THE ACID BATH MURDERER

so today's video is going to be another solved true crime kiss today we're going to be talking about another prolific uk serial killer and it's been too long since we've done a uk serial killer and you guys know whenever i do a serial killer kiss i'm always gonna go in so today's video is gonna be part one of a two-part series part two will be out in the next few days make sure you're subscribed with the bell on you don't want to miss part two because that has the majority of the of the gory details quickly before we get into this video i just want to remind you that i have set up a brand new second channel pretend the first one never existed the link to subscribe will be down below in the description hopefully i'm going to be posting like every week don't hold me to that and it's just gonna be fun light-hearted non-crimey or scary content it's just gonna be nice it's gonna be happy it's gonna be a fun time anyway before we get into this video i just want to thank our sponsors for making this video possible bbc sounds bbc sounds is literally like my go-to place for podcasts now it was launched in like late 2018 and you can get everything on there not just podcasts you can get like live radio music mixers bbc sounds it's in the name sounds you can get sounds on that the podcast that i've been loving recently is called bad people a true crime podcast are we surprised it's presented by a criminal psychologist named dr julia shaw and a comedian named sophie hagan and they go really into the psychology behind the crimes that they cover exploring like nature versus nurture can people be born evil or are they just a product of their environment and their upbringing and their childhood julia shaw is amazing i think i'm in love with that woman she obviously because she's a criminal psychologist she's always throwing in like little statistics and results from studies and little facts about like the lore and i just she's amazing i love listening to the podcast while i'm like doing my makeup on him on and i'll be doing my eyeliner like yes sophie i think it was his upbringing one of my favorite episodes of bad people is called when children kill and they talked about a bunch of different child killers from different countries as well so they talked about the james bulger case from this country they talked about i think it was a norwegian case and they discussed like the different laws in the different countries how the different societies reacted it was just so interesting so if you want to listen to the bad people podcast i really do recommend it you can check out bbc sounds using the link down below in the description of this video and i'm also going to be posting some weekly podcast updates on my instagram story this is my instagram right here so make sure you go in and following that i'll tell you what episodes i like if i find any new podcasts i'll keep you updated my handle is just eleanor neil same as it is on here thanks again to bbc sounds for sponsoring this video now before we get into it i just want to give my usual disclaimer that i mean absolutely no disrespect to anyone that i talk about in this video this video is for educational purposes and everything that i'm about to say is just information that i have found on the internet and i'm compiling into one video so the acid bath murderer john george higg was born on july 24th 1909 in stamford lincolnshire in the east midlands of england i'm probably going to call him john higg in this video but i've heard his name being pronounced john here i don't know i might swap between them unintentionally but george here john higg jesus john george higg so he was born in lincolnshire but his family later moved to outwood which is a little town in wakefield in west yorkshire which is a little bit too close to where i'm from for my liking the family did struggle financially john's father actually lost his job just a couple of months before john was born so that was obviously a big strain and a lot of stress on this family that were expecting a newborn baby and had no income his father eventually found a new job it wasn't as well paying as his old one and so the family did struggle a little bit but they they could always afford food and like the basic necessities but they couldn't have much more than that john was an only child and he had a lot of positive attention from his parents his father was also called john and his mother was called emily and they didn't actually think that they could have children they didn't think that they were able to emily fell pregnant at 40 which is you know past the age that you expect to be having children and so they thought that jon was their little miracle and while his parents loved him they adored him they weren't very nice with him and you'll see that a lot later because they were very strict protestant christians john was pushed into playing the piano when he was very young i don't think he really wanted to do it but the more he did it and the better he got he actually began liking it and he actually really liked classical music and he would go to concerts with his family he grew up very sheltered he didn't have many friends and that wasn't you know out of choice or out of like an inability to make friends it was actually because his parents sheltered him from the rest of the world so much that they didn't really want him to have friends the family were very very strict protestant christians in a sect named the plymouth brethren and this is that very radical religion it's not just like strict christian it's like i mean you'll see later on but john was brought up to fear god as opposed to love him and feel loved by him he feared his own religion john's father actually had like a bluish scar on his forehead and john remembered when he was younger his father used to point to the scar and say that he got it when he sinned when he was around john's age and the devil actually gave him that scar and he would tell his son look if you sin then you will get this sinner's scar as well and everyone will know that you're a sinner and this really stuck with john and he was terrified of getting this scar on his head because he thought that if people thought that he was a sinner then he would never be accepted into the world and that was genuinely how his parents raised him was that if he committed any tiny little sin then he would be discerned and the whole world wouldn't want to know him and john never had a proper childhood out of this fear of sinning he never wanted to do anything he never wanted to go anywhere he never wanted to talk to people out of fear that they were evil and associated with the devil this is not a rational fear to have but a fear that his parents instilled in him and besides he would spend every single day at church anywhere sometimes multiple times on a sunday he would be in church so he didn't really have time to socialize and become a normal child but these sins that his parents wouldn't let him commit they weren't the normal things like dirt steel don't lie it was like you are not allowed to read any other books other than the bible and of course in school they make you read books they read books to you and he was terrified that he was gonna be forced to read a kid's book his parents wouldn't let john play a sport they wouldn't let him have friends because every other child was evil it was touched by the devil his parents even told him to run home from school after the last bell and to not spend a second more than he needed to in that school if he ran home he'd be back in a christian environment as quickly as possible he essentially wasn't allowed to have fun or be happy to be happy was to be sinful in that world this was a miserable life that his parents pushed on him and a miserable life that his parents led themselves but it was also largely about appearances for the haig family they wanted to look like the perfect christian family and they wanted their son to be the best behaved the most obedient in church they wanted everyone to know that he was a good god-fearing child his father john cena even put huge fences up around their house to keep out people that weren't in their religious sect he just didn't want him or his family or his son to be mixing with people that didn't you know have as strict religious views as they did and while he never told his family this john hated his religion he hated how strict his parents were about it and i don't know if this was even conscious in his mind at this point he later in his life said oh yeah he hated it but at that point in your life when that's all you know do you know that you hate it but this manifested itself in recurring nightmares every single night that john higg would go to sleep he would dream of being in a forest and instead of trees they would all be crucifixes and as he was walking through this forest it would start to rain and the rain would get heavier and heavier and heavier until he looked up he would realize that it wasn't actually rain it was blood it was raining blood down on him and then he would look around and all of these crucifixes would turn to trees and he would actually be in a forest and all of a sudden these trees would start oozing blood he said that he would find himself suddenly frozen still he can't move he can't speak he can't make a noise and then he sees this man emerge from the forest this man's holding a cup and he's going to each different tree and taking a bit of the blood that's pouring out of these trees until the cup is full and when he got to john he would force him to drink the whole thing and i think these dreams are a pretty good reflection of how jon actually saw his religion he was terrified by it he felt like he was forced into it and he wasn't comforted by it like people are supposed to be with religion you're supposed to feel loved you're supposed to feel belonging but he didn't he felt so uncomfortable when john reached the age of around 10 or 11 he began learning how to get around his parents very strict religious rules he began lying to them of course he was too scared to do anything major so he started out with like little sins such as like reading a book reading a kid's book and as soon as he realized that nothing actually happened there were no consequences he had a lot of thoughts in his head he'd been told all his life that god is watching god sees everything you do every sin you commit and if you commit a sin then there'll be consequences he will punish you accordingly but where was he now you know he'd committed this sin and all of a sudden you know everything's just the same nothing happened so john felt as though he'd been lied to her he took this to mean one of two things maybe there was a god and he just didn't care about john he just didn't care what he was doing or maybe this whole thing this whole religion this whole world that his life revolved around was a lie maybe his parents were just forcing him into this religion that didn't even exist just because they wanted him to behave a certain way in his mind this was this was huge it felt like his whole world was a lie john felt as though he'd been lied to her he took this to mean one of two things maybe there was a god and god just didn't care about little john higg he didn't care about his sins he didn't care about his life or maybe there was no god at all and maybe this whole religion this whole thing that his whole life revolved around was a lie and john hague decided that the first chance he got he was going to leave the church he was going to leave his religion but for now he just had to act the part for his parents sake he knew that he would be punished he would be kicked out and ostracized his parents wouldn't want him anymore if he even implied that he was having doubts about his religion so he had to pretend like everything was the same even though in his head he was no longer in this at all john realized that as long as he looked the part as long as he looked like he was following the rules as long as he was a good choir boy he was dressed well presented well and turned up every day at church you know that's all he needed to do he didn't need to live this very strict life anymore he could sin whenever his parents didn't know about it because there were no consequences nothing happened as long as he looked the part he could lie about the rest and this approach seemed to work so he kept it going and eventually it began seeping into other areas of his life like his schooling just as long as he looked to be studying he didn't actually have to read the books he was lucky he was very naturally smart he was offered a bunch of different scholarships to a bunch of different private secondary schools in the area but the whole time he was actually doing nothing he wasn't studying he was barely even you know paying attention in class and he did the same thing when he left school and got his first job he got an apprenticeship as a mechanic and you know same formula look like you're doing work but actually do nothing and there's no consequences but you know in the real world you can't you can't do that in a manual job it's so hard to fake a manual job when you're trying to fix something and then it's not fixed people are gonna realize you didn't do anything and so he didn't like it he didn't like not being able to fake that job so he eventually left that apprenticeship and decided to become a salesman and when he did he found his calling not only could he pretend like he was busy at all times without actually doing anything but when he did do little things in this job he was a natural he was such a persuasive such a charming charismatic man you know he was so good at selling things and it wasn't that hard work anyway so he would do it sometimes he enjoyed it he enjoyed being able to manipulate people that didn't maybe want this product into wanting that product by the end of the phone call he enjoyed that and he began working his way up in this company he was very respected he was he was the best person in that company all of his peers wanted to be like him his you know the people lower down looked to him as like an inspiration of how to actually do this job and this satisfied him for a while until it didn't anymore john hague always wanted more he was never fully satisfied he wanted the world he wanted expensive cars he wanted a big house fancy clothes a lot of money drinks you know big nights out and to get all of that he needed a lot more money a lot more money than this job was offering so he began to steal from his job to feed this luxurious lifestyle there was a little tin of cash that was kept in the office and john began stealing small amounts of money from it and when no one noticed no one realized any money going missing he would up the amount every time and eventually people began growing suspicious of john and when this was reported to the higher-ups as much as they didn't want to fire him because he was their best employee he was helping to train everyone there you know he was he was their best guy they couldn't have someone stealing from the company and so he was let go and john hague now unemployed he realized that he didn't want to start from the bottom again he didn't want to go and get a call center job as an insurance salesman and work himself up in another company he wanted that big wage now so instead of going through all that he decided to just start his own company that way he had no higher ups no bosses or managers to get suspicious of him when he was taking you know large chunks of money from the company he didn't have to answer to anyone he didn't have to explain anything to anyone and he could take advantage of his employees it was perfect for him but i think he underestimated how hard it actually is to start a business to start you know this big company that he wanted get it off the ground get all these employees it's a lot of work and in the beginning it really doesn't pay much at all until it's a big company you're on very minimal wages and so for a while he had to stay at his parents home you know to make his living costs as low as possible he didn't want to pay for rent so he lived with his very strict christian parents and had to play that role the whole time but lucky for him it was around this time that he met a girl and he met a lot of girls all the time he was actually quite a ladies man he had women practically throwing themselves at him because he was very attractive to them he was very charismatic very charming and he acted like this big businessman he had a very enormous sense of self he thought that he was so important and he would dress like that he would always wear suits he would always be well groomed you know these women loved him and they were constantly coming for him and he didn't really want any of them that was until he met this one girl in particular that had a bit of money and she was very confident she was very headstrong she was she was a good match for him honestly her name was beatrice hammer she was 21 years old so four years younger than him at age 25 and the money thing was the main thing that attracted john to her because he wanted to get out of his parents house asap and obviously him starting this business from the ground he didn't have much money for rent or anything like that but beatrice did so he knew that if he married this woman he would be able to move out with her very quickly so he began dating beatrice and within four months he proposed her and married the woman and everyone was thinking wow okay this is this is a bit quick although this was the early 1900s so i suppose you know people did get married quite quick back then it was like the 1920s so anyway john and beatrice got married they got their own place and as soon as they did as soon as they did he never showed up to church again he never you know he completely dropped that religion the second he stepped out of his parents home however with this freedom comes a lot more responsibilities they had to pay for this house they were expected to start having children soon and while beatrice did have money it wasn't enough it just simply wasn't enough for them to live for both of them and then bring a child into the mix and you know john really liked his luxurious lifestyle so one particular day john was sat at home reading a newspaper when he read this kind of headline article about this local man that had been scamming car dealerships for a long period of time and john read this and saw this as inspiration although this man in the paper hadn't gotten away with it he thought that maybe he could because john hague saw himself as smarter than everyone else he was better at everything than anyone else and so he saw that as kind of a side hustle you know so john set about his plan to scam all of these car dealerships and make some quick money he grabbed a phone book and started going through it and picking random names so like a random first name so like henry smith and then he would go to a car dealership as henry smith and buy a car on finance and so he would give in the deposit for this car and he and the dealership would set up kind of a monthly payment plan that he would pay off the rest of the car but of course henry smith doesn't exist so when the car dealership would come to get that second third fourth fifth payment from henry smith they couldn't find him and no more payments could be made so that meant that john higg would get the car for that initial deposit price which is a fraction of what the car is actually worth and now john hague owns a car that he paid like a hundred pounds for and he can now sell that on for full price thousands of pounds sir john did this successfully a fair few times he made thousands of pounds doing this it was actually quite successful for him and he was very hurtful about this new business endeavor he was thinking wow i've done this a few times i can do this so many more but then the police came knocking at his door john higg was sentenced to 15 months in prison for fraud and once he started this prison sentence his wife beatrice back at home discovered that she was pregnant with a little girl and knowing that she couldn't care for this child alone john was in prison for a year and a half you know she didn't have a job she couldn't raise this child alone she decided to give this baby girl up for adoption and following john's incarceration beatrice decided to leave him get a divorce she claimed that she had no idea that he was doing all of this this fraudulent behavior this scamming all these car dealerships she claimed that she had no idea and it was against her values against her morals she didn't want to be married to a man like that and his parents well you can imagine how john higgs parents took that news john was ostracized from the family they said that they would never see never speak to him again until he can repent for his sins when he was 26 years old john was released from prison and he was now newly single and newly disowned from his family lucky for him they were willing to forgive as long as he was willing to put in the work to repair his sins and they allowed him to come and live back at home since he no longer had his home with beatrice because she left him sold the house he then went back and lived with his parents ready to start his new life and his parents like i said they really did love him um just in an odd way they wanted the best for him they wanted him to get back on track with his life and so they learned him an amount of money to set up a business with a friend they were gonna set up this dry cleaning business and it was it was doing really well it was growing exponentially this was this was going to be a very viable business for the men until a tragic incident happened and john's business partner got hit by a car and died following this john knew that he couldn't maintain and manage this business alone and so he had to sell it just when he thought he had his life back on track after his life of crime everything comes crumbling down for him and he thought that this just wasn't fair he decided that an honest life earning an honest living with an honest business wasn't for him why bother why bother doing things the good way the right way when you can just steal and scam and get an easy living he tried it the good way he tried it the law-abiding way and it still didn't work so why bother why bother doing things the hard way when there's an easy way and so he vowed that he was going to go back to his life of crime and in order to do so he decided to move to east london and there he met a man named william mcswan and his parents so william was around john's age in his kind of late 20s and william's parents donald and amy were so wealthy and this kind of trickled down to william they as a family they earned so many properties they owned amusement parks and they hired john higg as kind of a like an a chauffeur he used to drive them around he also because he had history as a mechanic kind of engineer he used to work at the theme parks doing kind of like little odd jobs he was just kind of like their friend that they employed to do a number of tasks and through this job he became closer and closer with william mcswan and the two of them after work i mean william didn't really work he just kind of collected the rent on all of the family's properties but after john higgs work the two of them would go to the pub they got really close they became friends and john originally took this job as a bit of like a cd income he was planning to like scam the family steal from them whatever whatever but as he was getting closer to william mcswan this was his friend after a while and then he was like oh i don't really want to do that to him and his family like he went soft and he turned on his original plan he knew that it would probably be better in the long term to keep the mcswan family as friends rather than enemies you know maybe they could offer him opportunities in the future you know if you're friends with someone they're gonna willingly give you maybe not their money but you know they're gonna be nicer to you they're gonna give you opportunities recommend you for things you know this was a good opportunity to keep connections with them and so instead of you know throwing that away just to steal a few hundred from them he decided to quit that job keep them as friends to maybe earn more in the long term and instead go and commit crimes elsewhere and his next criminal business endeavor was to open up a solicitor's office now bear in mind this man has absolutely no experience or training or qualifications to be a lawyer a solicitor a solicitor is kind of like a lawyer that takes some very small cases like divorce proceedings things like that and john higg decided to use the name of an existing solicitors like a big well-respected well-known solicitors and just use their name and pretend he was a branch of them that's like just setting up like a hsbc bank and pretending that you are hsbc you can't anyway he decided to open up this um fake franchise and steal all of their customers and once they all came to him and kind of signed on give like their initial fees you know that like start a bit of money that they would use to pay the solicitor he then closed the shop and this was his plan all along was to start it up get a little bit of money in from all of these people and then before they could even get suspicious close the shop down move away do the same thing elsewhere so his first one was in east london and then he moved to guildford in surrey and did the exact same thing there the exact same method so this fake solicitors got all these clients took all the checks then closed the shop down and left and then he did this a third time in hastings in east sussex he just did the exact same thing shop took the clients closed the shop bolted and it was around this point after his third shop he was gonna keep doing this you know this was proving like uh you know a viable business method he was getting away with it every single time no one was coming after him and he was earning a decent bit of money but then something else piqued his interest another money-making scheme he began posting ads in the newspapers saying that he was selling stocks and shares for lower than market price so basically his story his reasoning as to why he could do this was that he had deceased clients in his um you know solicitors business these clients had stocks and shares while they were alive and now they're deceased they don't have anyone to go to so they go to the solicitor and now he can sell them for lower than market price and of course everyone was diving at the chance to buy these stocks and shares for less than what they're actually worth because that means they're immediately making a profit bear in mind this is all a scam he didn't know any dead people what dead people what what stocks what shares you don't have any of this so he was telling these people in the newspaper that he could sell them these they would send him the money for them and he just you know never send anything and he earned a hell of a lot of money doing this he earned around 200 000 pounds maybe just a bit less than 200 000 pounds through like both the solicitors offices and these like fake stocks and chairs but this scheme was a little bit easier for police to track of course because as soon as people realize that this stock share selling business was a scam they could tell the police and the police could get in touch with the newspaper and be like oh who bought this out and then the newspaper could just send the police to john hague he didn't think that one through and so 28 year old john higg was arrested once again and this time he was sentenced to four years in prison and this was a huge shock for him although he was doing criminal behavior all the time he thought that he was invincible he thought that he was untouchable he thought he was just going to avoid police forever like yeah he'd been to prison once before but the sheer volume of things that he'd been able to get away with in between those two prison sentences there was there was so much that this man got away with that you would think that you're invincible at that point he barely got caught for the things that he did he had quite a good like get away with it to get caught ratio you know what i mean anyway but now he was now he was caught and now he was in a cell for four years and he had a lot of time to think about his plan once he got released and he would often brag to his inmate friends that he had so many options and ideas to get straight back on it once he got out he had so many you know criminal schemes that he was gonna put immersion once he could get out of the prison and he stuck to his word john was actually released from prison a year early due to world war ii that had kind of kicked off at this point and the whole country was desperately trying to save money and resources and they needed more workers so they were letting criminals that were kind of in there for less serious crimes maybe they were nearing the end of the sentence they were just letting them out early just so that they could help out and we had to spend less money keeping them in there and john hick this time he had a very solid plan he was going to get a job as a fireman so he looked like he had an honest job he looked like a good citizen very respectable his neighbors knew him as the fireman and you know firemen are good people they save people they put out fires you know and that is the only reason he got it was so that he looked like a trustworthy citizen so that people liked him so that people wouldn't think of him as this big fraudster this big criminal he was back in east london now after his prison sentence but within a few months john higg found himself landed back in prison this time for breaking and entering now i don't know the circumstances surrounding this we can only assume it was another attempt to get some money quickly but even then in jail he didn't give up he was still on these criminal money-making schemes he and a few of his fellow inmates would rush to the mail room as soon as mail got delivered they made sure that they were the first people there and they would steal and hide as many letters as many of the other inmates and the whole prisons letters as they possibly could and they would hold them for ransom and they would say to these inmates you're gonna have to pay me if you want your letter from your family you know your family that you're missing on the outside you're gonna have to pay me for it i mean this scheme didn't last long until it was broken up by prison guards and then you know the men were allowed to even go to the mail room anymore but you know he did that for a while and right now john is in prison he's in there for a long time as well breaking and entering and he has a lot of time just in his cell to think about why his criminal plans just keep on failing like what is what goes wrong every time that means he's back in prison over and over again and he concluded that it was because his victims could snitch on him his victims you know the ones in the prison that he would steal the letters off they could go to the police and say look this has happened so then the prison guards would come to him the people that he would scam from they realized they'd been scammed they would go to the police and say look can you try and solve this for me the issue was that he was leaving victims that could tell the police but what if his victims couldn't snitch what if the people that he stole from or scammed would mysteriously disappear and go missing then they couldn't tell police and he knew once he made this discovery he knew that he had to do things differently next time he was out of prison he thought that if he was to kill his victims that he would scam or rob and then you know get rid of the body well enough that it could never be traced to him then how would the scamming ever get traced to him if the victim is the only person that knows they've been scammed and they're no longer here to tell the police and their bodies also not here to say that anything ever happened to them then how would that ever get traced back to john hague so now all he had to do was come up with a foolproof plan as to how he could kill his victims murder his victims and then dispose of their bodies in a way that no one would ever find them so higg began doing some research thanks to the extensive book collection in the prison library he was reading all about like previous crimes and he began reading all the kind of true crime books which i'm actually quite surprised that they have those in prison but just a prison full of murderers and you're just giving them ideas but anyway he stumbles across this one particular killer from france that would become his inspiration george alexander saray was a french criminal that like john higg committed many many fraudulent schemes and thefts but all of that came to a head when this man surrey murdered his partnering crime and his wife he committed this double murder and then dumped both of the bodies in a vat of sulfuric acid and waited for this acid to dissolve the two bodies and the bodies were never found again no trace of those bodies was ever found and these murders this double murder remained unsolved for six years and it would have remained unsolved forever had saria's ex-girlfriend not gone to the police and snitched on him but the point being that the police would never have solved that case if it wasn't for a weak link in his own team so his ex-girlfriend was actually involved in the double murder but had he done it alone then his ex-girlfriend would have never known police would have never gotten any kind of leads to be able to solve that and it would have never been pinned on survey however saray was caught and he was guillotined in france but george higg decided not to listen to that bit and he thought that this was a foolproof plan this acid left no part of the body left so there was nothing to trace back to the victim you know this was perfect so john higg began researching uk crime and new care laws you know still in the prison library and he came to the conclusion the incorrect conclusion by the way that if there was no body if he was to murder someone and there was no body and police never found a body then he thought that no one could be arrested for that murder he genuinely thought that you could kill someone and then if you could hide the body well enough that police could never find it no matter how much they suspected you of killing someone they still couldn't arrest you until they found that body he got this misunderstanding from falsely translating the kind of latin terms in the law there's a term for the body of crime in all these kind of law books and he thought that meant the body of your victim even though the body of crime is just it's like a phrase of like i don't know i'm not a not a lawyer but it's just like a term of phrase in that it doesn't mean like the literal victim's body but anyway he thought if he could properly get rid of a body then police could never charge him with anything and he thought well perfect because police are never going to find any part of my victims because they're going to be absolutely dissolved in sulfuric acid but he wanted to put this to the test he wanted to make an experiment to figure out if this was actually you know a plan that he could genuinely go through with when he got out of prison so john higg was one of the more trusted prisoners you know when inmates get jobs in the prison and they can kind of go to the workshop and make things or they can work in the kitchen cooking whatever well john was allowed to go in the metal shop and you know craft metal it was all softer metals they weren't able to use you know anything sharp for obvious reasons however in this lab there was sulfuric acid in very very tiny amounts however he thought well it's a start and he decided that he was going to set up a very small experiment in his cell to see if sulfuric acid actually did dissolve bodies or if this was just a myth so he began stealing this sulfuric acid and bear in mind they've it's a very small amount that they would have in the prison for obvious reasons and he would steal it like every week until he amassed a decent amount like a full glassworth and then he bribed other inmates that had a job outside to smuggle him some mice inside and i'm sure you can see where this is going but john higg eventually amassed three mice and a decent amount of sulfuric acid like three flasks of sulfuric acid now the experiment was ready to go so john put a different amount of sulfuric acid in each flask and then grabbed the mice by their tail and dangled them above the flasks and he just watched them for a minute obviously these mice uh panicked and higg liked it he liked watching the panic and fear in this tiny little animal when he had full control over it he could kill it in a second and he liked that and then slowly he dropped all three mice into all three flasks of acid and he waited and watched and timed how long each amount of acid took to fully dissolve the live mouse and this acid is fizzling and corroding and sizzling on these little on these little mice and he timed that it took 30 minutes around 30 minutes to fully dissolve the mouse and once it was done there was left behind in these flasks a thick black sludge and he concluded from this experiment that well if this acid can fully dissolve a mouse then surely a larger quantity could fully dissolve a human body in 1943 john hague was released from prison once again now age 34 and he was now ready to carry out his master plan that was gonna make him hideously rich but first the not so glamorous part of getting back on his feet after jail you know he had no money he had he had nothing he had no job and once again he had to go back to his parents house eventually he made up the money to move back to east london he got himself a flat he picked up a job as a salesman and one night he was in the pub when he actually bumped into his old employer william mcswan the guy whose family earned all the amusement parks all the properties the guy that he'd worked for driving them around all those years ago so john and william got talking after a long period of not communicating at all and john was like oh i've just been you know so busy but really had been in prison for half of that time and the two of them agreed to start meeting up again they were really good friends before and they couldn't believe what happened and why they hadn't spoken in so long and they decided that they were going to start going to the pub together you know they were going to rekindle this friendship that they once had william mcswan would often invite john hague back to his house his huge house that he shared with his parents donald and amy and they would have dinner they would have drinks they would talk and you know john got close to william's parents and he became you know a family friend a good family friend at that and at first higg was very inspired by the life that william mcswan lived he earned a lot of money he lived a lavish lifestyle he could drink as much as he wanted he could go wherever he wanted he could afford whatever he wanted but before long higgs started getting envious of it so at first he was happy for his friend he was inspired by it it made him want to work harder and get that however you know things couldn't always stay positive for haig and now he started to hit william mcswan for having what he himself didn't have he would go with william to collect all the rent for his parents properties because that was that was william's job was collecting rent every day and it was a lot of money and john higg would see that amount of money go into william mcswan's pocket every single day and think god i wish that was me he decided that he was gonna get that money one way or another and he had his master plan all thought out now he just needed to put the wheels in martian he had to figure out how and where he was gonna carry out this great acid bath plan and he decided that he was gonna one have to get a hold of a lot of sulfuric acid which was gonna be tricky and two he was gonna have to have a place to do this he was renting an apartment in east london at the time but he decided that he didn't want to do this at home because it was far too risky his neighbors knew he lived there and then if that was the last place that someone was seen alive he decided that it was so much better if he just rented a space elsewhere and so he decided to start renting a small basement room slightly over in west london i think it was like central west so completely the other side of the city and in this basement room this basement flat he began setting up his workshop he called it his workshop but it was you know his killing lair and this would include a wooden work bench that he would later dissect bodies on a bunch of tools and a bunch of big blue 40 gallon water tight oil drums and i'm sure you can guess what they were going to be used for and over the course of the next six to eight months higg set himself up a fake business now he was no stranger to this so this was pretty easy for him he set up a fake engineering company called union group engineering and he was the director of the company which is also kind of why he decided to rent out this basement room because he needed an address for the company that he didn't want tracing back to himself because in order to get hold of sulfuric acid you have to have a genuine reason you have to you know use it for your job or something like that and even then it can only be sold in very small quantities so it was going to take him a while to build it all up and he would write letters to these chemical sale companies and say that he needed it for his engineering business and you know the paperwork checked out because he was good at faking things like that and he was able to buy small quantities of sulfuric acid meanwhile john higgs spent the whole summer getting close to william mcswan like i said they would go out to the pub multiple times a week he would go for meals at his family's home they would all have drinks they would hang out together all the time he was gaining this man's trust making him like him it's so eerie to know that he had this plan in the back of his mind and he knew this whole time he was making this man like him he was becoming friends with him he was getting to know him the whole time he knew that he was going to kill this man and then in early september of 1944 william mcswan mentioned to john hague that he had a few broken pinball machines at one of the amusement parks and he needed them fixing and he knew that john higg had a history in like engineering mechanics you know things like that and he wondered if john higg would fix them for him and higgs said oh yeah i've actually just set up a new workshop in kensington if you want to if you want to come and have a look and so william agrees to come down and have a look at his new workshop and haig takes into the basement so the two of them went into the basement and they were talking for a while just about these pinball machines how this was gonna go and then higg waited until a moment when william was caught off guard he turned round and bent down to go pick something up he wasn't looking at hague and it was in that moment that higg picked up a lead pipe from the workbench in his workshop and launched himself at william mcswan beating him over the head with this lead pipe until william mcswan fell to the ground dead hague then emptied william's pockets of his wallet all of his money his checkbook his watch and then he cleaned himself up to make sure there was no blood on his hands or anything like that and then he went to the pub for a drink and while he was there he was planning the rest of his evening how he was gonna disperse of his best friend's body when he returned back to the basement he began the process of loading william mcswan's body into one of those big blue 40-gallon oil drums but there was one thing that he had to do first one thing that i don't think he really planned in advance it was very spur of the moment he grabbed a blade off the side in his workshop and slit william mcswan's throat with it higg then picked up a cup and squeezed the blood out of mcswan's throat bear in mind his blood is no longer pumping so he had to physically squeeze the blood out of this body until this cup was full and when it was he lifted this cup up and downed the whole thing drank the whole thing in one he drank the blood of his best friend and as he did he was remembering the recurring nightmare that he had when he was younger that one where he was in a forest of crucifixes it began raining blood the crucifixes turned into trees and they were raining blood where the man filled up the cup with the blood from the trees and forced haig to drink it and haig in this moment as he was drinking the blood of his best friend he reported feeling very anxious it was like he knew that this was terribly wrong he knew he'd just committed the worst crime of his life and if he was caught he was never getting out of prison again but he kept going out of greed and this love of of money this need for money it was like anxiety mixed with excitement there was just a lot of adrenaline in his body as you might expect and then he got ready to do the final step the acid john higg had fashioned himself some protective gear just to make sure that he wasn't splashed or damaged by this sulfuric acid he wore a large raincoat that he zipped all the way up some large wader boots you know kind of like what fishermen wear when they're walking through the river he put on elbow high rubber gloves that came well higher than his elbow and on top of all of that on top of the reinker the waterproof pants the waterproof gloves he then put on a leather apron a thick leather airprint so that if anything splashed on it would be unlikely to burn all the way through to his skin without him noticing and then higg began picking up these flasks of acid and slowly pouring them into the oil drum and the more he paused the more he's getting into this he can hear the fizzling the sizzling in that oil drum and the more he's doing the fumes at the fumes are so powerful and he's getting light-headed until eventually he's getting more and more light-headed and he's thinking i'm nearly at the end i'll just keep going and then i'll go out for some air once i'm finished and then all of a sudden he wakes up on the ground the fumes had fully knocked him out and luckily for him he wasn't holding any acid at the time he'd actually just put the flask down so he woke up he went out for a little bit of air and then came back in and poured the rest of the sulfuric acid into the barrel tightened the lid on and then left it his job was done the whole night john higgs stayed up and pierced around the room still full of adrenaline anxiety excitement just a lot a lot of energy inside him he just couldn't sleep until the next morning when he unscrewed the barrel and looked inside to find that same thick black sludge that he'd seen when he did the same experiment with the mouse he decided to leave it just another day or two just in case there were lumps in the sludge that he couldn't see he wanted to make sure that this was as dissolved as he could possibly get it and then he took this oil drum and poured it down a drain in the road in the middle of the night which was pretty risky of him but now it was all over that was the last step william mcswan was dead he had all of his belongings that were on him and now all that was left was having to explain his disappearance to his family like i said he was very very close with the mcswan family in general not just william and he knew that there were going to be a lot of questions and he knew that he wanted to stay friends with the mcs once like i said earlier he could form a good relationship with them and end up earning money in the long term through being on good terms with them he didn't want to just abandon it and move away he wanted something out of this that he killed william mcswan for a reason that was because he wanted his assets he wanted his properties he wanted the big money not just the things that he had on him so higg came up with a cover story that william mcswan had intentionally fled to scotland because right now at this point in the story it was world war ii and william was terrified of being drafted to go to war he didn't want to fight and his family knew that his family knew that that was a genuine fear of his so then when he came to the house and said that he'd fled to scotland until the end of the war his family of course they were they were shocked and they were upset that his son would do this without telling them but they understood they knew that this was a big fear of their sons and you know as long as higg was staying in contact with him and keeping them updated they understood that it was for the best and they just kind of accepted it they accepted that their son was in scotland and he was going to be for the next few years until the war ended and they stayed friends with john hague they were actually closer than ever because now they didn't have their son and john hague was you know the closest thing they had to a son that wasn't their own they were very close with him they found him charming they they knew him very well and they trusted him he would often ask them for money to cover williams living costs up in scotland of course when didn't have living costs up in scotland this was going straight into higgs pocket and the family would give that money over no questions asked because that's their son and if their son needs money to live up in scotland they're gonna give it one evening when john higg was having dinner over at the mcswan's house he mentioned that money was a bit of an issue for him at the moment work was slur because he had this you know fake job as an engineer and the mcswan family very kindly offered him william's old job as the rent collector and this is exactly what john hague was hoping for to pocket a large amount of those checks so higg gladly accepted and got straight to work and as he did he realized that it was these properties where all the big money was at it wasn't the theme parks that william mcswan managed it was the checks that he would collect for his parents and hague wanted those properties plus higg knew that he couldn't keep up this constant ruse that their son was in scotland hiding because the wall was going to be over one day william was going to have to return one day and then he was going to have to explain where he was and why he wasn't coming home and it was at that moment that john hague knew that something had to be done about the mcswans and that is where i'm gonna end part one thank you so so much for watching this part two will be out in the next few days sorry to leave you on a cliffhanger i like doing that don't i make sure you've got my notifications on if you don't wanna miss part two i don't want you to miss it it is it's a big one thanks again to bbc sounds for sponsoring this video if you want to check out their podcasts specifically bad people i really recommend then the link is down below in the description remember i'll be giving you podcast updates over on my instagram every single week so make sure you're following that it's just 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Channel: Eleanor Neale

Views: 1,681,377

Rating: 4.9515305 out of 5

Keywords: eleanor, neale, eleanor neale, eleanor neale true crime, mystery, unsolved, unsolved mystery, true crime, solved, documentary, killer, murder, serial killer, buzzfeed, buzzfeed unsolved, podcast, true crime podcast, bbc, itv, netflix, storytime, forensic files, 2020, dateline, interview, news, creepypasta, horror, acid bath, murderer, john george haigh, john, haigh, hague, acid, bath, murder case, real stories, cold case files, london, england, uk, british, britain, uk serial killer, uk true crime, daily

Id: b3r8mxF7I1M

Length: 54min 36sec (3276 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020