Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller

by O'Connor, Sean

  After one trip to Stockholm during hostilities, Spooner returned home with a large paper parcel for his wife. He told Myra not to tell anyone that he had brought it back with him as, officially, he wasn’t supposed to bring back gifts from abroad. Myra was thrilled at the prospect of some perfume or maybe a dress-length of material. She unwrapped the package excitedly, but was soon disappointed to find that he had bought her a vegetable colander.6 Undoubtedly, with the privations of wartime, colanders were hard to come by, but Myra had hoped for something more personal, more romantic. But Spooner was nothing if not consistent. In his letters he always signed off ‘Yrs Affect. Reg’. Myra later recalled that she longed for him to write something more loving, how he missed her, ‘the sort of thing a woman wants to hear, but he never did’. Myra kept every letter Reg wrote to her, filing them in bundles according to the year.7

  In 1945, as the war reached an end, and the Allies moved remorselessly through Germany, the search for spies and saboteurs changed to a hunt for traitors, both civilian and military. On 22 April 1945, Spooner was commissioned in the Intelligence Corps with the rank of captain and a week later flew to Paris. Though he admired the city, he missed English food and lamented the shortage of cigarettes, asking Myra to send him over a regular supply of 300 a week.

  After the allied victory in May, Spooner travelled by car further into mainland Europe in pursuit of traitors and deserters. Nothing could have prepared him for his first-hand sight of the devastation the Allies had visited on the enemy. In three days, he felt, he had ‘lived a lifetime’.

  I always thought that people in London and other English towns knew what war was, but I have changed my mind. Nothing the people of London have experienced comes anywhere near what the people of Germany have undergone. The country – certainly the Western aspect – is literally devastated, and one wonders how it is all ever going to be put right. Aachen and Hamm for instance, are literally a shambles, not one single building remaining habitable, yet one sees a few – very few – people wandering aimlessly around, living goodness knows where and on Lord knows what . . . The more we drive East the more of the debacle of the German Reich we have witnessed.8

  British Intelligence had provided Spooner with a list of many of the traitors he was seeking. The most important traitor that MI5 were keen to capture was William Joyce, commonly known as ‘Lord Haw Haw’. Joyce had broadcast from Germany throughout the war to Britain and encouraged the British people to surrender. Though listening to these broadcasts was not illegal in Britain, it was officially discouraged. In 1940, Joyce had estimated that he had 6 million regular listeners in Britain and 18 million occasional listeners. Many ordinary people were keen to hear what the enemy was saying and how they were justifying their attempts to dominate Europe. Since wartime information in Britain was strictly censored, it was frequently possible for German broadcasts to be more informative than those of the BBC.9

  The investigation into Joyce’s crimes was led by Captain William Skardon of MI5, another former police officer. Spooner helped Skardon build up the dossier of evidence about Joyce’s life in Germany and his activities as Lord Haw Haw. When Spooner searched Radio Hamburg, he discovered a recording of what was intended to be Joyce’s last broadcast. Joyce had made the recording whilst drunk, when British troops were less than twenty miles away from the city. In it he lamented the fact that Britain and Germany had not made the natural alliance that they should have done and warned of the looming power and influence of the Soviet Union. The recording was never transmitted.

  Though he generally despised the wartime traitors he was pursuing, Spooner had some sympathy for Norman Baillie-Stewart, the ‘Officer in the Tower’ who had already, curiously, attracted the admiration of the young Neville Heath. ‘I quite like him,’ Spooner told his wife. ‘He is not like the others.’10 Baillie-Stewart was an ex-Sandhurst officer who had been court-martialled under the Official Secrets Act in 1933 for selling military secrets to foreign powers. Though not in danger of the death penalty at the time (as Britain was not at war), the ten crimes he was found guilty of carried a maximum sentence of 140 years in prison. However, Baillie-Stewart served only four, and when he was released from prison in 1937, he immediately applied for Austrian citizenship. When this was refused, he applied for German citizenship the next year, but because of complex red tape and the beginnings of the Anschluss, his application was not accepted until 1940. Baillie-Stewart had, however, been making pro-Nazi broadcasts from 1939 onwards – in fact he had begun reading Nazi-biased ‘news’ on the ‘Germany Calling’ English language service the week before the declaration of war. When he did so, he was still technically a British citizen and was therefore (again technically) guilty of treason, the penalty for which was execution, as was the case with Baillie-Stewart’s more renowned successor, William Joyce. In 1945, Spooner arrested Baillie-Stewart on the charge of high treason. A very fair man, Spooner set out to actively save Baillie-Stewart from the gallows by interviewing all of his friends and acquaintances from the time he arrived in Austria and also uncovering the clerical delay in the approval of his citizenship. Due to Spooner’s diligence, Baillie-Stewart avoided execution and served only five years in prison.

  Spooner was demobilized from the Intelligence Corps with the rank of major on 4 March 1946. Much to the exasperation of his wife, who was keen to take the holiday that had been truncated by the outbreak of war, Spooner rejoined the police force the same day. With the current dearth of police officers and the booming post-war crime wave, his commissioner had told him how urgently they needed the return of qualified senior detectives like him. Spooner replied that he could start straight away; ‘If you need me, here I am.’11 Officially Spooner had already been a divisional detective inspector for two years but he had never actually worked in that rank. His promotion had come through in June 1944 while he was on loan to the Secret Service, so it was based on seniority rather than merit. Now forty-three, Spooner felt, like thousands of men his age, that the war had held back his career and he was now to be faced with competition from a wave of ambitious young men keen to prove themselves in the force once they had been demobilized.

  But Spooner needn’t have worried about being eclipsed by up-and-coming younger men – for his defining moment was just ahead. His experiences as a London-based police inspector before the war and his more recent achievements in the pursuit of the most agile and deceptive of traitors and saboteurs, together with his extraordinary memory and inherent tenacity, were to be the ideal qualifications for him to lead the most celebrated murder investigation of his career for which he would be remembered as ‘Britain’s greatest detective’.12

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Pembridge Court Hotel

  21 JUNE 1946

  At 9.10 a.m. on the morning of Friday 21 June, Elizabeth Wyatt, the manageress of the Pembridge Court Hotel, told her waitress, Rhoda Spooner, to go up to Room 4 and give Lieutenant Colonel and Mrs Heath a knock. Neither of them had come down to breakfast that morning.

  Twenty-six-year-old Rhoda’s duties were to serve breakfast to guests at the hotel from 7.30 a.m. until 11 a.m. seven days a week.1 Though she never normally served meals to guests in their rooms, she had been instructed to make an exception by Mrs Wyatt on the previous Monday morning, when she had served tea and toast to Heath and his ‘wife’. Rhoda had also chatted with the lieutenant colonel over the preceding few days. She had seen him in the hotel lounge on Wednesday morning where she had been serving. He’d asked her for a cup of tea and during the conversation he had mentioned that he was going away on Friday with his wife to Copenhagen and that ‘Mrs Heath’ had just left the WRNS.

  So, on Friday morning, Rhoda went up to the first floor and knocked on the door of Room 4 as instructed. There was no answer. The door was closed, but not locked. Rhoda opened it and looked into the room. The curtains were drawn but there was sufficient daylight for her to see a woman asleep in the bed behind the door. This she assumed to be Mrs Heath (Yvonne Symonds)
whom she’d last seen on Monday morning in bed with her husband when she’d taken up the tea and toast. The woman in the bed was covered up to her shoulders by the bedclothes. The other bed by the window was empty and didn’t appear to have been slept in. Rhoda assumed that Heath had gone out and left his wife to have a lie-in.

  ‘Will you be coming down to breakfast?’ Rhoda asked.

  There was no reply. She quietly closed the door, leaving the woman to sleep on. Downstairs she told Mrs Wyatt that she’d asked if Mrs Heath was coming down to breakfast, but had received no answer.

  Later that morning, Barbara Osborne was attending to her morning cleaning rounds and knocked on the door of Room 4 at about 11.20 a.m. She received no answer either.

  My duties as chambermaid are making the beds in all the guest rooms, sweeping the rooms, dusting the furniture and cleaning the wash hand-basins and generally to make each room clean and tidy. I start work at 9 a.m. and finish at 12 noon. And if I have attended to every room I just leave the house and go home, but should any of my work remain unfinished and I could not get access to the rooms, then I report it to Mrs Wyatt and the matter is left with her.2

  Barbara entered the room. The curtains were still closed and the room in semi-darkness. She saw a woman whom she presumed to be Mrs Heath asleep in the bed nearest the door and noticed that her head was turned towards the window. The lady didn’t stir when Barbara came into the room so presuming she was still asleep, Barbara left without speaking. She decided to come back later and went on about her business cleaning the other rooms. At midday, Barbara knocked on the door of Room 4 again. Receiving no reply, she opened the door and spoke to the lady lying in bed.

  ‘Would you mind making the beds as I am going off duty?’

  Again, Mrs Heath did not answer, so Barbara reported to Mrs Wyatt that she had been unable to clean the room. She finished her shift and went home, thinking nothing out of the ordinary.

  By 2 p.m. that afternoon, Mrs Wyatt’s daughter-in-law, Alice, who worked as assistant manageress at the hotel, went upstairs to Room 4. Mrs Heath may well have had a heavy night, but she surely wouldn’t want to sleep on into the afternoon. Alice entered the room and drew back the curtains. Turning into the body of the room, she saw that there was no response from Mrs Heath to the daylight flooding in from the window. She approached the bed by the door, pulled back the bedclothes from the woman’s neck and saw that she was dead. Alice replaced the bedclothes and hurried downstairs to find her mother-in-law. ‘Come quick!’ she called, ‘I think this woman is dead.’3 Mrs Wyatt accompanied her daughter-in-law back up to the room. The woman was clearly dead. Alice immediately telephoned the police.4

  Sergeant Frederick Averill of ‘F’ Division, Notting Hill, arrived at the hotel at about 2.40 p.m. He was met by Alice Wyatt and shown up to Room 4. He noticed that the key was in the door on the inside but had not been locked. The bedclothes on the bed by the window had been roughly laid over the bed. The bedclothes on the bed near the door were pulled up to the woman’s shoulders. He noticed that she had bruises to the left-hand side of her face. When Averill pulled back the bedclothes, the condition of the woman’s body began to reveal the extraordinarily violent ordeal that she had suffered before she died. Averill then pulled back the bedclothes from the other bed and found the sheets beneath saturated with blood, with large clots in the centre of the bed. Averill called in the murder team.5

  He was joined shortly afterwards by Dr Henegan, the deputy divisional surgeon, Detective Inspector Shelley Symes and Sergeant Frederick Anning of the CID. Henegan, a junior doctor, established that the woman had been dead for some time, but did not at this point look for the cause of death.

  Reg Spooner arrived at the hotel at 3.30 p.m.6 He alerted the pathologist, 39-year-old Dr Keith Simpson, whose reputation during the war had begun to eclipse that of the leading forensic pathologist of the pre-war period, Sir Bernard Spilsbury. Simpson had been lecturing that afternoon at the Police Training College in Hendon when he had a call from his assistant Jean Scott-Dunn to go to Notting Hill as soon as possible.7 District Superintendent Tom Barratt also arrived at the hotel as well as the fingerprint division who carried out their tests and took the scene-of-crime photographs. The washbasin in the corner of the room bore traces of blood. It was evident that somebody had been attempting to wash something away after the murder. The side of the washbasin revealed one single bloody fingerprint.8

  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 tha
t there were three other rooms off the first-floor landing. Alice Wyatt slept in the room directly opposite Room 412 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