Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller

by O'Connor, Sean

  Pierrepoint tested the equipment, using a sandbag to calculate the drop using the ‘Home Office Table of Drops’. He adjusted the length of the drop tailored to Heath’s weight and stature. The sack was left overnight to stretch the rope.

  That evening, Violet Van Der Elst arrived at Merton Hall Road in her cream and black Rolls-Royce and told Bessie Heath, ‘I’ve come to make a last effort to save your boy.’ Mrs Van Der Elst was the daughter of a coalman but had become a successful businesswoman by developing Shavex, the first brush-less shaving cream, amassing a huge personal fortune in the process. As well as standing three times, unsuccessfully, as a Labour MP, she was a vehement opponent of capital punishment and had campaigned against the death penalty for years. After talking to Heath’s parents she drove to the Home Office and insisted on speaking to the home secretary. When she was told this was not possible, she left him a note outlining the incident at Venlo and the difficulty of Heath’s birth. She also stated that his parents did not appear at the trial as Heath had told them that if they did, he would plead guilty.39

  Isaac Near tried one last time to persuade Heath to see his parents before he died, but he was adamant. He didn’t want to see them because he didn’t want to break down at this stage. Near felt that Heath didn’t seem worried by the prospect of his own death and was resigned to his fate.40 A gambler to the last, he spent his last hours playing poker with the guards for imaginary stakes, as he wasn’t allowed any money.41 After Near left him for the last time that night, Heath sent him a note to thank him for his professionalism and his friendship.

  I don’t know what time they open where I’m going, but I hope the beer is better than it is here.42

  Next morning, Pierrepoint was woken at 6.30 by the warder who shared his quarters and checked that the rope was in the correct position at the right height for Heath, 5 feet 11 inches. The sandbag was put in the corner of the pit, where there was also a stretcher to be used after the execution was completed. Pierrepoint drew a ‘T’ in chalk to mark where Heath’s shoes would be aligned. He edged out the cotter pin so that it was only just in place – this would only save a fraction of a second, but it all helped to make the job faster. Throughout all their preparations, Pierrepoint and Kirk barely spoke, and if they did, only in a whisper, as Heath was in the condemned cell next door, unaware that the execution chamber had been right next to him since he had arrived in Pentonville. The door was hidden behind a wardrobe. Pierrepoint took great pride in his professionalism and attention to detail:

  [The] job had to go to a perfect rhythm, with full understanding all round, as silently and well timed as a team of commandos hijacking a German general from his own HQ. That is craftsmanship.43

  Pierrepoint and Kirk then went for a breakast of bacon and eggs.

  That morning there was a crowd of 3,000 people outside Pentonville, mostly women ‘with shopping baskets and children in prams’. There were also eighteen press photographers. Extra police had been arranged to deal with the expected crowds. The 100-yard drive between the main road and the prison was cordoned off by the police. At 8.55 a.m. Mrs Van der Elst arrived in her Rolls-Royce. Dressed in mourning clothes, she distributed handbills urging the abolition of the death penalty. Headed ‘The Fresh Evidence’, Mrs Van Der Elst’s leaflets claimed that Heath was not responsible for his actions. She had visited Mrs Heath the previous evening and had been told that when he was born, Heath’s brain was ‘terribly injured’ and that his parents thought he would not survive. Mrs Van Der Elst claimed that ‘this man was a possessed madman and should have been sent to Broadmoor’.44 The leaflets were snatched by the crowd and flung high in the air, falling ‘like a snowstorm’ on the crowd which swarmed around her car. The car in conjunction with the crowd then started to cause a traffic jam, so a police inspector, Thomas James, told Mrs Van Der Elst that she was causing an obstruction and must move on.45

  In the condemned cell, unaware of the commotion outside, Heath had risen early and was permitted to dress in the new grey, chalk-striped suit that he had worn for his trial. The prison around him continued its normal routine and the other prisoners carried on with their regular tasks, the prison authorities doing their utmost for the execution to take place as discreetly as possible. Prisoners normally occupied near the execution shed were given additional exercise in a yard remote from it. The prison clock was disconnected for the hour of nine.46

  Just before 9 a.m., Pierrepoint and Kirk waited outside the condemned cell with Harold Gedge, the deputy under-sherriff, Mr Lawton the governor, two senior prison officers and the prison chaplain, Reverend Cleavely. Seconds before 9 a.m., the door was opened quickly and Pierrepoint went straight up to Heath, putting his hands behind his back and strapping his wrists as another door in the cell was opened to the execution chamber for the first time. On this occasion Pierrepoint used a special strap made of pliant pale calf-leather that he only used about a dozen times when ‘I had a more than formal interest in this particular execution’.47 He told Heath, ‘Follow me.’

  Heath walked seven paces into the execution chamber with the noose straight ahead of him. The two prison officers gently stopped him on the ‘T’ marked on the trapdoors so that his feet were positioned across the division between them. As Harry Kirk tied Heath’s legs with the ankle strap, Pierrepoint looked him in the face, eye to eye, ‘that last look’.48 Pulling the white cap from his breast pocket he drew it over Heath’s head. He then reached for the noose, pulling it over the cap. The noose was not knotted, but the rope ran through a metal eye. In seconds, Pierrepoint tightened the noose to his right, pulled a rubber washer along the rope to hold it and darted to his left, pulling out the cotter pin with one hand and pulling the lever with the other. There was a snap as the falling doors opened and Heath’s body dropped into the pit. His neck was thrown back and his spinal column was severed instantaneously.

  His body hung lifeless, swinging to stillness. Pierrepoint estimated that the average time it took from entering the condemned cell to pulling the lever was twelve seconds. But he had done it in seven.

  The notice of execution with declarations from Harold Gedge the deputy under-sherriff and Dr Liddell was posted outside the prison gates at 9.25 a.m. Mrs Van Der Elst turned to a police officer near her and shouted, ‘You swine. I remember you. You do your damnedest. Why did they hang that young man? You do not care a damn.’

  She was charged with obstruction to boos and jeers from the crowd. Police officers forced her back in the car, one officer stepping on the running board and directing her chauffeur to Caledonian Road Police Station to be formally charged. At the station she was asked if she had any other witness to call on her behalf, to which she replied, ‘Yes, my chauffeur.’ Asked the chauffer’s name she couldn’t remember. After some time, she said, ‘Jackson.’ She was charged £2 for obstructing a public highway. She emphatically denied that she had sworn at a police officer.

  Twenty minutes after he was hanged, Madame Tussaud’s opened and Heath’s wax figure was already on display in the Chamber of Horrors. The figure was dressed in sports jacket and flannels, similar to the ones he had worn at the police court hearings, but Bernard Tussaud, an ex-RAF serviceman himself during the First World War, would not permit the model of Heath to wear the RAF tie that Heath himself had worn in court for the first two days of the trial. A blue and white striped tie was found from the stocks at the museum.49 When the museum opened its doors that morning, Heath’s body was still hanging within the precincts of Pentonville Prison.50

  The body was left hanging for over an hour. There was no reason for this last ignominy, it was a directive left over from the time when bodies were publicly exposed on a gibbet. This practice was not to be outlawed until 1949. Pierrepoint himself ‘had no heart for it’, nor did he approve of having to measure Heath’s body after death, carefully logging in the official register the dimensions of the distortion of his body. With the spinal cord now severed, Heath’s neck had stretched by two inches.51 After the allott
ed time, Pierrepoint returned to the execution hut.

  I stared at the flesh I had stilled. I had further duties to perform, but no longer as executioner. I had been nearest to this man in death and I prepared him for burial. As he hung I stripped him. Piece by piece I removed his clothes. It was not callous, but the best rough dignity I could give him, as he swung to the touch, still hooded in the noose. He yielded his garments without the resistance of limbs . . . In London there was always a post-mortem, and he had to be stripped entirely and placed on a mortuary stretcher. But in common courtesy I tied his empty shirt around his hips. [Harry Kirk] had fixed the tackle up above. I passed a rope under the armpits of my charge, and the body was hauled up a few feet. Standing on the scaffold with the body now drooping, I removed the noose and the cap, and took his head between my hands, inclining it from side to side to assure myself that the break had been clean. Then I went below and [Kirk] lowered the rope. A dead man, being taken down from execution is a uniquely broken body whether he is a criminal or Christ, and I received this flesh, leaning helplessly into my arms, with the linen round his loins, gently with the reverence I thought due to the shell of any man who has sinned and suffered.52

  At 11.45 that morning an inquest was held within the walls of the prison chaired by the St Pancras coroner, Dr Bentley Purchase. Ten jurors were sworn in. James Liddell, the medical officer, stated that Heath’s death by judicial execution had been instantaneous, his neck severed between the second and third vertebrae.53 After a short consultation with his fellow jurors, the foreman then requested if they might view the body. Even in death people were curious to look at him, to see if they could read any clue in his handsome features to the horrors he had committed. Repelled by this request, Dr Bentley Purchase informed the jury that this would not be necessary.54

  Thorough to the last, in the final act of their relationship of hunter and quarry, Heath’s body was identified by Reg Spooner. He was then buried in an unmarked grave within the precincts of the prison with no ceremony.

  At lunchtime, Spooner met Pierrepoint in a bar near Leicester Square.55 After a few drinks, Spooner turned to him and asked, ‘How did he go?’ Pierrepoint was quite startled. Ever the professional, Spooner had never asked before (and would never ask again) what had happened during the last moments on the gallows. Pierrepoint said that Heath had faced death bravely with no fuss. He had walked calmly to the scaffold, like a pilot facing what he himself might have called a ‘one-way Op’.

  When the governor asked if he had any last request – perhaps a shot of whisky – Heath said that he would like one. As Mr Lawton turned to organize it, Heath, a player to the last, added, ‘While you’re about it, sir, you might make that a double.’56

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Mrs Heath

  THE PEOPLE, 29 OCTOBER 1946

  I had a son called Neville, but he was not the man who was responsible for two brutal murders. I have read that my boy was a fiend, cold-blooded and calculating. I have heard him described as a monster. I do not believe it.

  He did murder, I know that. He himself knew that he committed both crimes although he could never understand how he had come to do so. To him, everything connected with those poor girls was hazy, their deaths occurred while he was mentally ‘blacked-out’. I am absolutely convinced that the Neville Heath who committed those awful crimes was a different man from the handsome, laughing son of mine who used to carry me off to the pictures or tease me gaily about my new dress.

  The last time I saw him was in Brixton prison when he was awaiting trial. I still cannot believe that was the same boy. To me, my Neville was the joking young man, always ready for a prank, who was yet in deadly earnest about getting his ‘B’ licence to fly a plane. His failure to get the licence helped to turn his brain – of that I am convinced. Up to that moment he may well have been wild and he may have made foolish mistakes, but he would not have wilfully harmed anyone.

  He rang me up that Wednesday afternoon, I remember. ‘I think I’ll just nip smartly home and collect my laundry,’ he said. And he told me he had won his ‘B’ licence. People have said that in not telling me his application had been refused, Neville was just betraying those traits of cunning and deceit with which his character has been blackened. That is not true. He lied because he did not want to hurt me by telling me of his failure. And, on the doorstep, he kissed me goodbye.

  He was always like that – kind and considerate to both his father and me. I remember once, when he was about twelve, his father was in hospital undergoing an operation. I took Neville to the cinema to keep his mind off the matter, because I could see that he was unusually upset and obviously worrying. Suddenly, in the middle of the film, he burst out crying and I had to take him home. He had been worrying over his dad and keeping that worry to himself until it was too great for him to bear any longer.

  As a child, he was as normal as any other small boy . . . full of fun and ready to play a childish prank. He would do ‘stunts’ on his bicycle and he was wrapped up in sport. The mile record he set up at his school has still not been broken.

  Yet, despite his natural dare-devilry, he was a wonderfully kind youngster. Never once did he forget a birthday and always I could be sure that he would turn up with some little present, bought from his own pocket money, which he knew I particularly wanted.

  I never carried a glass mirror in my handbag and Neville as a schoolboy knew this. On my birthday he presented me with a steel mirror contained in a leather case. ‘There you are, Mum. You won’t be afraid of breaking that.’ Even when he was in prison awaiting trial he remembered my birthday and sent me a telegram. He also wired on his father’s birthday.

  It has been said that as a small boy he was cruel to animals and that he once attacked a little girl so badly with a ruler that she had to be taken home in a taxi cab. Frankly I do not know of this incident and neither does his headmaster, who has nothing but good to say of him. Surely I, his mother, would have heard of this, if it had happened.

  When he was about eight, he longed for a puppy. One day I bought him Doodle, a mongrel, for half a crown. He came rushing in from school that day. ‘Mum, did you get me that puppy?’ he asked excitedly. I can still see his blue eyes alight with anticipation as he flung his schoolbooks aside and tore up to me. I had the puppy hidden under a pile of mending in my lap and told him that I had not been able to buy it. His whole face fell . . . until the puppy wriggled out and he picked it up and cuddled it in his face.

  I do agree with certain statements about my boy and those are in his attitude towards pain and fear. He would not show fear and though he hated the mere thought of inflicting pain – either mental or physical – on others, he was not afraid of it for himself. One day he came home from school with his wrist bandaged. When I asked him what was wrong, he replied airily: ‘Oh, just put my wrist out a bit, that’s all.’ Then he ate an enormous lunch and went off without even mentioning that he had a broken wrist and was going to hospital to have it set. He was always like that – cool and contemptuous of his own feelings, and considerate towards others. Once, I remember Mick, his young brother – who adores him still – excitedly demonstrating a rugby tackle on Neville who was then about sixteen and pretty hefty. The pair fell in a heap on the drawing-room floor. Neville was up in a flash and almost in tears because he thought that Mick, in tackling him, had hurt himself. The death of little Carol, the brother between Mick and himself, affected Neville considerably. He was only about six at the time, but I remember how grief-stricken he was. When Mick was born, he was delighted because he now had a young brother to look after.

  My son did wrong in the eyes of the world, but the world also did him much wrong. He adored his young wife and baby son, and was deeply affected when they parted. Though his school record was not brilliant, he worked hard when he had to and his friends have never ceased to speak well of him. Even his days at borstal were coloured by happy memories because there he was loved and respected by all. The fact that he ret
urned during the war to speak to the boys has been mentioned as an example of his arrogance. That is ridiculous – not only was he invited to speak but the governor during his time wrote to me only this month to say how much he appreciated Neville’s help at Hollesley Bay.

  It was his wish to die, knowing the only alternative was to be confined and watched over for the rest of his life. And both his father and I are still proud of him because we know that he died bravely and, to the end, tried every way to spare us suffering. In one of his last letters he wrote, ‘As I see it, this last journey is just one more Op. This time it’s destination unknown and Method of Travel Uncertain.’ Those are the things I remember about my son – the good things that every mother remembers.

  Everyone was more than kind to us in our trouble. I have nothing but praise for the kindness shown to me by both the police and the prison authorities. Our friends stood by us. We have received hundreds of letters expressing sympathy from complete strangers, and people in the district whom I hardly knew have crossed the road to tell me how they believed in Neville.

  In the Bible we learn that Christ cast out devils and I believe that at the time my son did those awful deeds, he was, in the true sense of the phrase, possessed by a devil. I can only hope and pray that soon the psychiatrists will have learned how to do as Christ did – and cast out devils from other unfortunate young men.

  Mrs Bessie Heath1

  AFTERWORD

  The return of the soldier is a potent myth.

  In 1946, many men returning to Britain from the various war-scarred parts of the globe had been changed by what they had witnessed and what they had done. At the same time many of the homes and families that they had idealized in their dreams throughout years of separation and suffering were now no longer intact; everything was in a state of flux, everything changed. Added to this, the whole concept of Churchillian ‘victory at all costs’ was tempered by revelations of genocide, mass rape, starvation, torture and the deadly power of a devastating new bomb.