Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller (2 page)

Heath could very well have deteriorated into a wretched book in less capable hands and that is why I did not want to include it in our series before, in view of the less savoury angle some might have taken.
¹³

Heath’s story continued to fascinate the public and resonated throughout popular culture in the years following the trial. In 1949, the writer, Elizabeth Taylor, reinvented Heath’s story as a dark romance in her novel,
A Wreath of Roses
.
¹⁴
Shortly afterwards, Patrick Hamilton wrote a trilogy of novels focusing on an amoral con man, Ralph Gorse, in his
Gorse Trilogy
(1951–55). Even if Gorse’s career as a petty criminal doesn’t actually lead to murder (though there’s a clear sense that he’s capable of it), it’s apparent that in his depiction of this satanic womanizer, Hamilton had drawn heavily on details from Heath’s biography, including incidences of cruelty in childhood and the manipulation of women as an art form, both with a strong undercurrent of sadomasochism.
¹⁵
All these facts were readily available in the popular press at the time of Heath’s arrest and trial.

In 1954, the criminologist and novelist Nigel Morland remarked on the dramatic qualities inherent in the Heath case, ‘in that it unfolds almost like a film story, with backgrounds slightly out of focus’.
¹⁶
It’s no surprise then that Alfred Hitchcock, renowned especially in his later works for his explorations of sex and psychopathy – particularly after the success of
Psycho
in 1960 – was drawn to Heath’s personality and spent several years developing a film inspired by the events of the case. The script, originally written by Benn Levy, was called
Frenzy
(latterly
Kaleidoscope
).
¹⁷
By 1967 Hitchcock was already making camera tests for the film and had shot an hour of silent footage. This was to be Hitchcock as he’d never been seen before – informed by the European New Wave with a particular emphasis on realism, graphic sex and violence.
¹⁸
But this new Hitch proved too radical for the studio executives at MCA. They rejected the script and the Heath project was shelved. Howard Fast, who also worked on the script, claimed that the studio told Hitchcock that they’d never allow him to shoot it as ‘his pictures were known for elegant villains and here was an impossibly ugly one’.
¹⁹
The title was eventually recycled for Hitchcock’s more accessible 1971 British comeback featuring Barry Foster as Rusk, the ‘necktie murderer’.
²⁰
But the essence of the film
Frenzy
– a charming but ultimately terrifying sex killer – shares much in common with the character of Heath, Rusk’s fetish for neckties echoing Heath’s widely reported fetish for handkerchiefs.

Though the facts of the case created an international media sensation, reported in newspapers and magazines across the globe, the trial was very English in tone; low-key and devoid of histrionics. The dramatic focus of the three-day hearing was a debate about Heath’s sanity. This was assessed by a statute over 100 years old – the M’Naghten Rules of 1843 – which posed the question: ‘Did the Defendant know what he was doing – and, if so, did he know what he was doing was wrong?’ This made no concessions for the developments in psychology and psychiatry since the turn of the twentieth century. The plea of diminished responsibility was not to reach the British statute books for another decade with the passing of the Homicide Act in 1957. This was to state that:

Where a person kills or is party to a killing of another, he shall not be convicted of murder if he was suffering from such abnormality of mind . . . as substantially impaired his mental responsibility for his acts and omissions in doing or being a party to the killing.
²¹

No such plea was available to Heath’s defence in 1946.

Key witnesses, who may have been able to offer crucial evidence in relation to Heath’s past behaviour, his service career and his psychological state in the months leading up to the murders, were never called to the trial. With the lack of such evidence the issue of Heath’s sanity (or insanity) was never fully debated. Beyond the categorization of Heath as a malevolent killer and sexual sadist, there was little curiosity, from either the prosecution or the defence, in examining Heath’s character or background. Heath didn’t deny committing the murders once he’d been arrested – consequently, there was no attempt at the trial to try and explain them. What provoked Heath to do what he did remains a mystery. Though he later gave a version of events to the press, this may have been motivated by his wish to leave money to his family and pay off his debts, rather than any desire to leave behind his version of the ‘Truth’. And, with regard to
any
story Heath told, it’s important to bear in mind that he was a sophisticated and practised liar, having talked his way into and out of dramatic situations since his schooldays.

In his essay,
Decline of the English Murder
, published in the same year as the trial, George Orwell observed a sea change in the culture of murder in Britain and firmly pointed to the Second World War as the tipping point.
²²
He lamented the passing of the ‘Elizabethan age’ of English murder which, he suggested, spanned from 1850 to 1925 and included classic cases like Crippen, Seddon, Mrs Maybrick, Thompson and Bywaters – all domestic crimes motivated by money, sex or respectability. He contrasted these with the ‘Cleft Chin Murder’ of 1944, committed by Elizabeth Marina Jones and Karl Hulten, a meaningless killing set against ‘the anonymous life of dance-halls and the false values of the American film’. In effect, he suggested that the average reader of the
News of the World
or the
Sunday Pictorial
²³
enjoyed the brutality of this new American style of murder because, as a culture, Britain had been brutalized by the effects of the war.

Orwell had first outlined this theory in ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’, comparing the author E. W. Hornung’s popular character, Raffles – the gentleman thief – with James Hadley Chase’s hard-boiled American tale
No Orchids for Miss Blandish
, a novel of murder, torture, sadistic violence and rape. Significantly this became one of the most popular novels of the war years and Orwell was clear in what he felt lay at the heart of its huge success – it articulated the sublimated anxieties of the age:

In his imagined world of gangsters Chase is presenting, as it were, a distilled version of the modern political scene, in which such things as mass bombing of civilians, the use of hostages, torture to obtain confessions, secret prisons, execution without trial, floggings with rubber truncheons, drownings in cesspools, systematic falsification of records and statistics, treachery, bribery, and quislingism are normal and morally neutral, even admirable when they are done in a large and bold way.
The average man is not directly interested in politics, and when he reads, he wants the current struggles of the world to be translated into a simple story about individuals
[my italics]
.
²⁴

This may well be another reason why Heath’s story touched such a popular nerve at the time, articulating as it did a brutal and violent strain in modern culture, unnervingly close to the surface, through the story of a once-heroic individual turned bad.

For the first time, this book examines evidence and witness statements that have been held in previously restricted files from the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police. Some evidence relating to third parties remains restricted in the National Archives until 2045 as do the scene of crime and post-mortem photographs, which were described at the time as ‘grotesque’. The post-mortem reports themselves are sufficiently graphic to make it clear the appalling nature of these images.

My intention is to examine the tragic events of 1946 in the fuller context of what we now know about the period and the case, as well as examining issues unexplored at the time concerning Heath’s life leading up to the killings, which might have some bearing on his subsequent actions. What was the combination of circumstances that brought the crisis in Heath’s life to a head that summer? And how far is Heath’s case emblematic or indeed symptomatic of the age in which he lived? For in a country battered and exhausted by six years of war, a culture in a moment of change, and the sense of a new morality around the corner, Heath was regarded as ‘the incarnation of war-time and post-war vices’.
²⁵

Throughout 1946, the major international news stories were the increasing violence in Palestine and the trials of the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. With the revelation of the horrors of the death camps, there’s a sense that mankind was capable of a depth of cruelty, a lack of humanity barely imaginable in the relative innocence of the pre-war period. Certainly with Gordon Cummins, the ‘blackout ripper’, who mutilated the sexual organs of his victims with a can-opener, followed soon after by Heath, then the acid-bath murderer Haigh and the necrophiliac Christie, there does seem a real sense of extremity – a ferocity and violence extremely rare in British crime since the Whitechapel murders at the end of the nineteenth century.

Early in the investigation, Detective Superintendent Lovell of the Dorset Constabulary first articulated the intriguing power of Heath’s complex nature: ‘Certainly his personality is an extremely puzzling one, and capable of more than one single interpretation.’
²⁶
Heath’s solicitor, Isaac Near, later commented that ‘whatever the facts of the case, Heath had certainly a remarkable personality – a personality that made one like him’.
²⁷
As well as a startling lack of remorse, the persona Heath reveals in his letters from prison show real tenderness and self-awareness. He was capable of inspiring genuine affection in many of the people he knew, yet it’s impossible not to be repelled by the atrocities he committed. What continues to fascinate is his elusive, contradictory character. How do we reconcile the suburban confidence trickster, the charismatic and articulate ladies’ man with the savage and pitiless murderer who had the capacity not just to kill, but to violate the bodies of his victims with such ferocity that war-hardened police officers vomited on seeing them?

At times it’s uncomfortable to examine the records of this case and find the lives of both killer and his victims described in such forensic detail, a knowledge denied to even their closest friends and family; not just a list of dates and places, but the most intimate details of their lives – the money they had (or more often didn’t have), the dates of their menstrual cycle, their sexual predilections, their innermost secrets. But it’s this sometimes invasive detail that diminishes the passage of time and brings home the fact that they may not be ‘fools in old-style hats and coats’ at all; that perhaps we share more with the wartime generation than we thought, and their ambitions and anxieties – despite the years between us – remain constant and universal, urgent and real.

William Bixley served for fifty years in Court No. 1 as supervising officer at the Old Bailey. He had held a uniquely privileged position, attendant at the most distressing and dramatic of trials. Yet, in his memoir of 1957, Bixley reflected that, of all the trials he had witnessed throughout his half-century of service, Heath’s case was ‘the most upsetting’.

The reason for the feeling of revulsion and dread which, I think, permeated the minds of everyone in that Court was that Heath seemed ostensibly so normal, and one had deep forebodings that only by a hair’s breadth did other seemingly decent and pleasant young men escape from the awful sexual sadism which, at times, makes man lower than any animal that walks or crawls on the face of the earth.
²⁸

It’s that hair’s breadth that separates us from Heath that continues to chill us, too. How could this ‘seemingly decent and pleasant’ young man also be capable of some of the most brutal acts in British criminal history?

CHARACTERS