‘From my enquiries I am satisfied that you are Neville George Clevely Heath. Wanted for interview by the Metropolitan Police in connection with the murder of Margery Gardner during the night of the 20 June 1946. You will be detained until officers arrive from London.’
Heath simply replied, ‘Oh. All right.’
Johnson now began to enter Brook’s details onto the charge sheet and asked Gates what name he should write. ‘Should I enter the name of Brook?’
Gates advised, ‘He says his name is Rupert Robert Brook, use that unless he prefers his proper name.’
Johnson asked what name the suspect himself would prefer to be entered on the charge sheet?
‘Oh. Heath. Neville George Clevely-Heath. The surname should be hyphenated.’
At 10 p.m. Johnson took Heath’s trousers to check for evidence and gave him a substitute pair. Gates then presented Heath with the return half of Doreen’s railway ticket.
‘This ticket was in your jacket pocket. Can you tell me how you became possessed of it?’
Thinking quickly, he said, ‘I found it in the lounge at the Tollard Royal Hotel.’
‘When and where?’
‘On a seat in the lounge on Thursday last.’18
It was a plausible answer – he’d admitted he had sat with Doreen in the lounge on Wednesday and she might have simply dropped the ticket from her handbag.
At about 10.30 p.m., Gates asked him whether he would be able to make a statement regarding Doreen Marshall’s disappearance. Heath replied that he would. In some contrast to his earlier off-hand attitude, he started writing this statement with great care at 11.50 p.m. and was still writing and examining his statement when Spooner’s car arrived at Bournemouth at 1.30 a.m. the next morning.
Leaving him to finish the statement, Spooner and Symes were greeted by several members of the Bournemouth police including Gates, Suter and Johnson. They were handed the suitcase which Gates had recovered from the railway station. Examining it, Spooner found three leather luggage labels with the names Capt N. G. C. Heath, Major N. G. C. Heath and Captain J. R. C. Armstrong. The latter had N. G. C. Heath London written on the reverse.19 As well as the bloodstained whip, there was a blue woollen scarf with traces of blood and nasal slime as well as a blue neckerchief, also bloodstained – both of which had been used for tying.20
Spooner and Symes went directly to the Tollard Royal and searched Room 81, going through all Heath’s belongings. Significant among his possessions were his flying helmet and an escape scarf that had been used as a tie. Some khaki webbing straps with no obvious purpose were also found. Spooner and Symes also recovered an extraordinary number of handkerchiefs – forty-nine in all. Most of these were womens’ and bore traces of lipstick.21 Many were monogrammed. In the middle drawer of the dressing table, Spooner discovered a handkerchief that had been tied into a knot and had recently been cut with a knife – on it were traces of blood and soil, as if it had been dragged across the ground. This bore the letters A. R. M., the first three letters of Neville Heath’s South African alias, Armstrong. Also in this drawer were two pieces of string that had been freshly cut.22
At 3 a.m. DS Johnson met Spooner in the CID office and gave him Heath’s jacket. From the left-hand pocket, Spooner recovered some things that hadn’t been noticed before – a caterpillar badge and a single artificial pearl, as if from a ladies’ necklace.23 Once Heath’s statement about the disappearance of Doreen Marshall had been completed, at 5.20 a.m., Reg Spooner finally came face to face with the man who had filled his days and sleepless nights since 21 June.
‘You are Heath?’
‘Yes.’
‘I am investigating the murder of Margery Gardner in your room at the Pembridge Court Hotel on the night of the 20–21 June last. I think you are in a position to give me some information about it.’
‘Yes, I will make a statement after I have had some sleep. I was there but I am not admitting I did it.’
Heath was allowed to sleep until 8 a.m. They were then driven back to London, with Heath sitting in the back of the Wolseley between Spooner and Symes, speaking very little and occasionally dozing. When he did speak, Heath addressed Symes, the more junior officer to whom he was handcuffed. He never spoke directly to Spooner. Arriving in Notting Hill at 11.25 that morning, Spooner reminded Heath that he had said he would make a statement about the murder of Margery Gardner. Heath said he was willing to make a statement, but wanted time to think the matter over. At 3 p.m., Spooner challenged Heath with the letter he had sent to Scotland Yard.
‘Did you write this letter to Superintendent Barratt?’
‘Yes.’
‘In it you refer to the instrument used on the woman Margery Gardner and you say you are forwarding it to the Yard. Did you do so?’
‘No.’
‘Where is it?’
‘It’s in one of my cases. I’ll get it later on.’
‘I will get it for you so you can see if it is the one you mean.’
‘There’s no need, it is the one.’
Spooner fetched the whip and presented it to Heath.
‘That’s it.’
‘Do you wish to continue with your statement?’
‘I am still thinking about it and I’m tired.’
Spooner left, returning later that evening. He wanted Heath to account for his movements during the night of 20–21 June, but after co-operating for a while, Heath said he realized the gravity of his position. He didn’t want to say more until he had taken legal advice after he had been charged – and he was certain now that he would be charged. Spooner left him at 8 p.m. Throughout the day, Shelley Symes had been taking notes of everything Heath had said. Heath looked through this statement repeatedly, paragraph by paragraph. Finally he signed it.
At 12.30 on Monday morning, Heath was led into the billiards room at Notting Hill Police Station by Inspector James Stone and placed in an identity parade with eleven other men of similar age, height and build. He was allowed to take any position and chose to stand sixth from the right. Spooner and Symes were also present, as observers only.
Harold Harter, the taxi driver, was asked to take a good look at all the men, and then to touch the man he had picked up with Margery Gardner outside the Panama Club.24 Without hesitation, Harter went straight to Heath and touched him on the chest with his right hand. Stone asked if he had any doubt, but Harter was clear: ‘That is the man.’ Harter was then escorted out of the building. Stone asked if Heath would like to change his position before the next witness arrived, but Heath just shook his head. Solomon Josephs, the receptionist of the Panama Club, was brought into the billiards room and again, Stone asked him to touch the person that he recognized in connection with the case. Again, with no hesitation, Josephs walked directly to Heath and touched him on the chest. Immediately after Heath had been positively identified by Harter and Josephs, Spooner approached him again.
‘You know who I am. I am now going to charge you with murdering Margery Aimee Brownell Gardner at the Pembridge Court Hotel during the night of Thursday to Friday, 20 to 21 June 1946.’
Spooner then cautioned him. Heath simply said, ‘I have nothing to say at the moment.’25
At West London Magistrates’ Court, the matrimonial court that was in session that afternoon was cancelled and the courtroom opened to the public. Crowds were already gathered around the court building when Heath arrived in a police car, handcuffed to Shelley Symes and smoking a pipe. He appeared before Paul Bennett, and was charged with the murder of Margery Gardner. He was remanded until 23 July. Asked if he required legal aid, he refused, saying, ‘I think I can manage it, sir.’26 After the hearing he fumbled for his pipe and puffed on it composedly as he was driven through the crowds back to Brixton Prison.
Early that evening, Reg Spooner sat down to write to his wife and daughter. They were currently away on the aborted family holiday that he had promised they would take together when he was demobilized.
At last success has com
e in this job and only two hours ago I charged Heath with the murder of Margery Gardner. I have just returned from the police court after seeing him remanded. It has all been a tiresome and worrying business and what with the sudden dash to Bournemouth for him and other things my last night’s sleep was the first since Friday night. Anyway, I daresay you have read about it all in the press. There is still an immense amount of work to be done in it, but at least we have the satisfaction of having got Heath – and there is more in it than is generally known although this morning’s papers were making inferences. The job has done me quite a bit of good and I am getting congratulations from high and low.
The press say it is one of the best stories for years.27
With Heath under arrest, it was clear that the disappearance of Doreen Marshall was now a murder enquiry. Bournemouth police announced that they were not looking for anybody else in connection with the case. With no admission from Heath and Metropolitan Police enquiries focused on the murder in Notting Hill, they concentrated on searching the sea-front cliffs west of the Tollard Royal Hotel and the wooded chines leading down to the beach. Digby, Scotland Yard’s famous bloodhound, was also engaged ‘in the greatest hunt which the world-famed organization has ever known in its history’. But even Digby failed to sniff out any leads and gave up the chase, withdrawing ‘in shame’ to his home near Winchester.
‘For the first time, I whipped him,’ said his dispirited mistress, Miss Nina Elms, who, however, hopes that Digby will reestablish his fame as England’s most foremost bloodhound.28
In London, wary of compromising the case against Heath, newspapers implied a connection between his arrest and Doreen’s disappearance without actually stating it, with stories appearing side by side on the front page. But five days after she had last been seen, the whereabouts of Doreen Marshall’s body eluded the police. With Heath now suspected to be a double murderer, the story of the blood-lust killer ignited the public’s imagination and fuelled their hungry desire for sensational details of the case. But even the most hardened followers of the story cannot have been prepared for the shocking revelations soon to come.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Branksome Dene Chine
7–8 JULY 1946
We generally describe the most repulsive examples of man’s cruelty as brutal or bestial. Implying by these adjectives that such behaviour is characteristic of less highly developed animals than ourselves. In truth, however, the extremes of ‘brutal’ behaviour are confined to man; and there is no parallel in nature to our savage treatment of each other.
Anthony Storr, Human Aggression, 1968
Kathleen Evans was a cake-maker who lived with her parents in Pinewood Road, one of the well-to-do avenues at the top of Branksome Dene Chine.1
At about midday on Sunday 7 July, she took her dog for a run through the chine, aiming as usual for the beach. She entered the ravine through the Pinewood Road entrance, then adorned with an exotic Dragons’ Teeth Gate, and walked half way down the main drive. She then branched over to the left, going down the steep steps into the chine itself. The ravine was densely covered with large pine trees and an undergrowth thick with rhododendron bushes, furze, bracken, heather and grass.
The spaniel then ran a long way ahead of her until she lost sight of him, but eventually she caught him up at a sandy cliff to the left. Miss Evans called the dog to her and carried on along the footpath towards the beach, coming to a spot with some bushes to the right and a hole in the ground to her left. The pathway began to narrow and it was at this point that Miss Evans noticed what she thought, at first, to be a swarm of bees buzzing around a bush of rhododendrons. Looking closer, she saw that the swarm of insects were not bees at all; they were flies.
Thinking that there must be ‘something objectionable’ in the bushes, she hurried on past, but noticed what seemed to be a dead fir bough propped against the bushes to her right. She thought no more about it.
However, on Monday morning, Miss Evans read the newspapers, which were full of Doreen Marshall, the ‘girl in the dinner gown’ who had ‘vanished in the dark’. That evening, Miss Evans told her father about the swarm of flies she had seen in the chine the day before and asked if he would go with her to investigate.
Kathleen retraced her steps into the sloping ravine. The flies were still buzzing around the rhododendrons and Mr Evans peered into the bushes. Looking to the left, he couldn’t see anything, but on the right he saw what appeared to be some clothing. Most distinctly he saw part of a yellow coat – just as had been described in the newspapers. Mr Evans and his daughter went to the telephone box at the mouth of the chine and called the police.
Given that Branksome Dene Chine was just outside Bournemouth but within the Poole boundary, officers from both stations were sent to the chine, led by Detective Sergeant Bishop of the Dorset Constabulary, based at Poole Police Station. Approaching the chine from the beach, concrete steps led to a sandy footpath up the centre of the ravine. To the west was a refreshment pavilion with a hard road leading up to Pine Wood Road, north-west of the chine. The footpath led up the side of the valley to wicket gates at Cassel Avenue at the north end of the chine. Bishop entered from the promenade entrance, guided by Miss Evans and her father; together they walked about 150 yards up the central path from the sea. Bishop was led to what appeared to be a natural alcove, about 22 feet wide, enclosed on three sides by rhododendron bushes. A fir bough and some branches had been deliberately placed in front of the alcove. Hidden behind them, under the spur of rhododendrons forming the east side of the alcove, Bishop could clearly see a body.2
As it was now 8.40 p.m. and the light was already beginning to fade, Bishop decided to leave the body where it was until the next morning. The chine was closed to the public and a police guard was maintained throughout the night.
The next morning, several officers including Bishop visited the chine with Dr Crichton McGaffey, a pathologist from Somerset who practised in Taunton. Drawing back the fir bough and cutting away parts of the bush, the body was exposed to full view. The sight that met the police’s eyes was so shocking that some officers vomited.
Doreen Marshall’s body was in a grotesque position and had been horrifically mutilated. She was naked apart from her right shoe, lying on her left side with her head thrust forward. Her right arm was extended over her head and her left arm underneath her body. Her right leg was twisted over her left. A week since she had been killed, dried black blood covered her body, now crawling with thousands of maggots which had eaten deep into her wounds.
The body was to the right of the natural alcove formed by the rhododendrons. On the left, about seventeen feet away from the body, were two bloodstains twenty-six inches apart. This appeared to be the scene of the crime itself, just next to the pathway that led through the chine to Pinewood Road. Outside the bushes there were two similar bloodstains, also twenty-six inches apart, as if the body had been moved there, before Heath decided to further conceal the body beneath the rhododendrons. Near these bloodstains, Bishop recovered twenty-seven pearl beads that had been torn from a necklace. These were to match the single pearl that Spooner had discovered in Heath’s jacket pocket.
By the stains under the bushes he found a stocking ripped in two. Near the body was the left shoe and fifteen feet away from it, Bishop found a handkerchief. Piled on Doreen’s body were her clothes – her black evening gown had been pulled inside-out and her lemon-coloured swagger coat had been placed on top with the lining showing. A brassiere was on Doreen’s shoulder. Underneath the coat was a corset belt, a sanitary towel and a pair of cami-knickers which had been torn. Another stocking was found in the bushes, about seven feet above the ground. Further towards the beach, Bishop came across a blue powder compact, the mirror slightly cracked – the gift from Doreen’s sister.
The police continued to investigate the chine for clues, using axes and machetes to cut back the dense vegetation in the growing summer heat. Many officers were veterans of the Burma campaign and the
work recalled their days in the steaming jungle.3 Thirty yards from the body, the police recovered what they presumed to be another gruesome clue – a bunch of human hair. It had been permed, so had clearly come from a woman’s head, and there was a substantial amount of it, perhaps three-quarters of a woman’s head of hair. Some had been cut and some had been violently pulled out. Sent to Scotland Yard, the hair would not match Doreen Marshall’s, leading the police to suspect that there may be another body hidden somewhere in the chine. Could this be the remains of ‘Peggy’, the girl Heath had mentioned in his statement, but who had so far not been traced? Press reports would ghoulishly hint that another woman’s body lay in the chine – and that she had been scalped.4
As early as 7.30 a.m., holiday-makers, ‘the majority of them women’, in shorts, swimwear and sunhats crowded around the police cordon on the beach in the hope of glimpsing some of the horrors that rumours indicated had taken place in the chine. Children with buckets and spades also wandered up to the chine to see what the fuss was about. Later that morning, when Doreen’s body was removed, the crowds lost interest in the murder scene and went back to sunbathing, eating ice-cream or making sandcastles on the beach.
Doreen’s body was taken to Poole where her father identified her in the mortuary there. At 2.30, Crichton McGaffey proceeded with the post-mortem in the presence of Constable Bishop. The injuries that Doreen had sustained before and after her death indicated a frenzied sex attack of shocking brutality. Though she had fought bravely for her life, at only 5 feet 3 inches and with a small frame, she had been overpowered by Heath’s powerful physique.
Doreen’s throat had been savagely cut just above the larynx right to the back of her neck. The left carotoid artery was completely severed, but the knife – the size of a fair-sized pocket knife – had been stopped by the spinal column. A second cut just above the first was not so deep and stopped short at the midline of the girl’s throat. Both these cuts were inflicted whilst Doreen was still alive and had resulted in her bleeding to death. But there was a catalogue of other terrible injuries that had been caused both before and after her death that revealed an appalling level of violence.5
Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller Page 30