Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller (46 page)

In his closing speech for the prosecution, Anthony Hawke recognized that, to judge from Heath’s actions, what he had done – how he had behaved before and after his crimes –
seemed
mad.

No one suggests that this is a normal person with whom we are dealing. I’d venture, most respectfully, to say that it might be entirely a wrong way to approach this case by saying, ‘Oh, well, anyhow, nobody in his sober sense would do a thing like this. After all, the man must be mad. Let us forget all about what the doctors have been saying and what these men in wigs and gowns have been saying to us. Let us forget all that special pleading and just say, as common-sense people, that nobody but a maniac would behave like this man.’ Members of the jury, with great respect, that is not the way to approach this.
²⁴

Madness – whether it was a moral or medical state – was not synonymous with insanity, which was a legal and not a clinical term. He reminded the jury that they were to establish whether Heath was responsible for his own actions purely in terms of the law. This was further stressed by Mr Justice Morris in his summing up. Speaking for ninety-nine minutes with simplicity and charm of manner, Morris guided the jury, weaving a clear path through the intricate evidence. His view was very plain: despite the confused and confusing semantic debate between the defence and prosecution about partial insanity, moral insanity, moral deficiency or moral degeneracy, the legal position was clear; the laws of insanity were not to be used as a ‘get out of jail free’ card.

Strong sexual instinct is not in itself insanity; a mere love of bloodshed or mere recklessness are not in themselves insanity; an inability to resist temptation is not of itself insanity; equally, the satisfaction of some perverted impulse is not, without more, to be excused on the ground of insanity. The plea of insanity cannot be permitted to become the easy or the vague explanation of some conduct which is shocking merely because it is also startling. The law of insanity is not to become the sole refuge of those who cannot challenge a charge which is brought to them.
²⁵

After Morris’s summing up, at 4.35 p.m. the jury retired. Heath was taken down to the tiny cell below the dock and waited, reading the scrawled messages that murderers of the past decade had written on the walls. Very much a betting man, having listened to the summing up, he made his odds ‘thirty to one’. Casswell went home to Wimbledon, leaving his junior Mr Jessel to take the verdict, a commonly exercised privilege of leading counsel once their main duties were over. However, the press, quick to manufacture a story out of very little, claimed that Casswell had collapsed from the strain of the trial.
²⁶
This he dismissed as ‘absolute nonsense’.
²⁷

At exactly 5.34, with less than an hour of deliberation following this complex trial, the jury filed back into their box. The autumn afternoon was getting dark, so the electric lights were switched on.
²⁸
Heath hurried up from the cells, snapped to attention and for the first time in the trial, lifted his head to look up. The silence in the courtroom was intense and for half a minute there was no sound.
²⁹
Standing straight and firm, his hands clasped behind his back with the ‘slightest twitch of the mouth’,
³⁰
Heath waited to hear his fate, his chest rising and falling. Two police officers stood either side of him in the dock as the judge and then the jury filed back into the courtroom. The clerk asked the jury, ‘Members of the jury, are you agreed on your verdict?’ The foreman, dressed in morning coat and hard white collar,
³¹
stood up and answered in a loud voice, ‘We are.’

‘Do you find the prisoner, Neville George Clevely Heath, guilty or not guilty of the murder of Margery Aimee Brownell Gardner?’

Another pause. The foreman cleared his throat and answered in a voice which reached every corner of the courtroom, ‘Guilty.’ There was no recommendation to mercy. The death sentence was passed and Heath was asked by Morris if he had anything to say. The garrulous airman had rarely had such an attentive audience. With all eyes on him, here was his opportunity to leave the trial with a flourish. All his life he had sought the limelight, a matinee idol at the centre of his own drama. But now there was no protestation of his innocence, no admission of guilt, no remorse or apology. Faced with death, words failed him. His only response to Morris’s question, a suitably nihilistic, empty: ‘Nothing.’

He left the court at 5.41, the gamble for his life rolled and lost in seven short minutes.
³²

Maggie Blunt was in her mid-thirties, a university-educated publicity assistant reluctantly working for a metals company near Slough. That night, she wrote in her Mass Observation Diary how ordinary people like her responded to the news of Heath’s sentence, not with confident cheers, but with an anxious ambivalence.

So Heath has been sentenced to death. I have been following this case in the press all agog and aghast. The news of his death sentence came a long way down on the BBC bulletin tonight and I found Mrs S waiting for it, as I was. I wonder how many other people were doing the same.

I can’t see that it makes much difference whether he was ‘insane’ or not. He was obviously dangerously abnormal and had committed shocking crimes. N was arguing about it when she was here – that you couldn’t condemn a man who was mentally imbalanced. This is a case that will be remembered and discussed in the far future when more is known of psychology.

Where does one draw the line for a person being responsible for his own actions?
³³

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Wednesday 16 October 1946

If ever there were a criminal quite obviously mad, such a one is Heath. It does not take a knowledge of psychiatry or long pondering the hair-splitting of expert witnesses to reach that conclusion. Not merely the circumstances of the crime, but the conduct of the murderer before and after it admit of no other answer. If that behaviour is not mad, then the word has no plain commonsense meaning.

A barrister
, Daily Worker
, 28 September 1946

This weather is quite amazing, don’t you think? For, although the days are quite cold the pleasant sunshine reminds one of any country except England. I’ve no doubt, though, that the fog and rain will not be far off now.

Heath in a letter to his mother,

13 October 1946
¹

T
aken to Pentonville in a Black Maria, Heath was introduced to the prison governor, Mr Lawton, and the medical officer, Dr Liddell, who asked if he would like some medication to help him get over the ordeal of the death sentence. But Heath was indifferent. He was taken to a cubicle and made to remove his smart civilian clothes and given the special uniform reserved for men convicted of murder – a rough grey suit, devoid of buttons or anything that might enable him to do himself an injury. He was now registered as Prisoner No. 2059 and shown to Condemed Cell No. 2. No. 1 was already being occupied by Arthur Boyce, who had been convicted of the murder of his fiancée, Elizabeth McLindon, the housekeeper to the exiled King of Greece. Whilst much of the country was celebrating that summer, Boyce had shot her at the king’s Chester Square home on ‘V’ Day, 8 June.
²

Most convicted murderers remained in a state of complete collapse for anything up to forty-eight hours after the death sentence was passed upon them, but as soon as he left the Old Bailey Heath began to chat casually with the warders on the ‘death watch’. Traditionally, three Sundays would have to pass before the execution was carried out – which would be the week of 13 October. Under the Criminal Lunatics Act of 1884 the home secretary had the power to appoint two doctors to examine a prisoner under sentence of death. The time allowed for lodging an appeal was fourteen days after the trial. But after discussion with Casswell and Near, Heath decided against it, but did allow the medical enquiry to go ahead, though he didn’t expect it to make any difference.

I am not optimistic about the result, neither am I unduly anxious, for in my opinion, the possible alternative may well prove far worse than the present situation.
³

The fact that he refused to appeal and was to take little interest in the medical enquiry that might save his life was at odds with the assumptions printed in some newspapers that the death of Doreen Marshall was an extraordinary bid by Heath to prove that he was insane and thereby escape the gallows. Casswell thought this ‘wholly unwarranted by the facts’.
⁴
Immediately the death sentence had been passed Heath was reconciled to it.

I have very little to say I’m afraid, except that I think I would rather have things this way than spend the remainder of my life behind bars. Even now it all seems like a bad dream and except for what I’ve read and heard I know extraordinarily little about the whole affair. God alone knows what must have happened but it is certain that I am responsible legally and therefore must pay the penalty.
⁵

During the trial, as the defence had effectively admitted that Heath was responsible for the murders, there was no necessity to fully debate the crimes and the motivation behind them. He was certain to be convicted and his only hope of escaping execution was Dr Hubert’s testimony that had gone so disastrously wrong. The fact that Heath wasn’t tried for the second murder also meant that many witnesses were not called and their testimony never examined. Effectively the jury had only heard a part of the story. It seemed the function of the trial was not to reveal the truth but to get a conviction. Even Heath himself claimed to have no knowledge about the motivation behind what Casswell had repeatedly called these ‘motiveless’ crimes.

Morally
[Heath wrote]
I don’t feel I am guilty because I could never have set out to commit two such vile deeds in cold blood. I don’t expect anyone to believe my story – except a few friends who have been terribly understanding – but without going into any details I want you to know that it wasn’t the ‘real me’ who was the author of these acts.
⁶

For Margery and Doreen’s families, there was no explanation, no sense of closure. Other than the knowledge that Heath was to pay for his acts with his life, there was to be no satisfaction for them, nor was the public’s curiosity about the case sated either.

Now that Heath was under sentence of death, the press were able to print any of the stories they had collected about him, whether they were true or not; a condemned man would not survive long enough to pursue a libel suit. Details of the case were embroidered or guessed at, including the particularly unpleasant detail that Heath had stuck empty cigarette packets in Doreen Marshall’s wounds (he hadn’t), the feeling being, perhaps, that Heath was such an inhuman monster that he must be capable of any depravity – as if the two murders he was responsible for were not, in themselves, horrific enough. The press hinted that Heath might have been guilty of other murders and sexual assaults. But as the trial was being prepared, Spooner had already investigated any unsolved crimes that Heath might have been responsible for. A member of the public had alerted the police to the fact that Heath might have killed Vera Page, a ten-year-old girl who had been found raped and strangled in west London, a mile away from her home.
⁷
Spooner also investigated the death of nineteen-year-old Louisa Steele from Blackheath who had been found strangled, raped and mutilated. Both murders had taken place in 1931 when Heath would have been fifteen, but nothing was found to connect him to either murder. On 26 October 1944 Florrie Porter, a 33-year-old nurse, had been murdered near RAF Finmere, where Heath had been stationed when he was seconded to the RAF. There was some similarity between the injuries sustained by both Florrie Porter and Doreen Marshall. But Spooner, scrupulously fair as ever, ascertained that Heath could not possibly have been involved in the death of Florrie Porter as he was on operations in Belgium at the time.
⁸

Despite rumours and assumptions in the press in Britain and South Africa, there is no evidence that Heath was involved in any other murders or assaults.
⁹

The press also became bolder in their references to Margery Gardner’s character and lifestyle. Somehow Trevethan Frampton’s claim that Margery liked to be dominated by men reached the newspapers, which hinted at it when the trial was over. There was an increasing presumption by the press (and possibly by the police) that Margery was in some way culpable for her own death, that having known Heath’s tastes, she had put herself in danger. Throughout the reporting of the trial, both victims were discussed in Hollywood style clichés – Margery Gardner cast as the vampish femme fatale and Doreen Marshall the innocent virgin – as if women could only conform to one of two extremes. Certainly, Margery had been promiscuous but it was Frampton – a man she had only known for six months – who assumed that she was ‘masochistic’, rather than Margery herself telling him that this was the case. When Spooner questioned Margery’s friends and lovers, including her husband, they all agreed that Margery ‘possessed no such trait’.
¹⁰
Peter Tilley Bailey, who had known Margery intimately in the six months preceding her death, confirmed that ‘she has never shown any abnormal tendencies to me’.
¹¹
Assuming that she had such tendencies certainly made the circumstances of her death more comprehensible (a sexual tryst gone wrong) and provided a further salacious development for the press to exploit. But was it actually true?