Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller (41 page)

‘For the first time, I whipped him,’ said his dispirited mistress, Miss Nina Elms, who, however, hopes that Digby will reestablish his fame as England’s most foremost bloodhound.
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In London, wary of compromising the case against Heath, newspapers implied a connection between his arrest and Doreen’s disappearance without actually stating it, with stories appearing side by side on the front page. But five days after she had last been seen, the whereabouts of Doreen Marshall’s body eluded the police. With Heath now suspected to be a double murderer, the story of the blood-lust killer ignited the public’s imagination and fuelled their hungry desire for sensational details of the case. But even the most hardened followers of the story cannot have been prepared for the shocking revelations soon to come.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Branksome Dene Chine

7–8 JULY 1946

We generally describe the most repulsive examples of man’s cruelty as brutal or bestial. Implying by these adjectives that such behaviour is characteristic of less highly developed animals than ourselves. In truth, however, the extremes of ‘brutal’ behaviour are confined to man; and there is no parallel in nature to our savage treatment of each other.

Anthony Storr
, Human Aggression
, 1968

K
athleen Evans was a cake-maker who lived with her parents in Pinewood Road, one of the well-to-do avenues at the top of Branksome Dene Chine.
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At about midday on Sunday 7 July, she took her dog for a run through the chine, aiming as usual for the beach. She entered the ravine through the Pinewood Road entrance, then adorned with an exotic Dragons’ Teeth Gate, and walked half way down the main drive. She then branched over to the left, going down the steep steps into the chine itself. The ravine was densely covered with large pine trees and an undergrowth thick with rhododendron bushes, furze, bracken, heather and grass.

The spaniel then ran a long way ahead of her until she lost sight of him, but eventually she caught him up at a sandy cliff to the left. Miss Evans called the dog to her and carried on along the footpath towards the beach, coming to a spot with some bushes to the right and a hole in the ground to her left. The pathway began to narrow and it was at this point that Miss Evans noticed what she thought, at first, to be a swarm of bees buzzing around a bush of rhododendrons. Looking closer, she saw that the swarm of insects were not bees at all; they were flies.

Thinking that there must be ‘something objectionable’ in the bushes, she hurried on past, but noticed what seemed to be a dead fir bough propped against the bushes to her right. She thought no more about it.

However, on Monday morning, Miss Evans read the newspapers, which were full of Doreen Marshall, the ‘girl in the dinner gown’ who had ‘vanished in the dark’. That evening, Miss Evans told her father about the swarm of flies she had seen in the chine the day before and asked if he would go with her to investigate.

Kathleen retraced her steps into the sloping ravine. The flies were still buzzing around the rhododendrons and Mr Evans peered into the bushes. Looking to the left, he couldn’t see anything, but on the right he saw what appeared to be some clothing. Most distinctly he saw part of a yellow coat – just as had been described in the newspapers. Mr Evans and his daughter went to the telephone box at the mouth of the chine and called the police.

Given that Branksome Dene Chine was just outside Bournemouth but within the Poole boundary, officers from both stations were sent to the chine, led by Detective Sergeant Bishop of the Dorset Constabulary, based at Poole Police Station. Approaching the chine from the beach, concrete steps led to a sandy footpath up the centre of the ravine. To the west was a refreshment pavilion with a hard road leading up to Pine Wood Road, north-west of the chine. The footpath led up the side of the valley to wicket gates at Cassel Avenue at the north end of the chine. Bishop entered from the promenade entrance, guided by Miss Evans and her father; together they walked about 150 yards up the central path from the sea. Bishop was led to what appeared to be a natural alcove, about 22 feet wide, enclosed on three sides by rhododendron bushes. A fir bough and some branches had been deliberately placed in front of the alcove. Hidden behind them, under the spur of rhododendrons forming the east side of the alcove, Bishop could clearly see a body.
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As it was now 8.40 p.m. and the light was already beginning to fade, Bishop decided to leave the body where it was until the next morning. The chine was closed to the public and a police guard was maintained throughout the night.

The next morning, several officers including Bishop visited the chine with Dr Crichton McGaffey, a pathologist from Somerset who practised in Taunton. Drawing back the fir bough and cutting away parts of the bush, the body was exposed to full view. The sight that met the police’s eyes was so shocking that some officers vomited.

Doreen Marshall’s body was in a grotesque position and had been horrifically mutilated. She was naked apart from her right shoe, lying on her left side with her head thrust forward. Her right arm was extended over her head and her left arm underneath her body. Her right leg was twisted over her left. A week since she had been killed, dried black blood covered her body, now crawling with thousands of maggots which had eaten deep into her wounds.

The body was to the right of the natural alcove formed by the rhododendrons. On the left, about seventeen feet away from the body, were two bloodstains twenty-six inches apart. This appeared to be the scene of the crime itself, just next to the pathway that led through the chine to Pinewood Road. Outside the bushes there were two similar bloodstains, also twenty-six inches apart, as if the body had been moved there, before Heath decided to further conceal the body beneath the rhododendrons. Near these bloodstains, Bishop recovered twenty-seven pearl beads that had been torn from a necklace. These were to match the single pearl that Spooner had discovered in Heath’s jacket pocket.

By the stains under the bushes he found a stocking ripped in two. Near the body was the left shoe and fifteen feet away from it, Bishop found a handkerchief. Piled on Doreen’s body were her clothes – her black evening gown had been pulled inside-out and her lemon-coloured swagger coat had been placed on top with the lining showing. A brassiere was on Doreen’s shoulder. Underneath the coat was a corset belt, a sanitary towel and a pair of cami-knickers which had been torn. Another stocking was found in the bushes, about seven feet above the ground. Further towards the beach, Bishop came across a blue powder compact, the mirror slightly cracked – the gift from Doreen’s sister.

The police continued to investigate the chine for clues, using axes and machetes to cut back the dense vegetation in the growing summer heat. Many officers were veterans of the Burma campaign and the work recalled their days in the steaming jungle.
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Thirty yards from the body, the police recovered what they presumed to be another gruesome clue – a bunch of human hair. It had been permed, so had clearly come from a woman’s head, and there was a substantial amount of it, perhaps three-quarters of a woman’s head of hair. Some had been cut and some had been violently pulled out. Sent to Scotland Yard, the hair would not match Doreen Marshall’s, leading the police to suspect that there may be another body hidden somewhere in the chine. Could this be the remains of ‘Peggy’, the girl Heath had mentioned in his statement, but who had so far not been traced? Press reports would ghoulishly hint that another woman’s body lay in the chine – and that she had been scalped.
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As early as 7.30 a.m., holiday-makers, ‘the majority of them women’, in shorts, swimwear and sunhats crowded around the police cordon on the beach in the hope of glimpsing some of the horrors that rumours indicated had taken place in the chine. Children with buckets and spades also wandered up to the chine to see what the fuss was about. Later that morning, when Doreen’s body was removed, the crowds lost interest in the murder scene and went back to sunbathing, eating ice-cream or making sandcastles on the beach.

Doreen’s body was taken to Poole where her father identified her in the mortuary there. At 2.30, Crichton McGaffey proceeded with the post-mortem in the presence of Constable Bishop. The injuries that Doreen had sustained before and after her death indicated a frenzied sex attack of shocking brutality. Though she had fought bravely for her life, at only 5 feet 3 inches and with a small frame, she had been overpowered by Heath’s powerful physique.

Doreen’s throat had been savagely cut just above the larynx right to the back of her neck. The left carotoid artery was completely severed, but the knife – the size of a fair-sized pocket knife – had been stopped by the spinal column. A second cut just above the first was not so deep and stopped short at the midline of the girl’s throat. Both these cuts were inflicted whilst Doreen was still alive and had resulted in her bleeding to death. But there was a catalogue of other terrible injuries that had been caused both before and after her death that revealed an appalling level of violence.
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There were a number of bruises to the back of Doreen’s head and her left temple, as well as some abrasions to her right cheekbone, as if she had been battered about the head and punched in the face. She had been gagged and bound. There were nail imprints and bruising around both wrists where they had been tightly tied together. Her fingers had a series of V-shaped cuts that indicated that she had fought desparately to fend off a knife attack by grabbing hold of the blade. These wounds cut right down to the bone.

Above the soft parts of the larynx where the knife later cut through, there was a swelling that had been caused by pressure from a soft instrument, such as the penis. In all probability, like Yvonne Symonds, Doreen had been a virgin, but Heath had extended her none of the sensitivity that Yvonne had been fortunate enough to receive. There was a bruise on the right shoulder and an area of redness above and below the left collarbone, denoting some pressure, probably from Heath’s knee. Some of her ribs had been broken and splintered, puncturing her left lung. These injuries might have resulted from Doreen being forcefully pinned to the ground and her squirming under Heath’s considerable weight of 171 lb as he raped her, undoing the gag in order to force himself into her mouth, pinning her down with his knee.

There was a large area of abrasion of the skin between the two shoulder blades. On the left side of the back, below the shoulder blades there were horizontal abrasions and corresponding abrasions at the back of the left arm. These were possibly due to Doreen being dragged across the ground, naked, whilst still alive.

Having dragged her further into the undergrowth, he then released her hands, cutting the handkerchief at this point with the knife – possibly with the intention of forcing her to do further sexual acts under duress.

At the back of the neck were two stricture marks. These were horizontal, about an inch apart, as if an attempt had been made to strangle her, possibly with the webbing straps or lengths of freshly cut string that had been found in Heath’s possession. Doreen had suffered all of these injuries before Heath had slashed her throat and killed her. The final moments of her life in a dark and lonely woodland by the beach must have been terrifying.

After she had been killed, Doreen’s body had been subjected to a series of mutilations of animal savagery. The right nipple had been bitten off. There was a deep cut extending diagonally across the right breast below the nipple, sloping down towards the middle. A second cut above the nipple joined the first cut below. There were similar injuries to the left breast, the left nipple having been savaged and torn until it was hanging off. Most shocking of all was a long deep cut running vertically up the front of the body, starting below the genitals from the inner thigh upwards. The blade had reached deep into the muscle one and a half inches from the surface of the skin. The cut extended up to a line joining the nipples. This long cut was done in four brutal strokes with Heath positioned by Doreen’s left shoulder. There were also injuries to the genitals. The vagina and anus had been perforated and the skin between them had been torn to a depth of three inches from the surface. These injuries had been made by a rough instrument – possibly a branch – with extreme brutality.

The police puzzled how Heath had managed to persuade a sensible, respectable girl like Doreen to such an isolated spot in order to carry out his intentions. At the Tollard Royal, Doreen had been very clear that she wanted to go straight home, but somehow Heath had succeeded in coaxing her to walk down the zigzag path in front of the hotel and down to the beach. The lights of the pier – and safety – were only a minute away to the east. But Heath persuaded Doreen to walk a mile in the opposite direction from her hotel towards the Bournemouth chines. It is clear from Yvonne Symonds’ statements that Heath was extremely persuasive (she recalled that he ‘over-persuaded’ her to sleep with him) and he may well have resorted to this tried-and-tested strategy, suggesting to Doreen that they get married. This impulsive romantic suggestion in the middle of the summer night may have convinced Doreen to accompany Heath towards Branksome Dene Chine – an area he knew from his walks with Peter Rylatt. The chines nearer to Bournemouth and closer to the Tollard Royal were more developed and less suitable for lovers’ meetings. Having failed to persuade Doreen to go up to his room at the hotel (as he had failed to do with Peggy Waring), Heath’s objective may well have been to seduce Doreen in the chine. Having walked her along the beach, he then suggested that they go into the chine. In doing so he had either lied that it was a shortcut back to Bournemouth or he had already succeeded in persuading her to have sex with him.
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Even today in daylight the chine feels dark and isolated – in the middle of the night it must have seemed extremely forbidding to Doreen, but she had her air force pilot to protect her.