Neville Heath is widely regarded as Britain’s first modern sex killer. The murders he committed in Bournemouth and London in 1946 are now the subject of a shocking new book. Faith Eckersall reports

He died in Pentonville Prison, his neck snapped by the noose constructed for him by Britain’s chief hangman, Albert Pierrepoint.

Neville Heath’s execution took just seven seconds but the shadow he cast over this part of the world has stayed far longer. Even during the 1990s, teenage lads would dare each other to spend some time at dusk or in the dark at the place in Branksome Dene Chine where the body of Doreen Marshall was found.

“My dad was a policeman and so I knew, we all knew, that the body of a woman had been left there,” says one of those who took this spooky challenge. Later he was surprised to discover, during a visit to Madame Tussauds, that a waxwork of the woman’s killer still stands to this day, its piercing blue eyes following you round the room.

Heath was a killer whose crimes straddled two eras; the Victorian and the modern era ushered in by the horrors of World War II. In his new book, Handsome Brute, author Sean O’Connor describes him as operating in a ‘lost, very English world’ laying bare the attitudes that allowed Heath to get away with lying to police because: “A gentleman’s word should be accepted.”

O’Connor reports the belief of prominent campaigners, and some of the jurors that tried him, that Heath should not have been hanged because someone who had committed crimes like his must be insane, not evil.

Not that many people at the time had any comprehensive idea what he’d really done; the details were considered too appalling to be reported and indeed, could still not be fully catalogued in a family newspaper.

Before he’d arrived in Bournemouth, already on the run from an horrific sex killing in a Notting Hill Hotel, Heath had lead a life of risk and crime.

Born and educated in respectable Wimbledon, he joined the RAF but was thrown out for stealing.

This formed a life-long pattern which saw him committed to borstal, a stint with the Royal Army Service Corps, marriage and a child with a woman in South Africa, heroic bravery over Holland after managing to re-join the RAF under an assumed name, and much carousing in the bars and nightclubs of post-war London.

When he met 32-year-old Margery Gardner and persuaded her to check into a hotel with him as man and wife she could not have known that the handsome charmer was a calculating psychopath.

She was found by a traumatised maid, her sheets saturated with blood, legs tied, internal injuries, and bearing savage whip marks. Parts of her body had been chewed off and she had been punched in the face.

A police manhunt was sparked for a man answering Heath’s description. “He is particularly fond of the company of women and is a frequenter of drinking clubs and bars,” it warned. Crucially, as O’Connor points out, it didn’t contain a photograph which meant that even though she had read part of the news story about him, Wren Doreen Marshall, recuperating from measles at Bournemouth’s Norfolk Hotel, did not recognise the captivating RAF officer who called himself Group Captain Rupert Brook, who invited her out to dinner.

While loons and well-wishers scribbled frenzied letters about alleged sightings, Heath had been gallivanting round Bournemouth, staying in room 71 at the Tollard Royal Hotel and befriending all manner of other holidaymakers.

On the night of July 3 and 4 Doreen went missing and within hours Heath was pawning her diamond ring at the Triangle.

Typically bold, Heath visited the police station in Madeira Road to concoct a story which explained reports that he’d been seen with the lost victim.

But time was running out. Schoolboys spotted the missing woman’s handbag on the beach at Alum Chine, a left-luggage ticket for Bournemouth Station in Heath’s possession revealed a locker containing, among other things, a whip.

Then, in the woods at Branksome Dene Chine on the evening of July 7, dog-walker Kathleen Evans of Pinewood Road saw a swarm of flies above a certain spot. She brought her father back and he saw enough to summon police.

When they found the body: “The sight that met the policemen’s eyes was so shocking some of them vomited,” says O’Connor.

Doreen Marshall’s corpse was in a similar state to that of the previous victim although the poor young woman had also lost ‘three-quarters of her hair’ and suffered ‘a frenzied sex attack of shocking brutality’.

Perhaps the most shocking thing of all about these killings was the fact that instead of being repulsed by him, many women seemed fascinated by Heath.

Some queued for 14 hours to ensure a seat at the Old Bailey.

Heath himself never gave any explanation for his crimes, claiming he barely remembered what had happened on the days they were committed.

Perhaps the best observation is that of the Old Bailey’s Crown Court 1 supervisor, William Bixley, who had saw the trials of Crippen, Lord Haw-Haw, Haigh and Christie. Yet he described the Heath trial as his most upsetting.

He wrote: “Heath seemed ostensibly so normal, and one had deep forebodings that only by a hair’s breadth did other seemingly decent and pleasant young men escape from the awful sexual sadism which, at times, makes man lower than any animal that walks or crawls on the face of the earth.”

  • Handsome Brute by Sean O’Connor is published by Simon & Schuster at £16.99