John George Haigh, the Acid-Bath Murderer

He has been portrayed variously as an enigmatic man of contrasts, a man scarred by his parents’ religion, or simply a calculating murderer.

It is true that he was not a sadist like Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rosemary West; nor did he kill on the industrial scale of doctors such as John Bodkin Adams or Harold Shipman. There was no sexual dimension to his crimes, as with Christie, and no children were involved as in the Moors Murders.

which seemed to put him in a different sphere from the run-of-the-mill murderer.