Haigh: the mind of a murderer

by Arthur La Bern

Genres: True Crime

187 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1973

About the author

Arthur La Bern was a journalist with an interest in crime stories. He wrote a number of novels, as well as a couple of non-fiction books about famous murderers. La Bern's novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square was the basis for Alfred Hitchcock's film Frenzy. The film It Always Rains on Sunday was based on the novel of the same name.

Reviews

[Fishface · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an excellent read, really digging into the question of whether or not John George Haigh (the Yorkshire Acid Bath Murderer) was mentally ill. The goal of the book was evidently to cast doubt on the wisdom of using the McNaughton Rule as a guideline for determining legal sanity. The value of this book was the author's access to, and analysis of, Haigh's correspondence with his family and friends and his daily behavior before and after his arrest. La Bern raised many excellent questions and discussed them pretty carefully. I don't think he proved really his point -- that Haigh was mentally ill, specifically a paranoid schizophrenic -- and the psychiatric expert he called in at the end only muddied those waters, IMHO. But he sure made me think. I came away wondering whether Haigh's self-destruction was planned all along. It also made me far sadder about his own wasted life. All that talent and intelligence, delivered to the hangman, at the cost of at least 5 innocent lives!