Murder with a Difference

by Molly Lefebure

Dual biography of British serial killers John George Haigh and John Reginald Halliday Christie. Written by the secretary of the London medical examiner.

Genres: True Crime

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1958

About the author

Molly Lefebure was born in Hackney on 6 October 1919 into a family descended from prominent arms manufacturers in 18th-century Paris. Her father, Charles Lefebure (OBE 1941 Birthday Honours), was a senior civil servant who worked with Sir William Beveridge on the establishment of the National Health Service (NHS), applying some of the revolutionary ideas of Robespierre, the Parisian Lefebures having professed Jacobin sympathies. Her mother was Elizabeth Cox.

Some of Molly's forebears had been men of letters; and one, Pierre Lefebure, having helped to set up the Institut Francais, became a professor of languages at the newly formed London University. Her uncle was Major Victor Lefebure (OBE, Chavalier of the Legion of Honour and Officer of the Crown of Italy) who, on 5–6 October 1916, carried out one of the most successful cylinder gas attacks of the war on the French front at Nieuport. He was a British Chemical Liaisons Officer officer with the French until the war closed. He wrote 'The Riddle of the Rhine: Chemical strategy in Peace and War.'

Molly Lefebure was educated at the North London Collegiate School. She went on to study at King's College London at the University of London where she met her husband, John Gerrish.

During the Second World War, Lefebure worked as a newspaper reporter for a London newspaper. It was also during the war that she met Dr Keith Simpson (the pathologist) and worked for him as his secretary where she gained information for her first book 'Evidence for the Crown,' the inspiration for the two part ITV drama Murder on the Homefront, which was also a title she coined for this memoir when she later republished it. Molly was the first woman ever to work in a mortuary. She was known as 'Molly of the morgue' and 'Miss Molly' by Scotland Yard.

Lefebure went on to live with her husband and her two children at Kingston-upon-Thames by the river. She also owned a house, Low High Snab, in Newlands Valley in Cumbria, where she wrote many of her books.

Molly's maternal grandmother arranged for her to spend summers on a remote farm on Exmoor, where Molly learned to hunt. Blooded aged eight with the Devon and Somerset Staghounds, she subsequently wrote on hunting for both The Field and Country Life and was a member of the Blencathra Hunt in the Lake District for more than 50 years.

Among Lefebure's 20 or so other books was a 1974 biography of Coleridge, subtitled 'The Bondage of Opium,' and a study of his wife, 'The Bondage of Love' (1986), which won Molly Lefebure the Lakeland Book of the Year award. Her study of the Coleridge children, 'The Private Lives of the Ancient Mariner,' is with her publisher, as is her last book, about the Lake District, 'The Vision and the Echo.' She also wrote several novels, as well as (under the name Mary Blandy, an 18th-century forebear who was convicted of poisoning her father) two studies of drug addiction.

Lefebure's children's books include illustrations by the famous Lakeland author Hill Walker and illustrator Alfred Wainwright.

Lefebure was a Coleridge scholar. After studying drug addiction at Guy's Hospital in London for six years, she wrote a biography of Coleridge that researched the effect on his life of his addiction to opiates.

She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2010.

Reviews

[Fishface · Rating 5 out of 5]

I consider this my standard text on Johnny Haigh, the Yorkshire Acid Bath Murderer, and Reg Christie, the erstwhile occupant of 10 Rillington Place, and we all know what he did in THERE. Very wonderfully written -- covers all the basics and adds a few little pieces of information that only the author, who was the Crown Coroner's secretary, could know. When I hear about some FBI profiler who really believes Haigh drank his victims' blood, I shake my head and wish I could tell them, "Just read Lefebure, you fool!"

[YarnAndYearn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book. Bear in mind it’s of its time. I think amateur psychology has moved along quite a bit since the fifties. But the book gives an authentic glimpse into the attitudes and mores of the time.