Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller (14 page)

Spooner and Symes now took a closer look at the body of the woman on the bed near the door. She was completely naked, lying on her back. Her head was lying to the right-hand side of the pillow, turned towards the window, much as if she had been deliberately placed that way to look as if she were asleep. Her feet were tied tightly one over the other with a knotted handkerchief. Her right arm was pinned diagonally behind her back and her left wrist and left hand lay under the left side of the small of her back. The extraordinary position of the arms and hands, together with bruising on the wrists seemed to indicate that her wrists had been tied behind her back and the ligature later removed. There was a considerable amount of blood on the bedding, but the front of the body and the face were strangely free of it, as if she had been washed after her ordeal.

The cause of death was not immediately apparent. Spooner then tilted the body to see if there were any injuries to the woman’s back. Across her back were several marks. The woman had been thrashed or lashed with a cane or a whip. There was also a trickle of blood from the woman’s vagina, indicating some sort of injury there, but as her ankles were bound with the knotted handkerchief, it was impossible to establish what sort of injury this might be. Spooner and Symes noted that the bedding of the bed nearest the window was soaked with blood. This suggested that the woman had suffered her injuries on the bed nearest the window and had then been transferred to the bed by the door.
⁹

Looking around the room, it seemed as if nothing had been disturbed. There was no sign of a struggle. On the mantleshelf was a white metal bracelet and on the dressing table were a pair of flowery earrings made of fabric. A large ornamental ring and two other rings were still on the dead woman’s fingers. Her fingernails – varnished a very dark colour – were unbroken, although there were traces of blood beneath them. On a pillow on the bed nearest the window was a long, patterned, elongated mark in blood that suggested that a stick, a riding crop or whip had been struck or wiped across it. Keith Simpson arrived and examined the body at 6.30 p.m. and found it to be still warm. He estimated the death to have taken place at about midnight or in the very early hours of that morning.

A brown leather ladies’ handbag lay on one of the armchairs. It contained all the personal elements of the woman’s life including an identity card, which, together with several letters, confirmed that the woman was not ‘Mrs Heath’ at all. The dead woman was a Mrs Margery Gardner of Bramham Gardens, SW5.

Spooner interviewed the hotel staff and was informed that the room had been booked on the previous Sunday in the name of Lieutenant Colonel Heath. Mrs Wyatt was sure that she recognized the man’s face and believed that he had stayed at the hotel before. When she later checked the register, she discovered that he had stayed there in November 1944 with a woman called Zita Williams. At the time he had been wearing a South African Air Force uniform and registered under the name of Armstrong. He had actually registered at the hotel twice before under that name.
¹⁰

When interviewed, both Barbara Osborne and Rhoda Spooner were certain that the dead woman was ‘Mrs Heath’ because she had dark hair, but they had mistaken Margery for the dark-haired Yvonne Symonds whom they had both seen on the previous Monday morning. Importantly, Barbara also informed the police that she had thoroughly cleaned the washbasin as usual on Thursday morning, stating, ‘I cleaned the washbasin and did so with a wet rag and Vim powder all around the inside of the basin and the edges. I have no doubt of that.’
¹¹

Curiously, despite the obvious violence of the attack, nothing untoward was heard during the night despite the fact that there were three other rooms off the first-floor landing. Alice Wyatt slept in the room directly opposite Room 4
¹²
and she had heard nothing after she retired to bed at 10.30 p.m. Of the residents in the hotel only a Mrs Thomas in Room 5 said that she had been woken in the early hours of Friday morning. She had heard creaking followed by the sound of the tap running in the bathroom on the landing. A little later on she heard the front door bang.
¹³

When Spooner telephoned the Criminal Records Office at New Scotland Yard, he was informed that Lieutenant Colonel Heath was the name used by Neville George Clevely Heath who had a substantial criminal record and was said to be living with his parents at an address in Wimbledon. Spooner left Symes at the scene of the crime to supervise the examination of the body and made his way to Heath’s parents’ house in south-west London. After Simpson’s examination at the hotel, Margery’s body was removed in a cardboard coffin and taken to Hammersmith mortuary in Fulham Palace Road.

As the afternoon turned to evening, a
Daily Mail
journalist, Harry Procter, walked home past Pembridge Gardens and saw a ‘small army of reporters’ outside the hotel. Procter ran into a colleague of his, Sydney Brock, who said ‘it looked like a murder, but it turns out to be an abortion’. Later that night, Procter met a police officer friend in his local pub, who presumed Procter was working on this latest murder case in Notting Hill. Procter had been told it was an abortion gone wrong. His police friend said, ‘Then it’s the queerest abortion I ever heard of ’, and told him that the dead woman had been tied up and beaten. Sensing a sensational story, Procter left immediately and headed for Hammersmith mortuary where he joined a growing crowd of reporters who had all been tipped off that an extraordinary investigation was under way.
¹⁴

Across London, Spooner arrived at a comfortable, red-brick house in suburban Wimbledon. The house, standing proudly on the corner of Merton Hall Road, was a substantial three-storey semi-detached residence in a very respectable area, surrounded by avenues of trees and backing on to open playing fields. Spooner introduced himself to Mr and Mrs Heath, who were apparently a very decent couple in their fifties. William Heath was the manager of the Waterloo Station branch of Faulkner’s, a chain of hairdressing shops, and his wife was a housewife. Bessie Heath told Spooner that her son had always been secretive, and was prone to being excitable which sometimes overcame him and made him sick. Heath’s father told Spooner that Neville drank rather heavily, usually beer, but alcohol didn’t seem to affect him. Neither of his parents had any information about their son’s association with women, who he appeared to shun.
¹⁵
Though he was not unduly conceited, he was very particular about his appearance and bathed most mornings.
¹⁶

After interviewing Mr and Mrs Heath, Spooner searched Heath’s bedroom and took away some of his personal possessions including books, papers – and four whips.

He also took Heath’s address book. This contained the names, addresses and telephone numbers of over 300 women.
¹⁷

The post-mortem on Margery Gardner took place that night at 10 p.m., attended by both Spooner and Symes, where Simpson was able to make a more thorough examination of the body.
¹⁸

Margery’s breasts had been so savagely bitten that one nipple was hanging loose; the other was found, bitten off, under her body. Turning the body over, Simpson counted seventeen lash marks, many of them so severe that the diamond weave pattern of the whip and its ferrule-like metallic tip were imprinted on her flesh. Nine of the lashes were on her back and buttocks, six were on the right side of the body injuring the breast, chest and abdomen and the remaining two were on the head over the left and right brow. The lashes were so clearly defined that Simpson was able to measure them with mathematical precision. The left-hand side of Margery’s face had been bruised by two blows or punches. There was also a group of bruises under the chin consistent with someone gripping it to prevent her head from moving.

The wound from which the blood had seeped when Spooner tilted the body was a seven-inch long tear of the vagina running four inches up the right wall and a further three inches across the back. It had been caused by a ‘tearing instrument such as a whip or cane’ being thrust into her and savagely rotated. The actual cause of death was asphyxia due to suffocation, though there was no indication of strangulation. Speculating about the order in which the injuries might have occurred, Simpson felt that the whip lashes took place first, followed by the blows to the face. The assailant then gripped Margery’s jaw with his hand and then her arms. After this he savaged her nipples with his teeth, then penetrated her vagina with the haft of the whip. Finally he forced her face into the bedding, ending her appalling ordeal by suffocating her. Simpson also confirmed the telling detail that Margery’s face had been washed after her death.

Though the injuries had taken place before she died it was not possible to ascertain whether or not Margery was conscious during the attack. She may have been rendered unconscious by the two blows to the head. She was certainly made helpless by the knotted handkerchiefs around her legs and wrists. She could also have been gagged, which may have contributed to her suffocation. This would also account for the fact that none of the nearby guests heard any screams from the room, despite the excruciating pain Margery must have suffered.

Simpson concluded that the injuries were the consequence of ‘a most violent and sadistic sexual assault’.
¹⁹
Having investigated the lash marks and the internal injuries to the vagina, Simpson was convinced that these injuries had all been executed with the diamond weave whip. ‘If you find that whip,’ he told Spooner, ‘you’ve found your man.’
²⁰

Another clue that the post-mortem yielded was the handkerchief that had bound Margery’s feet together. This bore the name ‘L. Kearns’ handwritten in black ink and also had an embroidered ‘K’ in blue silk cotton in one corner. This clearly didn’t belong to Margery as it was a man’s handkerchief and she had a clean and pressed one bearing her name in her handbag. So, who was this man Kearns and how was he involved in Margery’s death? At the time it seemed to Reg Spooner that the hunt was on for
two
men, both potential killers, both on the loose – and judging by the brutality of the attack on Margery Gardner – both extremely dangerous.

Given how clear the case against Neville Heath looked, Spooner issued a memo to the
Police Gazette
and to the press with a description and photograph of him as well as a request for information regarding the owner of the handkerchief. This memo was dispatched to every newspaper editor in the country and arrived on their desks on Saturday morning. But by Monday morning, Spooner had a change of heart. Though he needed the press to help trace Heath as swiftly as possible, he worried that the photograph might compromise a future court case. The taxi driver’s identification of Heath as the last person to be seen with Margery alive would be crucial. If the defence could prove that the driver had already seen a photograph of Heath in the newspapers, his evidence would be compromised and it might make it impossible to prove his guilt.

Another memo was hastily issued by Scotland Yard, withdrawing the photograph from all newspaper publication. Any deviation from the police’s directive would be followed by the full force of the law. Consequently, though written descriptions of Heath appeared in all newspapers, the photograph was completely withdrawn from circulation.

In connection with the death of Margery Gardner at Pembridge Gardens on the night of 20/21 June the Commissioner of Police of the metropolis requests editors to kindly refrain from publishing any photograph of Neville George Clevely Heath as publication will seriously prejudice any subsequent court proceedings.
²¹

In the months to come, this controversial memo was to lead to questions in the House of Commons. Within days it was to have a tragic, indeed fatal, impact.

PART TWO

Neville George Clevely Heath

CHAPTER SEVEN

Rake’s Progress

6 JUNE 1917 – 12 JULY 1938

It is a difficult question, my friends, for any young man . . . whether to follow uncritically the track he finds himself in, without considering his aptness for it, or to consider what his aptness or bent may be, and re-shape his course accordingly. I tried to do the latter, and I failed . . . However it was my poverty and not my will that consented to be beaten. It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one; and my impulses – affections – vices perhaps they should be called – were too strong not to hamper a man without advantages.

Thomas Hardy,
Jude the Obscure
, 1895

N
eville George Clevely Heath was born at home in a Victorian bay-fronted terraced house at Dudley Road, Ilford on 6 June 1917. The world he was born into was dominated by war, violence and loss – themes that for him, and for many of his generation, would characterize and define their lives.

The newspapers that day headlined a further offensive in Belgium where the British army was still fighting for control of the city of Ypres.
¹
Unseasonally wet weather had turned the battlefields into a sea of mud and by October that year, British casualties would mount to over 159,000. This, the ‘most gigantic, grim, futile and bloody fight ever waged’,
²
became known to history as the Battle of Passchendale. At home, southern England was also being terrorized by German raids. By this point in the Great War, Zeppelin airships had largely been replaced by a newer and much more powerful aircraft – the sinister Gotha Bomber. On the evening of 5 June a great battle took place over the Thames between the Imperial German Air Force and the Royal Flying Corps; bombs dropped across the south and east coasts and the inland south-eastern counties. The
Evening Standard
noted that picturedromes and tearooms quickly emptied as crowds sought to find a vantage point to watch the extraordinary air battle.