Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller

by O'Connor, Sean

  Curiously, when asked by the police to identify her body, Margery’s husband refused. Whether this is because he couldn’t bear to see the body of the woman he once loved, or whether he felt a sense of guilt is difficult to judge. Gilbert Wheat and Mr Macro Wilson volunteered to go to London to identify Margery if necessary. Ultimately this duty fell to Macro Wilson, who would identify the body at 3 p.m. on Wednesday 26 June at Hammersmith Mortuary in Fulham Palace Road.7

  Harold Harter, the taxi driver, also saw the story in a newspaper and came forward for questioning. He retraced his journey with the police from the Panama Club to the Pembridge Court Hotel. Several other witnesses from the Panama Club, including Margery’s friends Joyce Frost and Iris Humphrey, as well as the staff at the Panama Club were also inteviewed. Staff and guests at the Pembridge Court Hotel also gave statements.

  A clearer picture was beginning to emerge of the hours leading up to Margery’s death. Heath had signed his own name in the hotel and Panama Club registers, there were dozens of witnesses to the fact that he and Margery had spent all evening together and the taxi driver seemed to confirm that Heath was the last person to be seen with Margery alive.

  On Monday, after reading the description of Heath in that morning’s newspapers, George Girdwood at the Ocean Hotel in Worthing went round the corner to the hotel annexe. When he knocked on the door of Heath’s room on the first floor, there was no reply. Opening the door, Girdwood saw that though some of his belongings were still there, Heath and his suitcase had gone. Girdwood immediately rang Worthing police.8

  At 9.10 a.m., Detective Inspector Eagle arrived at the hotel. Girdwood showed him the newspaper with the description of Heath. He had arrived on Friday and left the day before without paying his bill. He had not been seen since 9 a.m. on Sunday morning when he had been taken a cup of tea and said at the time that he would not require breakfast. Eagle found Heath’s signature in the hotel register and asked if he could look at his room. As well as the five newspapers from the previous Saturday, Heath had left some clothes including his corduroy trousers, his suede shoes and some magazines. Screwed up in the waste paper basket he found a yellow ticket dated 20 June 1946 with ‘Lt. Col. Heath and Friends’ written on it. This was the entry slip to the Panama Club that Heath had used to sign Margery in on the previous Wednesday.9

  Further questioning Girdwood and his staff, the police learned that Heath had been accompanied by a young woman and that later on Sunday, they had received a telephone call asking for Colonel Heath to ring Swandean 906. This local telephone number was checked and found to be that of Major J. C. Symonds of ‘Strathmore’ on Warren Road. Two police officers went to the house and met Mrs Symonds who seemed very reluctant to give any information except to say that her husband had gone to London that morning to see his solicitors, Pontifex, Pitt & Coy in St Andrew Street, Holborn. This information was relayed to Spooner, who rang the solicitors and requested that Major Symonds come to the police station for questioning. Symonds was duly interviewed at Notting Hill and outlined his daughter’s brief relationship with Heath, giving the police the information Heath had discussed with Yvonne about his connection with the murder. At the same time, DI Eagle made arrangements for Mrs Symonds and her daughter to visit the police station at Worthing.

  At the annexe, Eagle noted that the bed sheets were marked with bloodstains. Under the sheet on the right-hand side of the bed he found three iron nails.10 The reason for the presence of these nails was never established. Yvonne had already lost her virginity to Heath the week before, so it’s unlikely that there would have been hymenal bleeding during intercourse.11 If Heath had succeeded in persuading her into any sort of extreme sex, Yvonne was subsequently unwilling to admit to it. At all times, Yvonne stated that Heath treated her with great gentleness and care. Yet the presence of the nails under the sheets does suggest a malign intent on Heath’s behalf.12

  At 3 p.m. Yvonne arrived at Worthing Police Station with her mother and made a statement regarding her association with Heath, focusing on the conversation they had at the Blue Peter Club about the Notting Hill murder. Yvonne also brought with her the two shirts that Heath had given her to wash. Any evidential value that the shirts might have revealed had now been washed and ironed out of them. The shirts and the other evidence from Heath’s room was then sent to Spooner in London. Yvonne mentioned that Heath had two suitcases, one of which he had left at Worthing Central Station. When the police investigated the left luggage there, the other suitcase had gone. Yvonne was then sent away by her parents for a holiday with some friends. A police watch was put on the Symonds’ house in case Heath tried to contact her.

  A man answering Heath’s description carrying a suitcase had been seen at Worthing Station at about 11.15 a.m. on Sunday morning, enquiring where he could get a taxi. He didn’t state his intended destination, nor did he succeed in getting a cab. Further enquiries at the bus office and the railway station drew a blank as both were exceptionally busy that weekend. Heath had disappeared into the crowds.

  The hunt for Heath now intensified along the south coast, focusing on Brighton and Hove, which Heath knew well. Aware that Heath would quickly spend his way through the£30 he had taken from Harry Ashbrook, messages were sent to all police stations along the south coast to report any attempt to borrow money or sell clothing or jewellery and particularly to investigate any complaints from young and attractive women.

  Spooner now made use of Heath’s address book that they had recovered from his room in Merton Hall Road. The book contained nearly 400 names and addresses throughout London and the provinces, all in Heath’s handwriting. Most of these were women. Spooner thought it possible that Heath had made contact with one or other of the women in the address book, so he issued a circular letter to various police forces around the country to question all of Heath’s associates. These included his former fiancées, Peggy Dixon and Zita Williams. Drawing a blank on the south coast, enquiries were made throughout the country – in Bedford, Portsmouth, Leeds, Jersey, Bristol, Bath, Luton, Manchester, Cornwall, Worcester and Wales. At its peak, 40,000 officers throughout the UK were working on the case. Many of the names and phone numbers led nowhere, with some women claiming not to have known Heath at all, or if they had, that they had only met him casually at a dance or in a pub. The police’s job was made more difficult as many of the women were now married and not keen to discuss their wartime pasts. Added to this, several potential witnesses had been killed in the Blitz or on active service. Many of the addresses had been bombed and were now derelict, leaving no trace of their former tenants. At one point, police were rumoured to be watching 150 women across the country and the Daily Mirror correspondent claimed that the police were waiting for Heath to contact one of them.

  In the end one of these women – and we are convinced that a woman is hiding him – will give us a clue to his whereabouts. Yesterday [a Mirror journalist] talked to a dozen women in the London area who have been friends with the ‘Don Juan’ Heath . . . all were under observation by the police . . . None would say a bad word against him. To an attractive brunette to whom Heath proposed marriage only twelve months ago [he] showed a photograph. ‘The darling,’ she said. ‘I still would love him always.’13

  The knotted handkerchief marked ‘L. Kearns’ that had bound Margery Gardner’s feet was sent to the forensic laboratory at Hendon, but despite a countrywide search the owner of the handkerchief was never traced, though a second-hand car dealer called L. Kearns was known to frequent the Nag’s Head in Knightsbridge, one of Heath’s locals. What had appeared at first to be a significant clue proved to be a red herring in what was becoming an increasingly frustrating and elusive investigation. The press scrutinized every development of the search, further inflating public fears that an extraordinarily dangerous killer remained at large.

  With Spooner’s investigation focused on Worthing, but with no real idea where Heath was, the police in London then received an unexpected lead.

  Superi
ntendent Tom Barratt had been mentioned in several of the newspaper reports over the weekend. On Monday morning he received a letter at Scotland Yard. Opening it, Barratt was stunned to find that it was a letter from Heath himself.

  22nd June 1946

  Sir,

  I feel it to be my duty to inform you of certain facts in connection with the death of Mrs Gardner at Notting Hill Gate. I booked in at the hotel last Sunday, but not with Mrs Gardner, whom I met for the first time during the week. I had drinks with her on Friday evening, and whilst I was with her she met an acquaintance with whom she was obliged to sleep. The reasons, as I understand them, were mainly financial.

  It was then that Mrs Gardner asked if she could use my hotel room until two o’clock and intimated that if I returned after that, I might spend the remainder of the night with her. I gave her my keys and told her to leave the hotel door open. It must have been almost 3 a.m. when I returned to the hotel and found her in the condition of which you are aware. I realized that I was in an invidious position, and rather than notify the police, I packed my belongings and left.

  Since then I have been in several minds whether to come forward or not, but in view of the circumstances I have been afraid to. I can give you a description of the man. He was aged approx. 30, dark hair (black), with a small moustache. Height about 5’ 9” slim build. His name was Jack and I gathered that he was a friend of Mrs Gardner’s of some long standing. The personal column of the ‘Daily Telegraph’ will find me, but at the moment I have assumed another name. I should like to come forward and help, but I cannot face the music of a fraud charge which will obviously be preferred against me if I should do so. I have the instrument with which Mrs Gardner was beaten and am forwarding this to you to-day. You will find my fingerprints on it, but you should also find others as well.

  N. G. C. Heath14

  The fraud charge that Heath mentioned here is probably related to the £30 that he had taken from Harry Ashbrook in payment for the trip to Copenhagen. The whip that Heath promised to forward never arrived. Heath deliberately implicated ‘Jack’ who was either a figment of his imagination, or he had given a description of the army officer whom Heath knew Margery had arranged to meet on the night she was killed.

  The letter was also full of basic errors (Heath met Margery on Thursday, not Friday) and was at odds with the story he had told Yvonne Symonds in Angmering in which Heath said that he had arranged for his friend to use his room at the Pembridge Court Hotel in order to entertain a prostitute. In the letter, it is Margery that Heath had supposedly been discussing the hotel room with. Perhaps with hindsight Heath had realized that he had been seen drinking, talking and dancing with her throughout Thursday night. He also suggested that Margery was a prostitute – an idea that the press picked up and continued to hint at. The alternative story that appeared less frequently was that Margery was ‘sweet and refined with haunting eyes and rich black hair’. But somehow this version of the story did not appeal to the press, who were nurturing the case as that summer’s media sensation.

  As he continued to elude the police, Scotland Yard began to receive dozens of ‘dud’ 999 calls with sightings of Heath from Worthing to Wales, from Birmingham to Bognor.15 Spooner called midnight talks to work through the mounting number of clues and leads.16 Letters from members of the public, many scrawled and anonymous, suggested motives for the murder – for instance that Heath was at the centre of a white slave ring, seducing and exploiting defenceless young women. In the golden age of Agatha Christie, hundreds of armchair sleuths claimed sightings of Heath all over the country.

  On Wednesday evening June 26th, in a ‘bus’ queue in the Strand at about 6 p.m. (outside Woolworth’s) was a man who answered the description given in the newspapers . . . the man wore dark glasses which he took off on the bus . . . but the moral of this story is that if there were a picture of the man published, the writer of this letter might have known at once whether it was the wanted man or not.17

  This concern about the lack of a photograph of Heath arose early in the investigation and was later proved to be valid.

  During the night of 27 June a two-and-a-half-ton ‘Dodge’ truck was stolen from Rochester and found abandoned in Worthing the next day. The truck had been loaded with rolls of tarred paper but they had all been removed when it was found. In the cabin was a carton containing twenty-four jars of Brylcreem, a camera and twenty-four rolls of Kodak film. On the box of Brylcreem was a message:

  The police thought they had got me but I am to clever for you, don’t you agree. I warn you there is going to be another murder before very long you see.

  J. Heath.

  P.S. The silly police have got to hurry if they want me.

  Though the handwriting was neat, the spelling (‘to clever’) didn’t indicate a grammar-school education like Heath’s. DI Eagle in Worthing passed the information to Spooner at Notting Hill but the clue turned out to be a red herring. It was clear that the longer Heath was at large, the more intense was the speculation about the possibility of him committing another violent murder.18

  One newspaper, adding fuel to the fire, speculated that Heath might be carrying a gun.19

  As well as questioning Heath’s acquaintances, the police continued to investigate Margery Gardner’s life and background. Her diary had been studied and copied and officers began to interview her friends and associates. It is at this point that the investigation into her death took a complex turn.

  One witness, Trevethan Frampton, had known Margery for about six months. They were both regulars at the same bars and clubs. In his interview with the police, Frampton gave an insight into Margery’s character which offered an alternative interpretation of the circumstances surrounding her death.

  On occasions Mrs Gardner told me that she liked people to be rough when making love to her and also that her husband was invariably rough with her. From this I gathered that she was a masochistic. I am not very interested in this subject and never questioned her on it. I did discover though that she enjoyed the sensation of being at a man’s mercy.20

  If Margery had left the Panama Club with Heath knowing what his sexual tastes were, had she allowed herself to be tied by him in order to be beaten, just as Pauline Brees had at the Strand Palace Hotel? Another witness who claimed to know Margery well, a Mrs Smith, also attributed masochistic tendencies to her, but Spooner thought Mrs Smith was ‘a borderline mental case’21 and that her statement was questionable.

  Nearly seventy years on, the complexities of masochistic behaviour are better understood and the subject is less covert than it was in the mid-1940s. High-street chains like Ann Summers sell a vast array of whips, handcuffs and ties aimed at the female consumer and intended for the mutual exploration of sexual dominance and submission. Though extreme, none of the injuries that Margery had suffered would have killed her, but Heath would only have needed to hold her face down into the pillow for as little as thirty seconds in order to suffocate her. Keith Simpson confirmed that Margery’s face seemed to have been washed after she had died. Might this have resulted from Heath attempting to revive her by splashing water on her face from the washbasin in the corner of the room? Were the police looking at a sexual tryst that had got out of hand? And was this, therefore, a case of manslaughter rather than murder?

  By the end of the first week of July, the investigation had been going on for sixteen days and despite several sightings, Heath had apparently disappeared. Maybe he was abroad by now or one of his women friends was hiding him somewhere in England? The police had drawn a blank.

  On the evening of Saturday 7 July, Reg Spooner received a telephone call that was to accelerate the investigation, but was also to take it in an unexpected and harrowing direction. He was told that a man was being held at Bournemouth Police Station who was believed to be Neville Heath. This was the call that Spooner had been waiting for. He told the police in Bournemouth to keep the suspect at the station at any cost. He would be there as soon as possible.

&
nbsp; Spooner instructed Detective Sergeant Frampton to fill a police car with petrol at Lambeth garage. Fuel still being rationed, Frampton drew three five-unit petrol coupons for the journey there and back.22 At 10.40 p.m. Spooner and Shelley Symes climbed into the back of the Wolseley and raced the hundred miles down to Bournemouth.

  PART THREE

  Group Captain Rupert Robert Brook

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Bournemouth

  23 JUNE 1946

  My learned friend quoted the great detective [Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes] who said that the curious thing about the dog in the night was that the dog did nothing in the night. Another great detective [G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown], known to my learned friend and possibly to you, once asked, ‘Where does a wise man hide a pebble?’ And the answer was, ‘On a beach.’ What better way of removing yourself from immediate notice at any rate, than to go and stay at a seaside place in the holiday season, taking on an identity and character which is not your own, and mingling with the seaside crowds, behaving as an hotel guest and an apparently ordinary person?

  Mr E. Anthony Hawke, Counsel for the Crown1

  Bournemouth is one of the few English towns one can safely call ‘her’.

  John Betjeman, First and Last Loves, 1952