Crawley’s Acid Bath Murderer is focus of new play

Bob was hoping to stage the show at The Archway Theatre in Horley this spring, but circumstances beyond his control have put the plans back. He is now looking at a slot at The Archway Theatre later in 2024 or 2025.

Bob’s play is called Corpus Delicti, a common law Latin phrase that translates as “body of the crime.” John George Haigh dissolved his victims in acid. He was hanged on August 10 1949, aged 40, in Wandsworth Prison. As Bob says: “The George Haigh Murders were the most infamous crime in Crawley. I have a book called The Trial of John Haigh which was published in 1953. It is a very old book that is falling apart in places but I became interested when I saw the TV drama featuring Martin Clunes which was on about five or six years ago. A lot of the action takes place in the town of Crawley which also made it really interesting. The place where a couple of the murders took place was Leopold Road. The building is not still there. The old building was a large brick shed where he murdered at least three or four people but that was torn down and there are a couple of new houses there on the site now.

“Haigh started off coming from a very strict family, a religious family, part of the Plymouth Brethren. They are similar to Quakers or I would say like the Amish people that you have in America, a similar background. They shun modern inventions and spend most of their time reading the Bible and I had to imagine some of the conversations that he had with his parents.

“When he was quite young, he started as a motor mechanic in the 1930s but he didn't like that. He started selling cars fraudulently and that got him in prison for about 18 months and then he started a proper upright official business. He wanted to be an insurance broker and he had a couple of contacts in Egypt and was very keen to get on in business but that fell apart a couple years later and he went to prison again.

“When he was on his third bout of prison, a prisoner was demonstrating as a bit of fun how with sulphuric acid if you put dead mice into it they would just completely disintegrate. He realised that if he could find a way to kill a wealthy person and then falsify the documents he could gain their property, maybe their jewellery and their money. He would just walk into a solicitor's office and claim that he was the son or the brother of the person that he had got rid of by putting them in an oil drum full of acid.”