The Ability to Kill Read Free

nine he was committed to a reformatory, probably for stealing. At nineteen he received his first prison sentence, for stealing bicycles. At twenty-four, after a period in the army, he was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for larceny and receiving. At twenty-six he married. He used his wife to steal for him by forging references and planting her in likely homes as a servant. At twenty-seven he took to bigamy. His practice, of course, was to ‘marry’ a woman, take her savings and disappear. Sometimes, he did not have to marry. On several occasions, having secured their money, he left the ladies high and dry after taking them on an excursion to some public place. There, he would excuse himself to go to the lavatory and then fail to return. When he was twenty-nine he was recognised in the street by his real wife. She had by then served a prison sentence on his account and had a score to settle. She had him arrested, and he went to prison for two years. That was his last prison sentence. Of course, he went back to stealing from women the moment he was released; but the experience with his first wife had taught him a lesson. He took care to move about more now—Brighton, Southampton, Bournemouth, Margate and other seaside towns—and he opened a second-hand furniture shop in Bristol to provide himself with a background and a base.
    He was forty when he committed his first murder, that of Bessie Mundy. She had a trust fund of £2500 administered by an uncle. Smith found that he, her ‘husband,’ could only gethis hands on the money if she died and left it to him. So what else could he do but kill her? There is nothing in his history to suggest that the murder was a psychological turning point for him. He seems rather to have been in the position of a man who had by accident hit upon a new way of solving an old problem. It is not surprising that, after seeing how well the bath trick worked, he should decide to use it again. No trust-fund difficulties figured in his subsequent murders. He married the women, insured their lives, made certain that their wills were in his favour, and then killed them. The extent of his emotional involvement in the deaths is best gauged by a remark he made after the first of them. Even as he pretended to labour under the shock of his bereavement, he could not help congratulating himself. ‘Wasn’t it a good job I got her to make a will?’ he said. He also returned the bath he had used to the ironmonger’s without paying for it.
    In its artlessness, Smith’s remark is reminiscent of the question J. G. Haigh asked the police when he realised that they were going to arrest him for murder: ‘Tell me, frankly, what are the chances of anybody being released from Broadmoor?’
    Smith and Haigh had, as well as moments of unwitting indiscretion, other things in common.
    Haigh was born in 1909, at Stamford in Lincolnshire. His father was an electrical engineer. Both parents belonged to that religious sect which calls itself ‘The Peculiar People’—the Plymouth Brethren—and discipline in the home was strict and sanctimonious. He was an only child. He disliked games, loved music and drawing, became a choir-boy and won a divinity prize. At the grammar school he was also known as a ready and resourceful liar with a taste for practical jokes of the kind which inflict pain on the victim. After he left school he worked for a time in a second-hand car showroom, then as an electrician in a cinema, then as a salesman. When he was twenty-five,he was arrested on charges of obtaining money under false pretences by means of a hire-purchase swindle. He was sentenced to fifteen months’ imprisonment. When he came out of prison he worked briefly for a firm of cleaners before being sacked for dishonesty. He then went south and set up, under a false name, as a solicitor. He was quite a skilful forger and by selling non-existent shares managed to defraud his ‘clients’ of over thirty thousand pounds before he