with the proprietor of the cafe as if nothing had happened um and then within half an hour he had strolled back to the workshop to carry out the disposal of Mrs Duran Deacon hay poured the remains of the acid into a corner of his yard he then returned to the enlo Court hotel to cover his tracks however he hadn't accounted for the fact that unlike his previous victims Mrs Jan Deacon would

be missed for a couple of days he looked as though he'd got away with it but in fact whereas no one had reported the other five people missing uh two days after Mrs Duran Deacon had failed to return to the enow court Hotel her best friend Miss constant Lane decided that she would go to Chelsea Police to report as a missing person the police visited the enlo Court hotel to conduct inqu quiries one officer felt that 39-year-old hag was out of place amongst the elderly residents checks revealed that hag had a criminal record for fraud

and the police started to look into the business activities of this supposed gentleman the police quickly discovered hag's Workshop here in Crawley but nothing could have prepared them for what they found it was like a scene from a hammer horror movie on the huntt to find evidence that would in Criminal ha detective Sergeant Pat heslin forced entry into the leapold road Workshop heslin walked straight into hag's Workshop of death and discovered all his implements heslin recovered the revolver and the bullets he also recovered a small little bit of paper it was the receipt for a

dry cleaning shop in rygate he went there on the Sunday and he recovered a fur coat it was the fur coat belonging to Mrs Duran Deacon hay realized that the game was up that point so he changed his T completely and he decided to make a confession he confessed to killing Mrs Jen Deacon but then to the the astonishment of the police he began telling them all about the other five killings and the disposals but he thought that they couldn't touch him ha believed the acid had dissolved his victims and if the police couldn't find

a body then there were no legal grounds to convict him he was wrong on both counts our experiment with Professor Wilson reveals the error that brought hag to justice so David is our chicken after just 2 hours in the sulfuric acid we can see that the chicken is obviously diluted inside some of the body fats have been burnt off there's a change in color and we used another piece of chicken in sulfuric acid which has been diluting for uh one day and here's the result it's this sludge this type of sludge though that's going to

be the beginning of his down fall in relation to Mrs Durand Deacon one of Britain's leading forensic Pathologists Professor Keith Simpson was brought in to examine hag's premises in the corner of the yard he discovered 28 lbs of human body fat part of a human foot and a set of Dentures which were shown to belong to Mrs Jan Deacon hag became desperate he had one last con up his sleeve he believed might save him from The Gallows a plea of insanity hay claimed that all his crimes had been committed to satisfy a Lust For Blood

hag put this Blood drinking claim into his statement at a very early stage um so if he was doing it he was acting very cleverly indeed but I think he was putting it in to perhaps try and show that in he was insane and in fact that was the defense that his was given at his trial that he was insane and therefore shouldn't hang in July 1949 hag's trial for murder began at Lewis Crown Court now such a Sinister set of killings had generated huge public interest and the streets outside were packed with people curious

to take a look at the man the Press had labeled the vampire Vernon evered remembers the trial as if it were yesterday if you hadn't known what he' done was he the sort of bloke you could have passing the street yes yes he could could have been a bank manager that's what he looked like Immaculate Vernon was a copy boy working for the local newspaper he got to experience the atmosphere of a trial that remarkably only lasted for 3 days there was a lot more interest in that sort of case because bearing in mind there's

no TV it made it a sensational story and was the was the talk of the day people talked about it at work what's happened today you know they brought the oil drums in today and all this sort of business there were 33 Witnesses some of them virtually only said one or two words like yes or no you know did you see Mrs D and Deacon come back into the hotel no during the trial hag's defense team didn't deny the murders instead they tried to portray their man as being mentally ill and therefore unable to fully

appreciate the morality of his acts and his claims hag's claims that there were other victims who he killed because he wanted to drink their blood yeah there was no there was no other circumstantial evidence and the police never followed those up anyway blood drinking was um another part of the ploy because of the the fact that one of the doctors said in between the disposed of Mrs Duran Deacon he went to the Jord hotel and crawling had poached eggs on toast and then came back and had appli the blood a doctor said there's no way

that would be possible without him absolutely um you know vomiting and being ill and you know this was another sort of figment of his imagination well he was a psychopath wasn't he he was he was cleverly Criminal it took the jury just 15 minutes to come to a conclusion ha was found guilty and sentenced to death there was almost a sort of I can't remember clapping or anything but there was a a sense of um just Justice will be done you know when uh when the sentence of death was pronounced they said to him after

he was sentenced have you anything to say and all he said was nothing at all the feeling was he deserved all he was going to get from wesworth prison ha wrote letters to his family there were no signs of remorse for his victims well in fact The insan Plea was never going to be really successful was it because we know that he killed for money he was quite careful about trying to cover his tracks indeed we never discovered the Hendersons that he murdered we never discovered the MC swans whom he murdered and clearly he was

benefiting financially from what he was doing on the 10th of August 1949 John George hay was marched the 15 Steps to The Hangman's noose in the time it's taken me to recount this story The Acid Bath murderer was dead in the eyes of the law Justice had been served if he could look down now that he might be and see us talking about him how would he feel about that he'd love it every serial killer I've worked with loves their Public Image loves their media the media attention they're able to generate I think he'd be

glorying in in all the agulation that still surrounds him I mean we're talking about a case now that happened in 1949 and yet here we are still talking about this extraordinary man and I think he would take a great deal of delight about that even though we're talking about hag we're also talking about the circumstances that allows hag to kill we're talking about the victims of hag we're talking about those people who really matter we're talking about the circumstances that some people can use to commit murder and that to me is far more important rather

than giving celebrity to the likes of hag even though hag would have loved the celebrity I set out to discover what could make a man murder six people and dispose of their bodies in such a callous manner from the evidence I've heard he was a cold-hearted killer a man with no conscience who would do whatever it took to make money and satisfy his aspirations to live the high life for John George hag though his crimes didn't [Music] pay [Music] [Music]