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In post-war London, Heath playacted suave army colonels and heroic air force captains to attract his prey. He had an easy charm and good looks that belied the twenty-nine-year-old sadist's unquenchable lust for blood. He took his first victim, Margery Gardner, a married, self-styled masochist separated from her husband, to Notting Hill Gate hotel. She was suffocted, her flesh covered with blood oozing from strange, diamond-patterned whip marks. Her nipples had been bitten off, and her vagina torn and mutilated by the inseertion of some kind of blunt instrament, which apparently had been fiercely rotated. Her ankles were bound tightly together with a hankerchief. Curiously, her face had been washed or licked clean of blood, although congealed blood still clogged her nostrils. There was no evidence that sexual intercourse had taken place. The graphic horror of the discovery had post-war London in a panic. Scotland yard knew it had a depraved monster on the loose. It also didn't take them long to link the name on the hotel register to Heath, already known to police as a man with a record - although never for anything violent. Obviously excited by his bloodthirsty initiation into murder, Heath did not wait long to strike again. In Bournemouth on Sunday, June 23, 1946, Group Captain Brooke aka. Heath, checked into the Tollard Royal Hotel. He talked up twenty-one-year-old Doreen Marshall who was recovering from influenza at a nearby hotel. Five days after Miss Marshall's disappearance a group of swarming flies were noticed around a patch of undergrowth on a path near the hotel. On investigation, Miss Marshall's body was dumped naked - except for a yellow left shoe - in a clump of rhododendron bushes. This time the pathetic corpse was blooily and sexually mutilated with a knife. Her clothing was casually draped over her body as if it had been tossed nonchalantly on top of her. Her empty handbag, found nearby, had been rifled for items of value. Like Gardner, her nipples were partially bitten off, and a jagged series of slashes reached from her vagina vertically up to her chest. Another jagged weapon, probably a branch from a nearby bush, had been used to violate and perforate both her vagina and her anus. Some stab wounds were an inch deep, and her throat was slit in two places, causing severe hemorhaging, the probable cause of death. Her hands were slashed from fighting off her assailiant. Oddly, Heath called the police himself, giving the name Brooke and offering to help with the investigation. They matched him with descriptions of Heath from London, and invited him down to the police station where he was promptly detained for questioning in the Gardner murder. He gave a story about the evening he spent with Marshall, with the police playing along, until they were satisfied and told him they knew who he was. The police found a wealth of evidence from the two women, handerchiefs and scarves, tickets and weapons stained with the blood of the victims. Although he was charged with both murders, he was only tried for one of them. The defense never put him on the stand because the arrogant braggart would run himself straight to the hangman. He pleaded insane, which was a longshot, considering his background. It only took the jury an hour to return from their deliberations with a guilty verdict - for the Gardner murder, rather than the cold-blooded butchering of Marshall. In a typically debonair gesture, Heath asked that the diaries containing his conquests be destroyed before he died, to save the reputation of those involved. No one was called to testify on his behalf, because Heath asked them not to. No one knows what drove the petty criminal to murder in 1946, and the only known connection between the two was the influence of alcohol present at both occasions. He wrote two last letters to his mother, one regretting his unworthiness of her, and the other lamenting the dawn and asking her not to mourn for him. His last request was for a whiskey, then after a pause, he asked to make it a double. Heath was hanged on 26 October, 1946. |
