Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller

by O'Connor, Sean

  But the mundane routine at Brixton was broken up by his various appearances at West London Magistrates’ Court. He appeared five times throughout July and August, travelling to and from Brixton in a Black Maria. Throughout the hearings, Heath said nothing but doodled on prison notepaper as he heard the events in Notting Hill and Bournemouth described. At his appearance on 29 July Heath was formally charged by Detective Sergeant Bishop from Poole of the murder of Doreen Marshall. He said, ‘Nothing to say.’ On 13 August, witnesses were called from both Bournemouth and Notting Hill, including Charles Marshall. One by one, Doreen’s possessions were handed around the police court. Heath looked on as his defence counsel held up the penknife and showed it to Doreen’s father.

  ‘Are you sure about this knife?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Certain,’ replied Mr Marshall.

  ‘Why are you so sure?’

  Mr Marshall explained to the bench, ‘I know it so well. It was a prize for ice-skating. She had a fountain pen to match it. Her name was inscribed on the fountain pen, but not on the knife. I am quite sure that knife is the one.’15

  There was a moment’s silence. Mr Marshall and the man who had murdered his daughter stared at each other for a second across the court. The last time they had met was at Bournemouth Police Station when Heath had reassured Mr Marshall that there was nothing to worry about, that his daughter would be found safe and well. Heath dropped his gaze quickly and shuffled uneasily on the fixed seat.

  At these preliminary hearings only the case for the prosecution was heard with Heath reserving his defence. This meant that all the shocking details of the two crimes were now public knowledge and reported feverishly in the press, months before Heath would appear at the Old Bailey to offer his defence. Unable to publish the most graphic details of the killings, most of the reporters on the press bench laid down their pencils and stared ahead of them in stunned silence. Heath carried on doodling.16

  At every appearance at the police court, large crowds queued for hours in order to get a glimpse of him.

  As with so many crimes of violence, especially where the coarser and darker aspects of the sex-motive are concerned, the court-rooms were thronged with onlookers, mostly women, many of them ‘teen-agers’. Outside the Police Court were mobs of eager sensationalists, elbowing and jostling, and some standing on walls, or tops of air-raid shelters: a trenchant manifestation of modern times and manners.17

  Extra police were drafted in order to deal with the crowds. When a police officer refused admission to one woman, she began to cry and shouted, ‘I must see Heath. I have come all the way from Golders Green!’18

  During Heath’s appearances at West London Magistrates’ Court, Bernard Tussaud, the great-great-grandson of the wax museum’s founder, spent three weeks observing Heath in the dock. As neither photography nor sketching was permitted in the court, he had to draw Heath’s image after each court hearing from memory. The wax figure would take six weeks to make. If Heath were found not guilty or reprieved, the figure would be melted down and the wax used again.

  As he prepared for his trial at the Old Bailey, Heath was very keen to get a ‘decent suit’. He sent magazine cuttings of the suits he liked and took his own measurements as he wanted it to be a good fit. In the end, friends bought him an off-the-peg suit for £20 with a grey chalk stripe and some new underwear – all with Heath’s clothing coupons.

  Isaac Near then instructed the esteemed defence KC, J. D. Casswell, to defend Heath. Sixty-year-old Casswell had been born and raised in Wimbledon, not far from the home of the Heath family, and had come to prominence professionally in 1913 in the case of negligence brought against the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company (the parent company of the White Star Line) by relatives of several passengers who had perished on the Titanic. The jury found the captain to be negligent and each of the relatives received £100 compensation. Casswell then saw action in France during the First World War, but was invalided out of the army in 1917 with an eye condition. He had defended several high-profile murder defendants – forty by the end of his career – only five of whom were subsequently executed. In 1935 he had defended Percy Stoner in the murder of Francis Rattenbury in Bournemouth. Stoner was reprieved following an appeal. Perhaps most famously in 1944, he had defended Elizabeth Marina Jones, the eighteen-year-old waitress who had accompanied US Army deserter Karl Hulten on a spree of violence culminating in the murder of a taxi driver on the Great West Road. The case became known as the Cleft Chin Murder – a sensation at the time and the story that provoked George Orwell to write his essay, Decline of the English Murder. Though Hulten was executed Casswell managed to secure a reprieve for Jones. She was released from prison in 1954.19

  Casswell was known for his charm, imperturbability and doggedness and had some of the rhetorical gifts of Marshall Hall, ‘the great defender’, with perhaps an even better knowledge of the law. Before taking the brief, Casswell discussed the case with an eminent psychologist colleague who declared on the basic facts that Heath was ‘mad as a hatter from a doctor’s point of view’. But Casswell worried from the start, that though this might be true in medical terms, he was not sure that it could be proved that Heath was as mad as a hatter in the terms of the law. This astute comment was to prove true and the sole debate at Heath’s trial was focused on this issue.

  When Casswell was shown into the interview room at Brixton to meet his client for the first time, he immediately mistook the man he was presented with for a member of the prison staff, thinking to himself, ‘What good-looking chaps they’re recruiting as warders these days.’ Casswell thought Heath a ‘good-looking young man with a splendid physique and an attractive and charming manner . . . he certainly looked the opposite of the popular image of a sexual maniac.’20 After Casswell had introduced himself, Heath’s first question was directly to the point.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I plead guilty?’

  ‘You’ve a father and mother and brother, all alive. Do you want it said that a man in his right mind could commit two such brutal crimes?’

  Heath reflected for a moment.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Put me down as Not Guilty, old boy.’21

  Casswell felt from this first meeting that Heath was indifferent to whether he lived or died. Whatever the press speculated, Casswell dismissed any suggestion that Heath had murdered Doreen Marshall deliberately in order to try and secure a life sentence in Broadmoor. If anything, Heath seemed to have a death wish and his half-hearted attempts to engage with a medical enquiry Casswell felt were purely for the benefit of Heath’s family.

  At the same time, the Director of Public Prosecution was instructing the case for the Crown. Anthony Hawke, a 51-year-old senior Treasury counsel and veteran of several murder trials, was appointed as leading counsel for the prosecution. Under the terms of English law, Heath could only be tried for one indictment at a time. It was up to the prosecution to decide which murder he would be tried for first. In discussion with Theobald Mathew, Hawke felt that there was more chance of getting a conviction if Heath were tried for the murder of Margery Gardner. The murder of Doreen Marshall looked like the savageries of a lunatic and might give the defence the opportunity to plead insanity.

  During his time on remand, as Casswell and Hawke prepared their cases, Heath was questioned by several medical officers, including Dr William Henry de Bargue Hubert, who was to be called on behalf of the defence. Dr Hubert Young, the senior medical officer at Wormwood Scrubs and Dr Hugh Grierson, the senior medical officer at Brixton were to be called as expert witnesses for the prosecution.

  Dr Young had various meetings with Heath whom he found very polite and personable, being particularly proud of his flying career and claiming that he had a ‘fighter pilot temperament’. He was completely unwilling to discuss the charges. He didn’t dispute the facts and didn’t see how he possibly could. He said that he had originally decided to give himself up to the police, hence the letter to Barratt about sending in the riding whip, but then chang
ed his mind. When he was arrested he had at first intended to plead guilty and though Casswell had persuaded him not to, he told Dr Young that he was still unsure if it was the right decision. He admitted that for some time before the murders, ‘he had been conscious of an impulse to react in a certain way in his sexual relationships’.22 He wouldn’t divulge to Dr Young what this impulse was due to, but said he had tried to explain it to Dr Hubert in strict confidence after they had been talking for three hours. Young felt that the reason for Heath’s unwillingness to discuss the crimes had something to do with his marriage.23

  Dr Grierson from Brixton had interviewed Bessie Heath who admitted that her son was highly strung as a boy but that he was a kind, not a cruel person, fond of children and animals. She thought he had been particularly upset in the RAF after seeing an airman have his head cut off by a propeller. In her opinion, her son wasn’t insane but she thought that ‘his brain must have gone’.24

  Heath told Dr Grierson that he didn’t want to talk about the charge and denied any abnormal state of mind at the time of the murders, adding – as he had done with Dr Young – that he could, if he so wished, give an account of all his actions but he didn’t wish to do so. He didn’t explain why he was unwilling to discuss it, either. Though he seemed unemotional it was evident to Grierson that Heath kept his feelings under strict control. He denied any abnormality in his sex life or of ever having performed any unnatural sex acts. When Grierson specifically questioned him about any sadistic impulses, in spite of the evidence of the two killings, Heath denied that he ever had any. This was supported when Reg Spooner interviewed many of the women that Heath had slept with, none of whom ‘spoke of perverse conduct’. Mr Friedman, Heath’s wife’s solicitor, also confirmed that as far as Elizabeth knew, Heath had never shown ‘any sexual or violent tendencies’.25 When asked about the incident in the Strand Palace Hotel with Pauline Brees and her claim that he had said ‘I hate women’, Heath had nothing to say. Grierson felt that he was continually on his guard, even about matters not directly concerned with the charge. When Grierson attempted to discuss Heath’s sexual relations with his wife and whether this might have had an influence on his later conduct, Heath was particularly unforthcoming.

  Throughout his time on remand, the issue of his wife and child in South Africa played heavily on his mind. ‘I’d rather not defend the charge at all than have them undergo any publicity,’ he wrote in one letter. ‘Look at it logically, and you’ll see that any publicity of this nature will ruin the child’s life.’26

  He took a keen interest in how the case was reported in the South African press and even threatened to take legal action against those that he felt misreported the story. Following his appearances in the police court, Elizabeth and her son were soon pursued by the press in Johannesburg. Journalists began phoning her home in Forest Town twenty-four hours a day in the hope of getting an exclusive story.

  I am tired of living this haunted existence. I am tired of dodging photographers and being tracked down by reporters; tired of offers to sell my life story. I am a normal person who has done nothing to merit notoriety. What happened in my life was something over which I had no control. I had only two months of married life, so there really is nothing for me to tell. Ninety per cent of our marriage and divorce we were apart.27

  Elizabeth and her son left Johannesburg with her new fiancé, to a secret address ‘somewhere in the heart of the big game country near the Portuguese Mozambique border’,28 where they would stay until the furore surrounding the trial had died down.

  In the heaviest Old Bailey calendar for years, Heath’s trial was announced as Case No. 7229 and was scheduled to take place in the week beginning 23 September. It was expected to last four days.

  One of the witnesses called on behalf of the defence was William Spurrett Fielding-Johnson, Heath’s former squadron leader. His testimony, recorded by Isaac Near, discussed the breakdown Heath had in 1944. But Fielding-Johnson was never to appear at the Old Bailey. Days before he was to give evidence, he had a heart attack. He was rushed to hospital and though he survived, his evidence was never heard.

  The trial would continue without it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Mrs Armstrong

  14 SEPTEMBER 1946

  Number 3923 Name N. Heath

  Brixton Prison

  Mrs Elizabeth Armstrong

  15, Epping Road,

  Forest Town

  Johannesburg

  Transvaal

  South Africa

  Elizabeth, my dear,

  I said that I would never write to you again, but under the circumstances I hope you will read this last letter.

  I cannot explain what has happened – you will undoubtedly know as much as I do about it – and the South African newspapers have printed many (untrue) reports and covered themselves with the word ‘alleged’.

  In the face of the evidence I cannot deny these two offences, but to me it still seems fantastically unbelievable. By the time you get this letter it will all be over and I do sincerely hope that I am awarded the maximum sentence.

  It was originally my intention of forwarding no defence, but now it has been impressed upon me that I should tell the true story for my family’s sake, if nothing else. I am assisted by the finest counsel obtainable in the country.

  I am certain in my mind what the sentence will be, but my object in offering a defence against the charges is not to get a lighter sentence – I should hate that – but to make it abundantly clear, for the sake of the few people for whom I have a deep regard, that I did not set out to cold bloodedly commit two vile murders. That I am responsible, I shall never deny and I’m quite prepared to pay the piper.

  A letter or word from you whilst I have been here, would have meant more than anything else to me, but I can quite understand your point of view in not writing.

  I have reason to believe that the current opinion in Johannesburg is that I deserted you and then blackmailed your father into a divorce for sums varying from £2,000 upwards. All of this as you well know is complete and absolute nonsense and I shall never believe that you started this vile rumour. I have my own views as to the source, but have asked my solicitors, through their Johannesburg agents, to make a thorough enquiry. I, personally, can find a great deal of ironic humour in the report, when I think of those days when I begged you not to leave me. One thing is certain, and it is that had I not left Training Command in South Africa to go on ‘ops’ none of this last eighteen months of hell would have occurred. Anyway, what is done is done and nothing can repair the harm now. I blame nobody except myself.

  Liz, my dear, do you remember the last time I saw Rob? I don’t think you ever realized – or will ever realize, just what that moment meant to me. I always had some hope that you would not go through with the divorce and that you would return to me. On that day I must have realized that you were so completely under your family’s domination, that nothing would change your mind or alter your decision. From that time onwards, nothing was clear to me and I could view nothing in its true perspective. Hate, animosity, revenge, a hundred and one feelings completely alien to my real self consumed my entire being. Life without you and Robby was just empty. Now, thank God, it is almost over. Since we parted, I know I’ve laughed a lot and been on parties etc, but the whole time there was that terrible feeling of hollow mockery in the background which made my entire existence miserably unbearable.

  Always, across my mind, there has been a vision of you, or a blurred picture of Robby playing so happily in the garden with the dogs and then that frightening feeling of emptiness and frustration when I realized I should never see either of you again.

  Life for me during the last eighteen months has been plain hell and I shall be glad when it’s over.

  Now, at last, I can look back upon those years of perfect happiness with you. Bloemfontein at [Central Flying School] with that awful cold hotel – Greystones – the ‘Rambles’, with those enormous teas – The Bloemfont
ein Hotel and those early morning drives to the Aerodrome in that little open car which we both froze in so regularly – Randfontein and our house there. The chaps who used to come and stay with us – the parties we had there and at the Aerodrome – The way you cried the night before you first went to Yvonne Kotze’s to meet the other officers’ wives – the day we were invaded by all those puppies and chose Baron – all these memories and countless others are indelibly printed upon my mind and will stay with me whatever happens.