Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller (49 page)

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.
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After the allotted 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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 returned 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 Heath
¹

AFTERWORD

T
he 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.

Approximately 60 million people were killed in the Second World War
¹
and at least as many who survived were bruised and shattered by it, servicemen and women, their spouses and their children. Many lived with the legacy of this trauma for years to come – and some continue to do so, though their number now dwindles year on year.

To date, the story of Neville Heath has been the preserve of sensational and often lurid true-crime anthologies. It has been consigned to history as a sex crime, in the tradition of Jack the Ripper and paving the way for Haigh, Christie and later horrors. But examined in the context in which they happened, perhaps the murders are uniquely a product of their time and place – not a simple tabloid tale of sex and sadism, but a much more complex story of class, aspiration and damage; of damaged individuals in a damaged world. In this light, Heath might also be counted as a casualty of historical forces beyond his control – shaped, defined and broken by his experiences in the war that had just ended. In turn, Margery Gardner and Doreen Marshall became further casualties, in Heath’s hands, of the early days of peace.

After the death of her mother, Margery Gardner’s daughter Melody had been formally adopted by her grandmother in Sheffield and given her mother’s maiden name, in order to protect her from the extraordinary interest that the case elicited at the time. Mrs Wheat was also determined that Melody’s errant father should have nothing to do with her upbringing. Two weeks after Heath was executed, Peter Gardner married Kathleen Wyard. But this marriage was to be short-lived; Peter died from cirrhosis of the liver on 1 May 1947, the inevitable outcome of his alcoholism.
²

As a young girl, Melody accepted that she was an orphan like many children of her generation who had lost parents during the war. She and her grandmother lived together in Sheffield at Oakholme Road, with her uncle Gilbert visiting in the holidays from the various schools where he was teaching. But as she grew to maturity, Melody became more and more curious about her mother and began to ask her grandmother questions. Why was her name different, for instance, than her mother’s that was carved on her gravestone in the local cemetery? Mrs Wheat and Gilbert, with the best of intentions, tried to protect young Melody from the truth for as long as possible. They had done their best to put Margery’s death behind them, never giving interviews and never discussing it at home. Eventually, having been repeatedly pestered by Melody, Mrs Wheat broke down in tears and told her the story of her mother’s tragic death. Now that she knew, Mrs Wheat hoped that that would be the end of the matter. But Melody was by then a curious adolescent and desperate to find out more about the mother she barely remembered, but missed intensely.