Handsome Brute
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2013
This paperback edition published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2014
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Copyright © 2013 by Sean O’Connor
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This is an astonishing case, is it not? The probability is, of course, that Heath knows no more about the state of his mind than any of us do about our own minds. It is something that is part of his nature; it is natural; to him it would not appear extraordinary.
J. D. Casswell KC
Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?
Shakespeare, King Lear (III, vi)
For Jo O’Keefe
1969–2010
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
CHARACTERS
PROLOGUE: Mrs Brees
PART ONE: London
1 Summer 1946
2 Miss Symonds
3 Mrs Gardner
4 Thursday 20 June 1946
5 Detective Inspector Spooner
6 The Pembridge Court Hotel
PART TWO: Neville George Clevely Heath
7 Rake’s Progress
8 Borstal Boy
9 Lt. James Robert Cadogan Armstrong
10 Out of South Africa
11 Thursday 20 June 1946
12 Rogue Male
PART THREE: Group Captain Rupert Robert Brook
13 Bournemouth
14 Miss Waring
15 Miss Marshall
16 The Tollard Royal Hotel
17 Detective Constable Suter
18 Branksome Dene Chine
PART FOUR: The Twisting of Another Rope
19 3923
20 Mrs Armstrong
21 The Old Bailey
22 Wednesday 16 October 1946
23 Mrs Heath
AFTERWORD
APPENDIX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FURTHER READING
ENDNOTES
List of Illustrations
FOREWORD
So much for Raffles. Now for a header into the cesspool.
George Orwell, ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’, 1944
Heath’s story is not a pretty one . . . it will be remembered as a sort of sadistic bloodbath not untypical of an age of crime where sadism and bloodbaths are, if anything, coming to be the rule rather than exceptions.
Nigel Morland, Hangman’s Clutch, 1954
With the passing of the Second World War generation into history, the story of Neville George Clevely Heath, once regarded as ‘the most dangerous criminal modern Britain has known’1 and ‘the most atrocious murderer in modern times’,2 has dwindled in our collective memory in the sixty-eight years between 1946 and today.
Heath’s reputation – once a byword for sadistic perversion and psychopathic violence – has not held the popular imagination as Christie’s or the Moors Murderers’ have. This is despite the fact that the case caused a media furore at the time, providing gruesome (and titillating) copy in newspapers dominated by the grey realities of austerity Britain: the national debt, the initiation of bread rationing and the painfully slow process of demobilization. The case was a gift for the tabloids with its sensational ingredients of aberrant sex and violent death, set in a world undergoing a process of radical change. The blond, handsome Heath, still tanned from his time abroad, was a great distraction for a nation in flux, exhausted by six years of wartime privation and looking towards an uncertain future. All the elements of the case came together to make a classic English narrative: a charming but vicious protagonist ridden with class anxiety, an ambitious detective, a national manhunt for a killer on the loose.
From a twenty-first-century perspective, the background to the murders – the pubs, bars and nightclubs of west London and the genteel hotels of south-coast seaside resorts – conjure a lost, very English world. It’s the socially and sexually anxious environment of Agatha Christie and Terence Rattigan, filtered through the prism of Patrick Hamilton’s drink-sodden novel, Hangover Square. But despite the classic and comfortable mid-twentieth-century English setting, the savagery of the crimes and Heath’s at once charming, yet pathological, personality anticipate an American style of slaughter much more akin to Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho or Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. And despite the period details – the Royal Air Force slang, the pipe clenched in the teeth and the old school tie – Heath’s laconic attitude both to his crimes and to the prospect of his own extinction is redolent of the casual cruelty of contemporary murderers like John Maden, who killed his niece Tia Rigg in Manchester in 2010, ‘because I felt like it’. When he was finally arrested, Heath responded in a similarly offhand manner: ‘Oh, all right.’3
Such was the appetite for news of the case at the time, that in the summer of 1946 when newspapers were generally restricted to four skimpy pages because of newsprint rationing, the Heath case received enormous coverage. In reporting the trial, journalists took licence to report – in surprising detail – the most graphic revelations of the murders as well as the more salacious details of Heath’s sex life. The trial offered an opportunity to examine the darker avenues of sexuality in modern Britain – and this was all available over the breakfast table with the post and the toast. Heath’s friends even negotiated a newspaper deal for him in order to give his exclusive side of the story.
Curiously, given the nature of his crimes, the audience for Heath’s story was primarily female. Some women, it was reported, queued for fourteen hours outside the Old Bailey in the hope of getting just a glimpse of this most notorious of ladykillers. ‘Rarely’, noted the People, ‘have women been so strangely fascinated by a murder trial.’4
For a society struggling to negotiate its place in the new world order, Heath’s story articulated an alarming new postwar anxiety. With millions of soldiers, sailors and airmen returning to Britain – many of them trained killers – the Heath trial exposed the tension created by re-integrating servicemen en masse into the hugely changed communities and families they had left years earlier. Newspapers of the time are filled with tragic stories of servicemen returning home and killing their estranged wives, unable to settle into the brave new, post-war world. Commenting on the case of one former soldier who had done just that, which resulted in the conviction being commuted to manslaughter, Mr Justice Charles warned that ‘the law of the jungle’5 was creeping into English courtrooms. The News Chronicle worried that ‘it would seem from some recent murder trials that the unfaithful wife of a servic
eman is an outlaw with no benefit of law whatsoever. She may be murdered with impunity.’6
Heath’s career encapsulated the civilian population’s particularly ambivalent attitude towards pilots from Bomber Command. Taking their lead from Winston Churchill, the public had lauded ‘the Few’, the brave boys in Spitfires who defended the nation from invasion in 1940, dog-fighting the Luftwaffe across the skies above the South Downs. But Bomber Command had flown into Europe causing devastation on an unprecedented scale, wiping out civilian and military targets alike with a seeming disregard for human life. They were at once glamorous but deadly – the creators of those iconic symbols of wartime destruction, Berlin, Hamburg and Dresden.7 In his study of the RAF during World War II, The Flyer, Martin Francis observes ‘a broader ambivalence among the public and the men of the RAF themselves, as to whether they were chivalric knights of the air or merciless agents of violent destruction’.8 Neville Heath – the charmer turned killer – absolutely embodies this disorientating anxiety, and this may well be a key to the extraordinary interest the public took in the case; for Heath’s story dramatized one of the unspoken fears of the age.
As early as 1947, only a year after the murders, a serial killer with remarkable similarities to Heath appears in Ken Annakin’s ostensibly upbeat film, Holiday Camp.9 Dennis Price plays Squadron Leader Hardwick, a suave ex-RAF pilot, charming lonely women with tales of his wartime exploits, whilst hiding his true nature as the ‘mannequin murderer’. The references to Heath would have been very clear to cinema-goers at the time. The film attempts to examine the new democracy ushered in by the Welfare State. All strata of society get to take a holiday – even if that only means a chilly week at Butlins in Bognor. But despite the optimism for the new Albion inherent in the film, it’s clear that the murderous Squadron Leader Hardwick – and Heath himself – articulated the unease in British society at welcoming home a whole generation of men, many of whom had killed during the war. Having fuelled and channelled these violent instincts on behalf of the state, where were they to be directed now? And, indeed, could they be channelled at all? Or were these dark instincts to become a reality of the post-war world?10
The fascination with Heath continued after his trial and began to fill more than just newspaper copy. Two sensational monographs about the case were published with indelicate haste after Heath’s trial, both by journalists who claimed to have known Heath personally. Gerald Byrne’s Borstal Boy: The Uncensored Life of Neville Heath was published in 1946, printed to economy standards and bearing a suitably sombre black and white cover. Full of salacious (and often unsubstantiated) detail, it is a paperback shocker masquerading as a morality tale, ‘of a man . . . who stopped at nothing to satisfy his own craving for position, money and power’.11
Sydney Brock’s The Life and Death of Neville Heath followed swiftly in 1947. Though the text attempts a serious examination of Heath’s life and crimes from a first-hand point of view, it has a Mills & Boon-style subtitle: The Man No Woman Could Resist. The cover of this railway bookstore paperback depicts a sexy young woman in a saucy short skirt – a whip to her side, hanging sinisterly in mid-air. The cover promises a ‘Sensational-Sadistic-Romantic-True Story’.12 This uncomfortable tone – exploiting the case as soft pornography – came to dominate non-fiction writing about Heath. James Hodge, who published the much-admired Notable British Trials series, had hesitated about covering the Heath trial at all, precisely because the facts of the case could too easily result in something of dubious value, bordering on exploitative porn. Eventually Macdonald Critchley successfully edited the case in 1951, winning resounding praise from Hodge:
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 reg
ard 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 Pictorial23 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
Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller Page 1
