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His 'foolproof' plan had proved anything but. Because of her false teeth the remains of Mrs Durand-Deacon were positively identified.
At trial Haigh attempted to plead insanity, concocting an unlikely tale of how he drank his victims' blood. After only a couple of days the jury needed a mere 13 minutes to decide that Haigh was sane and guilty as charged.
On Wednesday 10 August, 1949 Haigh was executed by hanging.
It has been said that people can lie through their teeth but their teeth cannot lie. Like fingerprints, teeth are unique to the individual and in proving identification and solving crimes they have often been the means of providing conclusive evidence. The next pioneering murder case of this episode occurred during the Second World War and was central to the development of forensic dentistry.
Blitzkrieg cop
On 17 July 1942, a workman demolishing a bombed out chapel in South London made a grisly discovery. Underneath a stone slab he saw laid out before him a skeleton; pieces of flesh still clinging to its bones.
Assuming that it was the remains of a victim of the Blitz, he lifted it out with his shovel. The head stayed on the ground.
Once the police arrived the skeleton was wrapped and taken to the public mortuary, which is where the forensic pathologist Dr Keith Simpson first made its acquaintance.
This was wartime London and the sight of dead bodies was not uncommon, but Simpson could not write this off as a casualty of war. There were too many unanswered questions. What was the identity of the body and how had it come to be so neatly laid out under the floor of the chapel? There had indeed been an ancient cemetery on the site, but this skeleton was not ancient, it had soft tissue attached.
Simpson estimated that the body was only about twelve to eighteen months dead. The chapel had been bombed almost two years before in 1940. So was he looking at a murder victim?
Through some astute detective work Dr Simpson ascertained that the body was indeed a murder victim, but with no apparent way of identifying the body there was little hope of finding the killer.
The teeth held the answer
Simpson turned his attention to the teeth. The lower jaw of the skull had gone completely, but the upper jaw was, as Simpson put it, a ‘mine of information’. Through a missing persons list police found a possible identity for the corpse; Rachel Dobkin, the estranged wife of a fire warden who worked in the building next to the chapel where the skeleton had been found.
