The RAF flight commander wrote him an excellent report and said he would make a first-class fighter pilot. To all appearances, Neville Heath was a young man with every gift life could offer — a good school, a solid family, and a future in the military. But the RAF gave him something even more important than a career: a uniform. Something that made him a cut above the ordinary civilian.
He loved the look of himself in it. He was discharged after a year for going absent without leave. And then the other side of him surfaced. He was a fraudster, a forger, a thief.
He would sit in a London club with a pipe and a copy of the Times, charming everyone at the bar, all the while cashing cheques that bounced. He embezzled mess funds. He stole whatever wasn’t nailed down. Between 1938 and 1939, he served time for forgery, fraud, and housebreaking.
He adopted false names, always grand ones. At one point he called himself Lord Dudley. He was a charlatan. He was also, deeply, a ladies’ man.
But not in any loving sense. Heath treated women like playthings. He believed they were less intelligent than men, and that they existed for his own use. “All women have the morals of alley cats,” he once said, “and they love rascals like me.
” Beneath the polished charm, he hated women with a passion. In February 1946, a young woman named Pauline Breeze was found in a London hotel room with Heath, tied to the bed while he attacked her with a whip. She had agreed to the experiment, and she was so embarrassed that she refused to press charges. Heath’s career could have ended right there.
It didn’t. In June of that year, Heath met Yvonne Simmons in the city. She was young, a virgin, and plainly innocent. He proposed to her, and she spent the night with him at the Pembridge Court Hotel.
She later told people he treated her gently, with perfect gentlemanly kindness. Heath was always more interested in his next conquest than his current one. He was easily bored. He was constantly on the hunt.
Then, on the 20th of June, 1946, he met a 32-year-old aspiring actress named Margery Gardner in a London bar. Margery was vulnerable. She had recently separated from her husband, she had a young child, and she was struggling in the entertainment business with no real stability. She was looking for someone to romanticize her, to sweep her off her feet.
Heath sensed it immediately. He told her grand stories about his wartime exploits, embellished dramatically, and checked them both into the Pembridge Court Hotel under the name Lieutenant Colonel Heath. And here was the truth of it: Margery had unusual sexual tastes. She liked bondage.
She liked a little whipping. That was the spark Heath needed. He had found the bomb, and he had the pin. They arrived at the hotel around midnight.
What happened next was unspeakable. Margery was bound, her wrists tied behind her back. Heath beat her seventeen times with a distinctive riding whip, leaving grotesque crisscross marks all over her body. He bit her nipples severely.
He thrust something inside her, possibly a poker, and rotated it while she was still alive. Then, as if to add insult to the injury, he suffocated her. The chambermaid found her the next morning. An assistant manager was summoned.
The curtains were opened, and Margery’s mutilated body was uncovered. The pathologist looked at her wounds and said, “If you find the whip, you’ve found your man. ”
Heath, meanwhile, had simply left the hotel around 1:30 in the morning. No panic.
No backward glance. Unmoved by the horror he had inflicted on Margery, he caught a train to Worthing to visit Yvonne Simmons, the woman he had proposed to just days earlier. He spent the night with her as though nothing had happened. Some believe he had pre-selected Yvonne as his next victim.
Why he let her live remains a mystery. The murder of Margery Gardner made headlines. Heath’s name was suddenly public knowledge. To cover his tracks, he wrote a long letter to the officer in charge of the homicide investigation, claiming he knew who killed Margery.
He said she had wanted to use his hotel room to meet another man for sex. He painted her in a dark light, hoping to shift the blame onto a stranger. Aware that the police were closing in, he moved on. He headed to the seaside town of Bournemouth, with its grand hotels and holiday atmosphere.
And he made a remarkable decision. He didn’t hide. He hid in plain sight. He booked into the Tollard Royal Hotel, one of the finest in town, under the name Group Captain Rupert Brooke.
The name was baffling. Rupert Brooke was one of the most famous war poets in history, the great romantic. But that was precisely the image Heath wanted: the great lover, the great romantic, the charming war hero. He stood at the hotel bar, regaling other guests with stories of flying in South Africa and receiving medals.
They bought him drinks and meals while he didn’t have a penny in his pocket. Just days after Margery Gardner’s life was taken, Heath went for a walk along the cliffs of Bournemouth and met two young Wrens of the Women’s Royal Naval Service. One of them was nineteen-year-old Doreen Marshall. She was down in Bournemouth to recuperate from a bad cold.
She was young, away from home, and knew nobody in the town. Heath saw her vulnerability immediately. He invited her to afternoon tea at the Tollard Royal. Doreen was thrilled.
A group captain taking a young Wren out — she had no romantic ideas about it, but she was honored. She went willingly for tea, and later for dinner. He ordered champagne. To all appearances, she was enjoying herself.
But at some point during the evening, the mood changed. Something made Doreen uneasy. Perhaps he said something about his life that didn’t quite add up. Perhaps she sensed the mask slipping.
She asked the hotel to call a taxi to take her back to her own hotel, the Norfolk. That was not in Heath’s plan. He said, “Cancel that taxi. I’m taking this young lady home myself.
”
She protested. He insisted. He said he’d walk her back, and that he’d be half an hour. She corrected him: “A quarter of an hour.
” It was a clear sign she wanted as little time with him as possible. Doreen Marshall was never seen alive again. A day and a half passed. She was reported missing.
The manager of the Tollard Royal knew that the woman Doreen had dined with that night had been with Group Captain Rupert Brooke. He was asked to speak to the police. Heath, convinced he was untouchable, agreed. He went to the police station and told the same story he had told the manager: that the last time he had seen Doreen was in the gardens in central Bournemouth, and he never saw her again.
He thought he was clever enough to talk his way out of anything. He believed he was in complete control. But then, as he was leaving, Doreen’s father and sister walked into the police station. They had arrived in Bournemouth, worried about her disappearance.
The sister looked almost identical to Doreen. Heath froze, as if she had come back from the dead. Detective Constable Suter noticed his reaction. He looked at the man in front of him and remembered the wanted poster that had been sent to Bournemouth, for the man who had killed Margery Gardner at the Pembridge Court Hotel in London.
He said, “Isn’t your name Heath? ”
Heath tried to leave. He said he needed to go back to the Tollard Royal to collect his jacket. The police told him they would fetch it for him.
And in the pocket of that jacket, they found a railway storage ticket. They went to Bournemouth train station and picked up the suitcase Heath had left there. Inside, they discovered a distinctive riding whip — the whip used to kill Margery Gardner. They also found a handkerchief with human hair tied in it.
And in the pocket of Heath’s jacket, they found a single pearl. A few days later, on Sunday the 7th of July, a young waitress walking her dog in Bournemouth was drawn to a rhododendron thicket by a swarm of flies. She found the stinking remains of Doreen Marshall. Her clothes had been torn off and scattered around.
A pearl necklace had been thrown to the ground, beads scattered everywhere. She had been bound. She had been beaten. Her nipples had been bitten.
An object had been inserted into her. And there was a savage wound from her inner thigh up to a mutilated breast. The pearl in Heath’s pocket was from her necklace. He had taken it as a souvenir.
Once it became obvious that the fantasy of Group Captain Brooke could not be sustained, Heath confessed that he was indeed Neville Heath. On the 8th of July 1946, he was returned to London and charged with the murder of Margery Gardner. Although he had slashed Doreen Marshall’s throat and mutilated her body, he was not tried for her murder, because at that point in British law a man was only tried for one murder at a time. Heath, with his usual insouciance, told his defense counsel, “I’ll plead guilty, old boy.
” The counsel said, “I don’t think so,” and suggested he plead not guilty by reason of insanity. Two prison psychiatrists contradicted the defense. They said Neville Heath was a psychopath and a sexual sadist, and that he knew exactly what he was doing. The jury took no time at all to convict him.
Heath was twenty-nine years old. He showed no flicker of remorse for his victims. To the very end, he saw them as objects for his domination. The only tears he ever shed were in a letter to his parents, awaiting execution: “My only regret at leaving the world is that I have been deemed unworthy of you both.
”
On the day of the hanging, the executioner arrived early. They measured the drop, they dropped a sandbag on the rope to stretch it, in a cell right next to Heath’s death cell. At the appointed hour, the bell told of his pinioning and his hooding, and then the drop. Neville Heath was hanged.
He was twenty-nine years old. To the outside world he had been a dashing war hero, a charming group captain, a gentleman. There were no horns. No tail.
No black cloak. He wore a uniform and medals he didn’t deserve. If you met him in the corner of the saloon bar of your local pub, you would see nothing but an upright man. That was the horror of Neville Heath.
You never know a killer is going to strike until it is too late.
