Murder of the Black Museum 1875-1975: The Dark Secrets Behind a Hundred Years of the Most Notorious Crimes in England

by Honeycombe, Gordon

  She had been struck several times on the back of her head. There were also abrasions on her back, a bruise on her right shoulder and an area of redness around the left collarbone, as if someone had knelt on her. The left side of her chest was bruised and a rib had fractured, piercing the left lung. Her left arm was bruised, as were both wrists, which appeared to have been tightly tied. They also bore fingernail imprints of her assailant. The fingers of both her hands were badly cut on the inside, as if she had seized a knife in self-defence. All these injuries had been inflicted before she died, her death itself having been caused by two deep knife cuts across her throat.

  After death, a nipple had been bitten off and her body had been mutilated. A jagged series of slashes reached from her vagina vertically up to her chest, where they were joined by a deep diagonal cut from each nipple to the centre of her body, forming a Y. A rough instrument, possibly a branch, had also penetrated and torn her vagina as well as her anus.

  No knife was ever found, nor was any blood on any of Heath’s clothing. It is thought he stripped naked before the attack, and afterwards washed himself in the sea, into which he also threw the knife.

  Heath’s trial at the Old Bailey began on Tuesday, 24 September, concluding on the Thursday of that week at 5.45 pm. He pleaded not guilty. The judge was Mr Justice Morris; Mr EA Hawke led for the Crown and Mr JD Casswell for the accused.

  The question was not whether Heath was guilty, but whether he was insane. He gave no evidence in his own defence, as his counsel felt that his calm detachment and agreeable manner would never support the defence’s contention that he was mad. Mr Casswell, in his cross-examination of DI Spooner, tried to establish Heath’s instability and criminal nature by a detailed account of his career.

  Neville George Clevely Heath was born on 6 June 1917 at Ilford, Essex. His father was a barber, and his mother is said to have been a large, dominant woman. He was educated to begin with at a local Catholic school, where he seems to have been a bully and a tormentor of animals. He was good at athletics and rugby, but failed his exams. An office boy at £1 a week for a time, he joined the Artists’ Rifles when he was seventeen, and finding a service life to his liking he enlisted in the RAF on a short-service commission in February 1936. Court-martialled the following year for being absent without leave, for escaping while under arrest and for stealing a car, he was dismissed from the RAF in September 1937. In November, he was charged with fraud and false pretences, eight other offences being taken into consideration, including two of posing as Lord Dudley. He was put on probation. In July 1938, after working for a fortnight as a sales assistant in an Oxford Street store, he was sent to a borstal in Suffolk for three years for robbing a friend’s house of jewellery worth £51. Ten other offences were taken into consideration. Years later, he revisited the borstal at Hollesley Bay, giving the inmates a talk on how he had made good. Released from the borstal on the outbreak of war, he joined the RASC as a private, being commissioned in March 1940 when he was sent to the Middle East. This time he got into trouble with a brigadier, mainly over dishonoured cheques. He went absent without leave, was again court-martialled and then cashiered in August 1941. Sent back to Britain on the troopship Mooltan, he absconded at Durban and went to Johannesburg, where he masqueraded as Captain Selway MC for a time, until he enlisted in the South African Air Force, calling himself Armstrong. His past record came to light eventually, but because of his good work he was allowed to remain, although he was never put on operational duties. Obtaining the rank of captain, he was seconded to the RAF in May 1944, to 180 (Bomber) Squadron, and flew a few sorties over Holland. In October his Mitchell bomber – he was the pilot – was hit by anti-aircraft fire and he and his crew bailed out.

  Early in 1945, he returned to South Africa, and in October his wife – he had married in February 1942 – divorced him for desertion, taking custody of their son. She was a wealthy woman and he tried to blackmail her family over the divorce. In December, he was court-martialled for the third time, being convicted of undisciplined conduct and of wearing unauthorised decorations. Dismissed from the service, he returned to England, to Wimbledon, where his parents lived in Merton Hall Road. Before long he was fined £10 at Wimbledon magistrate’s court in April for wearing medals and a uniform to which he was not entitled. He studied for a ‘B’ commercial flying licence, but failed to turn up for the necessary exams.

  The assault on the woman in the Strand hotel occurred in March, and the first assault on Mrs Gardner in May. He killed her in the early hours of 21 June 1946.

  Mr Casswell’s defence was that Heath’s mind was ‘not behind his hand,’ that he was not responsible for his actions and was ‘morally defective’ or ‘morally insane’. Was there any anticipation or premeditation? Were his actions in London, Worthing and Bournemouth the actions of a sane man – not hiding, discussing the murder with Miss Symonds, writing to the police, reporting to the police, behaving in an apparently normal manner after the most savage of crimes? He may have known what he was doing, said Mr Casswell, but he did not know that what he was doing was wrong. Besides, the man must have been mad to have done what he did. Therefore, his deeds came within the scope of the McNaghten Rules on insanity and Heath must be found guilty but insane.

  Dr WH de Bargue Hubert, produced by the defence as an expert psychiatrist who could vouch for this line of reasoning, was carved up in cross-examination. (Within a year Dr Hubert, who was a drug addict, committed suicide.) Two prison doctors testifying for the Crown announced that Heath was a most abnormal person, a sadist, a sexual pervert and a psychopath, but that although he had behaved in an extraordinary way he was not insane.

  Heath seemed indifferent to what was being said. Wearing a light-grey suit with a wide chalk stripe, he presented a clean, almost heroic appearance with his fresh complexion, blue eyes, and fair wavy hair, carefully brushed and pomaded.

  The question of why his petty criminality took such a sadistic, murderous bent in 1946 was hardly raised and never answered. Nothing was said of his early sexual experiences – Heath himself was reluctant to talk about them to the doctors who examined him – but as a schoolboy he had assaulted a girl, and then a woman much later in South Africa.

  The jury, who included one woman, were out for an hour. They found him guilty of murder. Asked if he had anything to say, Heath replied: ‘Nothing.’ There was no appeal. He never showed any remorse or made a confession. He wrote to his parents: ‘My only regret at leaving the world is that I have been damned unworthy of you both.’

  He was hanged at Pentonville Prison by Albert Pierrepoint and Harry Kirk on 26 October 1946. According to Pierrepoint, Heath was the most handsome man he had ever hanged.

  Some two weeks earlier in Germany, Pierrepoint had hanged sixteen war criminals at Hameln – in one day (8 October) – and on 11 October he had a hand in the deaths of another twelve. Following these executions, he had been entertained in the evening by some RAF officers, who had been in Heath’s old squadron and were aware that their former comrade was about to be hanged in London. It seems they talked about him rather fondly. One recalled Heath’s answer to an admiring comment that he must have had hundreds of affairs. After some careful thought, as if calculating numbers, Neville Heath replied: ‘Not hundreds, old boy, but thousands. And the funny thing is I’ve never been the slightest bit in love with any of them.’

  Heath was smoking a pipe when Pierrepoint and Kirk entered the condemned cell. To the warders he said: ‘Come on, boys. Let’s be going.’ Earlier that morning he had asked for a whisky as a final request, adding: ‘In the circumstances, you might make that a double.’

  38

  JENKINS, GERAGHTY AND ROLT

  THE MURDER OF ALEC DE ANTIQUIS, 1947

  Chance plays as large a part in murder as in life, and it was pure chance that motor mechanic Alec de Antiquis happened to be riding on a motorcycle along Charlotte Street in central London one sunny April afternoon just after two o’clock. Aged thirty-four and ma
rried with six children, he had a garage and repair business at Collier’s Wood in south London, and was on his way back there after picking up some spare parts for his workshop. It was not chance that he acted the way he did, but it was chance that the man whose path he blocked had a gun and had no hesitation in using it. The inadvisability of having a go was seldom better demonstrated than in this case, which is also notable for the emergence of one of Scotland Yard’s celebrated investigators, Superintendent Robert Fabian, and for the last appearances of Sir Bernard Spilsbury and Robert Churchill at an Old Bailey murder trial.

  Just before 2 pm on Monday, 28 April 1947, three masked gunmen burst into Jay’s, a jeweller’s shop at 73-75 Charlotte Street, W1, on the corner of Tottenham Street and not far from the Scala Theatre. Two of the gunmen went in by the front door, the third by a side entrance. This man ordered the two assistants in the back to keep quiet. The two other bandits in the front of the shop grabbed at the jewellery on the shelves. What happened next has been confusedly reported. It seems that during the raid a gun was thrown at the firm’s director, Ernest Stock, as he slammed shut the door of a safe. One of the raiders clubbed him to the ground with another gun. The assistant manager, Bertram Keates, aged seventy, managed to set off a burglar alarm, and when he was asked for the safe’s keys he threw a stool at the gunmen, whereupon a shot was fired. It missed him, passed through a glass door leading to the inner room and struck the panelled wall beyond. No doubt alarmed by the noise, resistance, and their own violence, the gunmen fled outside, empty-handed apart from the guns that two of them held. They piled into a getaway car, found their exit was blocked by a lorry and scrambled out. They then ran, it seems, across Charlotte Street towards the section of Tottenham Street that leads into Tottenham Court Road. Women screamed; pedestrians scattered; some dropped to the ground. Alec de Antiquis drove his motorcycle across their path in an attempt to obstruct their escape.

  One of the raiders shot him in the head. He fell dying into the gutter while the three robbers disappeared among the crowds and traffic. He is alleged to have said to someone before he died: ‘I’m all right … Stop them … I did my best.’

  Another bold and public-spirited passer-by, a surveyor from Kenton in Middlesex named Charles Grimshaw, also had a go. He described how he saw the three gunmen come out of Jay’s and then run towards him:

  At that moment a motorcyclist drew up in front of me. He more or less stood up from his machine on one leg, as though to dismount, and I heard a shot and saw him fall. I saw two men come round the front of the machine, which had fallen over, still running towards me across Charlotte Street. They were side by side and the taller of the two was removing a white scarf from his face. There seemed to be a third person on the other side of the fallen motorcyclist. I stepped off the kerb behind a stationary car and, as they drew near to me, trip-kicked the shorter man. He fell full length on the pavement and dropped the gun he was carrying. I jumped on top of him, but his companion, who had run on a few paces, turned back and kicked me on the head. That made me release the man, as I was dazed, and he pushed me over and stood up. He picked up the gun, pointed it at me and said: ‘Keep off!’ I stayed where I was.

  Albert Pierrepoint, the chief executioner, who had left a pub in Soho shortly before the shooting, happened to walk along Charlotte Street soon afterwards and saw a lot of people gathered around a body in the road. But he walked on, late for an appointment. He was in London on an official visit to the War Office concerning the carrying out of further executions in Germany.

  One of Pierrepoint’s police friends, Acting Superintendent Robert Fabian, was put in charge of the case, assisted by DCI Higgins and DI Hodge. The many eye-witness accounts of the robbers varied considerably, and it was thought they escaped in a car, which was incorrect.

  Two days after the shootings a taxi driver walked into Tottenham Court Road police station and said he had seen two men in a hurry enter Brook House, an office block at 191 Tottenham Court Road. They had had knotted handkerchiefs around their necks. When the building was searched, a raincoat was found in an empty top-floor office, where one of the gunmen at least had sought temporary shelter. Stuffed into the coat’s pockets were a cap, a pair of gloves and a piece of white cloth, triangularly folded and knotted. The maker’s name had been torn from the coat and cap, but a dissection of the coat revealed, in the lining, a manufacturer’s stock label bearing trade numbers and marks. The expert help of a man in the clothing business enabled the police to trace the raincoat to a multiple tailors’ in Leeds. They in turn informed the police that the coat was part of a consignment delivered to three of their branches in London. The coat found in Brook House was traced to a tailor’s shop in Deptford High Street.

  At that time, to prevent the acceptance of forged clothing coupons, a customer’s name and address were noted as a precaution, and as a result a record of the coat’s sale, on 30 December 1946, led the police to a man in Bermondsey who revealed, after some prevarication, that his wife had lent the coat a few weeks before the shooting to her brother, Harry Jenkins.

  Charles Henry Jenkins, aged twenty-three, was soon picked up. A handsome braggart and ex-borstal boy, he was a minor criminal with a record for assault, including two convictions for assaulting policemen – he broke the jaw of one of them. But twenty-seven witnesses failed to pick him out at an hour-long identity parade.

  In the meantime, an eight-year-old schoolboy discovered a gun lying just above the low-tide mark of the River Thames at Wapping. It was a .32, loaded with five rounds (three of which had misfired) and an empty case, which proved to have been that of the bullet that killed Alec de Antiquis. Then another gun was recovered from the foreshore of the Thames, a rusty old .455 Bulldog revolver loaded with six rounds, one of which had been fired. This bullet was extracted from the woodwork in the jewellers’ shop. The rounds in the Bulldog were over fifty years old. Both guns were found a quarter of a mile from the block of flats in Bermondsey where lived the parents of Jenkins’s wife.

  Two years before this, Harry Jenkins’s older brother, Thomas, had been convicted of manslaughter for a very similar crime. In another raid on a jewellers’, this time in the City (on 8 December 1944) a retired naval captain, Ralph Binney, a passer-by, tried to stop two thieves from getting away by stepping into the road and stretching out his arms before the getaway car. The driver, Ronald Hedley, knocked him down with the car and ran over him twice. The captain’s clothing caught on the body work of the car and he was dragged for over a mile, across London Bridge, before his broken and battered body was flung clear. He died soon afterwards. Hedley was later hanged. Thomas Jenkins, who was with him in the car, was sentenced to eight years’ penal servitude. Both he and Hedley belonged to a south London gang called the Elephant Boys.

  Harry Jenkins was not so fortunate as his brother. Two of his friends were also picked up by the police and interrogated: Christopher James Geraghty, aged twenty, and Terence John Peter Rolt, who was seventeen. Geraghty had been with Jenkins in borstal and had twice escaped. Both he and Rolt eventually made incriminating statements and all three were charged on 19 May 1947 with the murder of Alec de Antiquis.

  Rolt’s story was that on Saturday, 26 April, two days before the shooting, the three of them had broken into a gunsmith’s shop, F Dyke and Co., in Union Street, between Waterloo and London Bridge stations. Here they spent the night, playing with the guns on display and eventually choosing the three that were used in the Charlotte Street raid. On the morning of Monday the 28th they met up again at Whitechapel underground station and travelled by tube to Goodge Street. Walking here and there, all armed, they tried to evaluate the possible pickings in jewellers’ shops in the vicinity of Tottenham Court Road. This took some time as they edgily nerved themselves for the robbery. Jay’s at last was chosen, but by this time it was the lunch hour and the streets were thronged. The raiders retreated to a café for lunch.

  They now encouraged each other by sneaking across the street to make fu
rther assessments of what was in the window of Jay’s – first Rolt, then Geraghty, who derided Rolt’s timorous estimates by saying the contents of the window were worth £5,000. Procrastinating yet further, they decided to acquire a getaway car, although it was never used as such. But after a black Vauxhall 14 saloon had been stolen from Whitfield Street by Jenkins and Rolt, there was nothing now to stop them staging the raid. Rolt drove the car up Charlotte Street with Geraghty beside him. Jenkins walked ahead. The plan was that all three, having parked the car near the shop, would first assemble on the pavement and then, when the coast was clear, would enter the shop. Rolt parked the car and Geraghty joined Jenkins. Then Rolt, in a high state of tension and nervous excitement, mistook a signal from Jenkins and scrambled out of the car. He burst into the shop, brandishing a gun. Jenkins and Geraghty, hastily pulling up their scarves as masks, had no option but to follow him.

  In the confusion the two elderly salesmen in Jay’s were assaulted and a shot was fired from the Bulldog. The gun that was thrown at Mr Stock had faulty ammunition, which rendered it incapable of being fired. When the robbers fled outside they found that a lorry had pulled up in front of their getaway car and obstructed its departure. In a panic, they ran down the street. It was Chris Geraghty who shot the motorcyclist who got in his way. All three were found guilty at the Old Bailey of the murder of Alec de Antiquis.

  Their trial began on Monday, 21 July before Mr Justice Hallett and ended a week later. The chief prosecutor was Mr Anthony Hawke. Jenkins was defended by Mr Vick, KC; Rolt by Mr O’Sullivan, KC, and Geraghty by Mr Wrightson. The jury were out for fifty minutes. Rolt, because of his youth – he was not yet eighteen – was ordered to be detained at His Majesty’s pleasure for at least five years. Although Harry Jenkins killed no one, he was deemed to have been an accessory engaged in a joint enterprise of armed robbery. He was sentenced to death with Chris Geraghty. Despite pleas for a reprieve on account of their youth, he and Geraghty were hanged at Pentonville Prison by Albert Pierrepoint, assisted by Harry Allen and Harry Critchell, on 19 September 1947.