John George Haigh Case Case Study

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John George Haigh Case

George Haigh Case

The John George Haigh case was yet another death investigation case that set a major benchmark in the history of death investigations and its implications in the death investigation and subsequent criminal trial world still resonate to this very day. This is true for a number of reasons and some of the less obvious reasons will be analyzed and discussed in this brief treatise.

The one obvious thing that this case changed was that a body is not necessary to convict a criminal and this is even true when speaking of crimes like murder and/or serial killings like those committed by Haigh. Despite the bodies being disposed of, the mountain of forensic evidence that implicated Haigh was substantial and even if that were not the case, the circumstantial evidence that pointed to Haigh was also quite damning, which is something that is potentially less obvious to many people. The latter part of that vein of thought will be discussed next.

One need not look too far in the recent past to see a high-profile case where a body was not present when an arrest was plotted. The author of this report is referring to the murder in the United States of Lacy Peterson at the hands of Scott Peterson. Lacy Peterson's body was not found until April 2003, after she disappeared the previous December, but Scott Peterson was under suspicion long before then. However, the recovery body and the extreme suspicious items he had on his person when he was arrested a few days later were quite damning even though Lacy's presence in the river had erased a lot of the forensic evidence.

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The items in Scott's possession were nearly $15,000 in cash, a dozen pair of shoes, 200 blister packs of sleeping pills, a shovel, several credit cards belong to family members other than Scott and Lacy Peterson and so forth. Throughout the entire trial, only one piece of forensic evidence was entered, that being a strand of hair found in a pair of pliers. The vast majority of the evidence that led to the conviction was non-forensic and circumstantial in nature…not unlike the Haigh case although the Haigh case had a lot more forensic evidence but no body. The Peterson case was the other way around but both cases led to convictions and the Haigh case happening is what led to convictions of people like Peterson possible (MurderPedia.org, 2013).

Even with the forensic evidence, the paper trail that implicated Haigh, even if it did not prove the murder, surely provide motive and opportunity because dead people tell no tales and this makes it all the more easier to steal from them. A clear pattern would be established between the missing people and the fact that Haigh was robbing them blind so even if the forensic evidence was there, it would still probably render a conviction (especially if it happened in modern times) because the correlation between the deaths and the theft is just too much of a coincidence to be explainable any other way.

It was not due to lack of effort, Haigh made it a point to kill people….....

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