Word: haigh
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...respectable isolation without recourse to spirits. One of these was stately Mrs. Olive Henrietta Roberts Durand-Deacon, a widow of 69. She had few close friends at the hotel, but over a period of three years had struck up an acquaintance with a youngish (39) gentleman named John George Haigh, who was, he said, an inventor...
...Durand-Deacon's cross that her fingernails were regrettably stubby and she had long nursed an idea for making plastic nails for other women similarly afflicted. One day last February, Mr. Haigh suggested they drive down to a factory he had in Crawley, Sussex. Three days later Haigh reported that Mrs. Durand-Deacon had never met him and never returned to the hotel. Scotland Yard sent out a routine tracer...
Grave Error. Prisoner Haigh promptly asked for a writ of attachment against Editor Bolam and the Mirror for prejudicing his right to a fair trial. Bolam made the best defense he could find; he pleaded "guilty of a grave error for which I tender my most humble apologies...
...never been a case ... of such a scandalous and wicked character. This has been done, not as an error of judgment, but as a matter of policy, pandering to sensationalism [to increase] circulation . . ." The Mirror was fined $40,000. Bolam was sentenced to three months in Brixton Prison (where Haigh is waiting trial), the first editor to be imprisoned under the law in 48 years...
London newspapers carried a brief factual report of Bolam's conviction, with no hints of vampires. None protested the verdict. The Times, which had printed only official announcements in the Haigh case, even cheered Lord Goddard; it thought its tabloid contemporary guilty of "a plain abuse of the right to report news freely...