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John Hay, the acid bath killer. William McSwan hated violence. When World War II broke out in 1939, he registered as a conscientious objector. Still, Churchill didn't care much for those who refused to fight, and McSwan received his call-up papers like everyone else. He served for six months, but wanted nothing more than to return to his cozy life at home.
William was what you'd call privileged. He grew up in a wealthy family that bought and rented several properties around London. His father, Donald, was a skilled typist and entrepreneur. His mother, Amy, helped maintain and collect rent from their properties. William owned a string of businesses, though he was best known for his amusement arcade, where pinball was the talk of the town.
On the side, McSwan helped his parents manage their properties. McSwan lived a lavish life and returning to Germany was the last thing he wanted. As his business ventures generated passive income, McSwan bounced around the country dodging draft letters and conscription officers left and right. One day,
In a Kensington pub in 1943, he ran into John George Hay, someone he'd known for a long time but hadn't seen in years. Before the war broke out, John had worked for William, maintaining his arcade machines. He was a handyman around the arcade and an expert behind the wheel. Soon, William hired John as his personal chauffeur.
But then, John disappeared, and with war raging across Europe, William assumed he'd gone to fight the good fight. But here he was again, seven years later, sipping beer at the bar and looking for a job. A generous man, McSwan saw a veteran down on his luck and needing a favor. So, he introduced John to his parents and got him a job in the engineering field.
It was September 1944, and things seemed on the up and up for John. He had a job, a friend, food on the table. What else could he want? What else could he need? The simple answer? John envied William's lavish life. He wanted it for himself, but lacked the gung-ho spirit to get there. Until now, William assumed John had spent the last several years in Germany, France, or Italy. In reality, he was in prison.
John was a con man. Soon, he'd become one of the most gruesome serial killers in English history, known only as the Acid Bath Killer. Part 1: The Pianist John Hay grew up like any other English boy at the turn of the 20th century: poor and religious. His family attended a Plymouth Brethren Church, an ultra-conservative Protestant sect, one of those branches that believe the Bible is the end-all be-all of law.
On the outside, John was a good boy from Yorkshire. He loved classical music and was quite a piano player. He won a scholarship to the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School and even sang in the church choir. It all begs the question, what went wrong? What drove this seemingly innocent, church-going, piano-playing, choir-singing English lad toward a life of crime, murder, and acid baths?
In his book, "The Acid Bath Murders: The Trials and Liquidations of John George Hay," author Gordon Lowe points to a few oddities surrounding his parents, their beliefs, and John's upbringing. His parents built a seven-foot fence around their home and barred John from bringing friends home from school as they were contaminated by the outside world. Bullies picked on him at school, but John took his frustration out on the church organist.
He'd swipe the stool from underneath her when she sat down to play. Then, John turned his frustration toward a helpless pig in the sty, chasing it round and round until it eventually died of exhaustion. Finally, John claimed to suffer from recurring religious nightmares, though any child might fabricate such claims to get out of Sunday service. So, here we have a boy, bullied at school and confused about his beliefs,
believing the outside world is contaminated by some unseen act of God. He vents his anger on those who can't help defend themselves and, like most serial killers, got his fix for blood by killing animals. If they knew what we know now, they'd recognize the signs of a possibly violent criminal. Although, they'd never expect the level of violence he willingly stooped to. As we said,
John was a con man at heart, and like most con men, he wore several hats and faces. He was a silver-tongued devil who could charm anyone he locked eyes with. He was a man of culture and high-class taste. He enjoyed concerts and long nights out on the town. And, like most con men, he didn't earn enough of an honest living to support his lavish life. So, he had to steal it.
However, John wasn't very good at fraud, at least not at first. There was a glimmer of hope when he married 23-year-old Betty Hamer. Perhaps he'd turned his life around, gotten a decent job, and was prepared to start a family. Betty got pregnant. John got thrown in prison. Police caught him running a car fraud scam in London and locked him up in 1934. Betty had the baby while John was away, but gave it up for adoption and fled the city.
Disgusted by the news, John's family ostracized him. Nowhere in the Bible does God say it's okay to have a baby out of wedlock, become a con man and get arrested. Left with no family and no freedom, all John could do was sit and dwell on his next move. Part two, second chances. John walked out of prison two years later. He moved to London and took the job working for William McSwan. Was this an attempt to turn his life around?
John spent the last two years pondering his life decisions. Maybe he wasn't cut out for this conman gig. Maybe prison humbled him, made him appreciate the things he had, rather than yearn for the things he wanted. The life of an arcade machine handyman wasn't full of glitz and glamour. Meanwhile, owning the arcade came with several perks and financial benefits. Like Mr. Kim in Parasite,
John was jealous of William as he chauffeured the arcade mogul around London. Soon, jealousy turned to envy. John wanted what William had, but lacked the tangible skills to get it. All he knew how to do was lie and scam, and he wasn't very good at that either. Still, you have to give him credit for trying. For his next trick, John posed as a solicitor.
which is basically a lawyer with a few subtle differences and a term used primarily in the UK. He donned the moniker William Cato Adamson, a fictitious man who kept fictional offices in Guildford, Surrey, and Hastings, Sussex. As the story goes, Mr. Adamson made his living selling fake stock shares from his dead client's estates. However, the amateur scammer overlooked a crucial detail at the top of his letterhead.
He misspelled Guildford, forgetting to include the D. An eagle-eyed client noticed the mistake and reported Mr. Adamson to the police. Perhaps they'd overlooked the mistake if John masqueraded as a carpenter or steelworker, but an English solicitor with the education to match would certainly notice a glaring error at the top of their letterhead. It didn't take long for the police to pick apart his ruse, and John spent another four years in prison.
From there, he bounced between scams and jail, getting himself caught, time, and nobody knows the details of these mini-scams, but we're sure they shared similar traits with John's other failures: poor execution and gross oversight. With plenty of time to reflect in his cell, John finally figured out what he was doing wrong.
Every time he got caught, someone ratted him out. He left too many liabilities in his criminal wake. If he took care of those witnesses, nobody would be left to rat him out. It all hinged on a Latin legal precedent called "corpus delicti," which translates to "body of the crime." If there was no body, there was no crime. So all John had to do was kill off any liabilities and get rid of their bodies.
But how? While researching this how question, John stumbled upon some writings about a French conman turned murderer named Georges Alexandre Sarre. Part three, the inspiration. Sarre was a well-educated man born in Italy and living in France in the 1920s. He studied chemistry, medicine, and law at the University of Marseille, three fields that spearheaded his master plan.
Where John failed, Saray excelled. He was a real lawyer with real clients and correctly spelled letterheads. Where John patched together his solo scams and got himself caught, Saray built a carefully constructed web of deceit, false documentation, and accomplices.
Sarre ran a life insurance scam out of Marseille with the help of two German sisters, Catherine and Philomene. Though they were Sarre's lovers, Catherine and Philomene had a straightforward job: find unhealthy men and marry them. Once they were married, Sarre moved onto stage two. For stage two, Sarre recruited a corrupt priest named Louis Chambon du Verger to seek medical evaluations, posing as the ailing husband.
Now, Louis was a young man in, what we can assume to be, good health. Therefore, when he went for his medical exams, the doctor considered him to be in tip-top shape. The life insurance companies didn't hesitate to give him a juicy policy. Of course, that policy was in the sick husband's name. In stage 3, Sarre used his chemistry background to speed up the husband's illness with poison.
Once he croaked, the quartet cashed in on the policy. Greed, not money, is the root of all evil. And at one point, Saré believed Louis was getting too greedy.
In 1925, Sade murdered Louis and his mistress. Then, given his background, he dumped both their bodies in a bathtub and filled it with sulfuric acid, a chemical he knew how to get and use. The plan worked, and nobody suspected a thing for six years. Was Sade himself driven by greed? If he cut Louis out of the picture and, therefore, his share of the insurance money,
Saray and the sisters could claim more for themselves. Did he gaslight himself into thinking Louis was cheating him? Or was it just a valid enough excuse for the sisters to go along? Still, with Louis out of the picture, the trio was free to make and spend more money. However, their lavish spending got out of control, forcing Saray to create a new scam. This time, he'd used the sisters themselves.
According to one source, a healthy Catherine insured herself for a million francs under the name Majalie Herbine. The real Majalie Herbine had tuberculosis and wasn't meant for this earth much longer. But in a miraculous twist of fate, Majalie made a recovery, throwing a massive monkey wrench into the trio's insurance scam.
So, to ensure they cashed in on the million-franc policy, Sade forced a glass of poisonous champagne down Magellie's throat, killing her instantly. Her recovery and untimely death made the insurance companies a little suspicious. They reported the oddities to the police, but the investigation came up empty. The trio got their money, and Catherine fled to Meats to lay low.
However, she was blinded by love when she met a handsome young man and followed him back to Marseille. Some passers-by looked at her and thought, "Isn't she supposed to be dead?" The trio ultimately confessed to everything they'd done. The scams, the murders, the acid, everything. With some clever legal work, Sarre delayed his trial for two years but couldn't escape his fate. On Monday, April 23rd, 1934,
An executioner named Anatole Dibley dropped the guillotine on Georges Alexandre Sarre. And while Sarre's physical body may have died that day, his legacy lived on in the mind of John Hay. Now, he had an answer to his liability question. Part 4: Born Again John was a changed man, a different man, when he and McSwan rekindled their working relationship in 1943.
You might call John a born-again criminal imbued with the spirit of Georges Sarre. But John kept his cool between 1943 and 1944. He chauffeured McSwan around the city and collected rent for his parents. All the while, he made enough money to rent three basement rooms in Kensington. He had a place to live, a well-paying job, and a friend in William McSwan. But that still wasn't enough.
On September 9th, 1944, McSwan told a coworker that he was going away for a bit, though he was adamant that he'd be back soon. Then, McSwan and John met at a bar in Kensington, not far from John's basement apartment. Perhaps they got good and loaded. Maybe they only shared a pint or two. Was it cause for celebration? After all, John only secured the basement apartment three days prior.
They left the bar and John convinced McSwan to come see his new place. One retelling of the story says John wanted to show McSwan a new pinball machine he'd been working on. Another says John got a literal taste for blood and lured McSwan back to the apartment to kill him. Why or how John drew McSwan back to the apartment didn't really matter.
All that mattered was the lead pipe cracking across the back of McSwan's skull, killing him instantly. Now John could move on to phase two of his plan, drawing inspiration from Sade's string of acidic murders. He hoisted McSwan's limp body into a 40-gallon drum and filled it with sulfuric acid. John underestimated the grotesque smell of melting human flesh and had to leave the room until the odorous fumes dissipated.
He finally came back and went to bed for the night. The next morning, he awoke to find McSwan's body mostly dissolved in the acid drum, at least enough that he could pour the remains down a sewage drain. Meanwhile, World War II raged in the background.
Allied forces reclaimed France two weeks before McSwan's demise, and Hitler reared on his heels as the war neared its final days. Still, Great Britain continued calling young men to war, meaning McSwan kept dodging conscription officers until the day he died. John leveraged this character flaw and told Donald and Amy that William had recently fled to Scotland to avoid conscription.
With a rational reason why their son cut communication out of nowhere, Don and Amy didn't question it when John moved into William's home and collected the rent checks on his behalf. On the surface, John came off as a friend, as someone willing to watch after William and his business while the coward hid in Scotland. In reality, William McSwan, or what remained of him, floated under his parents' feet as his acid grave moved through the English sewage system.
John maintained this ruse for some time, literally living in McSwan's shoes and enjoying the lavish lifestyle he dreamed of. In fact, Hitler's suicide was probably the worst thing that could have happened. The German dictator took his own life on April 30th, 1945, and Germany officially surrendered to the Allies seven days later. The war was over. William could come home, but William never came home, leaving Don and Amy to worry about their son.
Spring turned to summer, and the parents still hadn't heard a word from their long-lost son. They'd become a liability, and there was only one way he knew how to get rid of them. John played their wants against them, saying William had finally come home and was waiting for them at John's apartment. Of course, the only thing waiting for them when they arrived was a lead pipe and two drums of acid.
With the entire McSwan family disposed of, John sold their properties for £8,000 and moved into a swanky Kensington hotel. With inflation, John's £8,000 payday would be worth almost £378,000 in 2022. The money only lasted two years. By 1947, John lost most of it to gambling and excessive spending
Without any smart investing tricks or legitimate business practices, John needed to double down once again. This time, he set his sights on Dr. Archibald Henderson and his wife, Rose. Part 5: The Doctor and His Wife Archibald Henderson was a wealthy doctor living in London. He and his wife enjoyed the good life, earning enough to hire a maid to keep their home nice and tidy.
However, the couple was looking to sell their home, which caught John's attention. Having spent years in the housing market industry, John weaseled his way into their lives after showing interest in buying their home. John and Rose connected over their shared love of music. The couple even invited John to play piano at a party in their flat. Of course, John was only laying the groundwork for his next scheme. Infiltrate, kill, dissolve, cash in.
A four-step plan he'd worked on since melting away the McSwans two years prior. Step one was a go. At the party, John must have turned up the charm. He made sure everyone in the room felt comfortable around him to the point that they weren't paying attention. When he saw an opening, John slipped away and stole Archibald's revolver. Guns were cleaner than lead pipes. On to step two.
At the time, John was renting a workshop in Sussex where he moved his entire acidic operation. On February 12th, 1948, John picked Archibald up and drove him back to the Sussex workshop. The two chatted about an invention John was working on, peaking the doctor's interest in all things new and technological. However, there was no invention. Only the cold barrel of Archibald's own gun pressed against the back of his head.
John pulled the trigger, putting an end to the good doctor. But now, he had to deal with his wife. He lured Rose to the workshop, claiming Archibald was ill and needed help. She arrived to find her husband dead on the floor, and soon met the same fate. John rounded the corner on step three and melted the couple in acid. However, the acid may not have gotten rid of all the evidence this time.
According to one source, Dr. Henderson's foot survived the acid bath. Still, John dumped the barrels in the corner of his backyard. Then he forged a letter to Rose's brother, Berlin, who was on the verge of contacting the police. John convinced Berlin that Rose and the doctor fled to South Africa after Archibald performed an illegal abortion. When the brother quelled, John sold off the Hendersons' possessions for another 8,000 pounds,
By now, John had killed and dissolved five people from two families, William, Don, and Amy McSwan, and Archibald and Rose Henderson. He stole their lives and cashed in on their possessions to live the luxurious life he always desired. However, one must always take the facts of a near 100-year-old story with a grain of salt. How easy was it to dissolve a body in sulfuric acid?
And could a man with no formal training quickly obtain and use such a chemical without hurting himself or attracting attention? Part 6. Know your acid. Most non-scientific people default to the same two acids off the top of their heads, sulfuric and hydrofluoric.
Fans of Breaking Bad and Mythbusters recall a crossover episode when Adam and Jamie, aka the Mythbusters, tested to see if hydrofluoric acid could melt a body and eventually eat its way through a bathtub and the floor beneath, as seen on Breaking Bad. Without diving headfirst into the highly scientific details, the short answer is yes, you could get rid of a body in a vat of acid.
However, it would require a lot of acid and a lot of time. You won't melt through the bathtub, nor will you melt through 45-gallon steel drums in the case of John Hay.
The differences lay in the kind of acid used in both situations. In Breaking Bad, Walt and Jesse use hydrofluoric acid to get rid of their bodies. And while hydrofluoric acid is quite strong and the most reactive, it's the weakest of the acid groups when hydrogen gets involved. So, to ramp up the tests, the MythBusters switched to concentrated sulfuric acid, as used by John and Sade.
According to a New York Times piece from 2009, Mexican drug cartels use lye, a common ingredient in household cleaners, to get rid of their bodies. Why? Because lye, also known as sodium hydroxide, is great at unclogging drains. Clogs made up mostly of human hair, dead skin, and other bio-gunk.
Meanwhile, in the 1980s, a henchman for the Gambino crime family used a vat of acid, probably sulfuric, to dispose of a body he'd just hunted down who accidentally killed John Gotti's son in a traffic accident. So, if all these acids are so dangerous, they must be hard to get, right? Wrong. You can easily buy enough sulfuric acid to melt a body at your local hardware store or online.
And if that's easy to get today, you can only imagine how easy it was for John Hay to stroll into a 1940s hardware store and walk out with a cart full of body-melting liquid. After killing the Hendersons and cashing in on all their worldly possessions, John had to re-up on his acid supply. He already had his sights on his next and final victim, a woman named Olive. Until now,
John Hay targeted wealthy families whom he could fleece for a few thousand pounds. And while those paydays were enough to get him from victim to victim, John yearned for his white whale, his ultra wealthy, easily duped, frail and female white whale. Finally, in early 1949, he thought he'd found her.
Olive Durand Deacon was a 69-year-old woman who only checked one of John's boxes. She was a voice to be reckoned with in the women's suffrage movement, regularly barking at dominating male figures like Winston Churchill. She fought tirelessly from 1903 to 1928 until women had the right to vote in England during the fight. Olive met a wealthy English captain named Reginald Durand Deacon.
The two married, but Reginald died in 1938, leaving a 5,800 pound inheritance for his wife. Never one to rest on her laurels, nor rely on the help of men, Olive invested the inheritance and turned it into 37,000 pounds, making her a millionaire by today's standards. She was an ambitious woman, always eyeing her next business venture,
It's that same ambition that led to her ultimate demise. Days before her death, Olive spoke with a few friends about an idea she had for artificial fingernails. Unaware that John was eavesdropping on their conversation, it must have seemed like a miracle when a young man stepped out of the shadows and offered up his workshop for the project. Until now, John had done well not to leave any witnesses behind. He was methodical, strategic, and careful.
never pushing the envelope as he had in the past. However, greed, like Georges Sarre, got the better of him. Those 37,000 pounds blinded him to all the red flags associated with targeting Durand Deacon. She was well-liked and had many friends.
She stuck to a regimented schedule and was never one to skip town unannounced. She maintained close confidants, especially her friend Constance Lane, who knew John offered up his workshop in the first place. On February 18th, 1949, Olive told Constance she was headed to John's workshop. She was dressed to the nines, wearing a Persian fur coat and two pearl necklaces. When she arrived at John's workshop,
He pulled out Archibald Henderson's revolver and shot her in the back of the head. After stripping her of her valuables, John dumped Olive's body in her acid grave. Once the body decomposed, John hauled the barrel out to the backyard and tossed it over a pile of rubble at the back of the property. One of the loudest voices in the English women's suffrage movement was silenced by a greedy coward concealed behind the barrel of a stolen gun.
Two days later, Constance reported her friend missing. It had been three days since John put a bullet in the back of her head, leaving her to melt in a barrel of acid. If the police had any chance of catching him, they had to act fast. Constance told them about John and Olive's plan, and police finally pulled John in for questioning on Monday the 28th, 10 days after killing Olive. But John was cocky. Remember, corpus delicti, no body, no crime.
He sat calmly in the police station, sipping tea and munching on bread. Meanwhile, detectives got permission to break the lock on his workshop and searched the place for whatever clues they could find. Believing he'd never get caught, John never cleaned up after himself.
Inside his workshop, detectives found three bottles of sulfuric acid, the revolver with 11 spare bullets, a gas mask, a rubber apron, and several strips of red cellophane, which they discerned as a prototype for artificial fingernails. They could theoretically put Olive at the scene, but without a body. All their evidence was circumstantial. Then they found some evidence that didn't belong.
Inside a suitcase, detectives found several passports, driver's licenses, ID cards, and marriage certificates bearing the names William McSwan, Donald and Amy McSwan, Archibald Henderson, and his wife, Rose. They had to find the body if they wanted to get John for murder. So, with the help of a full-scale investigation team, detectives excavated 400 pounds of dirt in John's backyard.
While digging, they found bone fragments that belonged to an elderly female. Then they found broken dentures identified as Olive's by her dentist. Eventually, the police uncovered 28 pounds of human flesh that they could reasonably identify as Olive. Still, it wasn't a bonafide dead body. Everything was still circumstantial.
John was so cocky that he confessed to all six murders. He detailed how he lured and murdered the McSwans, Hendersons, and Duran Deacon to his home, beat and shot them, and dissolved their bodies in acid. But how could he be so brazen? In what world can you confess to six murders and still get away with it? It all circles back to Corpus Delicti, part seven, A Gross Misunderstanding.
John did a lot of reading while in jail, long before he melted his first body. In those readings, he studied the concept of corpus delicti, which translates to body of the crime. But John grossly misunderstood what body of the crime actually meant. He defined it as no body, no crime. But that's not what the body refers to. Under corpus delicti, you must prove a crime before you can convict someone of that crime.
You can confess to burning down a building, but if the court can't provide evidence to back that confession, they can't convict you. When it comes to murder cases, the body doesn't refer to a physical body. It refers to a body of evidence that reasonably proves you committed the crime. But John wasn't totally off with his reasoning. In fact, "no body, no crime" was a legal precedent set by barrister Matthew Hale in the 17th century.
However, in the 20th century, that law expanded to include a body of evidence in place of a physical corpse. Apparently, too many people got away with murder by exploiting the current standards. So, when John casually confessed to the killings, he thought he could walk away scot-free. But, when detectives explained how he'd misinterpreted corpus delicti, John was officially dead in the water, or should we say acid.
Without a legal leg to stand on, John tried pleading insanity at his trial. He claimed he drank the blood of his victims in some sort of vampiric ritual. Visions of blood and gore plagued his dreams since he was a young boy, and his unquenchable lust for human flesh drove him to commit unspeakable acts.
The dreams subsided and John lived a troubled but normal life until a car accident in 1944 sent everything spiraling out of control. He recalled seeing a forest of bloodied crucifixes and a man prancing from cross to cross, catching the dripping blood in a cup. Then the man approached John, beckoning him to drink from the cup. While John told a compelling story, one fit for the clinically insane,
The Attorney General at the prosecution's table wasn't buying it. Sir Hartley Shawcross implored the jury to disregard every word coming out of John's mouth. He'd spent his entire life as a schemer and a fraudster. He'd steal the shirt off your back if given a chance and would put a bullet in your head for a few thousand pounds. He knew what he was doing when he killed and dissolved those people.
There was no forest of bleeding crosses, no man offering him cups of blood. John was not insane, psychotic perhaps, but not insane. The jury sided with Shawcross. It only took them a few minutes to find John guilty. They probably didn't even have to leave the courtroom. Justice Travers Humphreys sentenced John Hay to death. And on August 10th, 1949, John Hay took one last drink of brandy before walking up to the gallows.
The hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, a 25-year professional with upwards of 600 executions under his belt, tightened the noose around Hay's neck, pulled the lever, and dropped him to the floor. As with most serial killers, their stories often overshadow those of their victims.
In 2002, a made-for-TV British film called A Is for Acid dramatized John's life story. The lead role went to English actor and comedian Martin Clunes, who said John was the first real person he'd ever played. While the acid bath killer story was lost on Martin's generation, his mother remembered the case all too well. John Hay was the boogeyman of her childhood.
Meanwhile, an older friend recalled how his parents used the acid bath killer as a threat. You eat that up or John Hay will get you.
