SIXTY six years ago Doreen Marshall was gruesomely murdered by one of Britain’s most notorious killers when staying in Bournemouth.

Now, at last, the 21-year-old Wren’s name has been added to the Commonwealth War Graves Debt of Honour for her service in the Second World War.

Tragically, though she died while still in uniform, her killer was a fellow Briton – the sexual sadist Neville Heath whose life ended that year at the end of a rope.

An account of Heath’s horrifying double murder spree in 1946 is told in a new book entitled Scenes of Murder Then and Now (After The Battle £39.95, left) whose editor-in-chief Winston Ramsey was responsible for getting Doreen’s name added to the Debt of Honour Register.

By the time the Second World War ended in 1939, Ilford-born Heath had already been in trouble with the law. He had been to Borstal, been commissioned in the RAF and been up before a court martial and subsequently joined the Royal Army service Corps...and faced a court martial again.

He had also, in 1942, married Elizabeth Pitt-Rivers from one of Britain’s leading families.

They were divorced in 1945.

He turned to murder a year later picking up a young woman, Mrs Margery Gardner, in a Kensington club and brutally killing her in a Notting Hill hotel.

Fleeing, he went to Worthing – a woman there had a lucky escape – and then on to Bournemouth where he booked into the Tollard Royal Hotel on the West Cliff, calling himself Group Captain Rupert Brooke.

Somehow, he made the acquaintance of Doreen Marshall, who was waiting to be demobbed from the WRNS and staying at the Norfolk Hotel on Richmond Hill, recovering from influenza.

He invited her to tea at his hotel and then dinner and they spent the evening, with other residents in the lounge.

At the end of the evening Doreen asked a resident to call her a taxi but Heath offered to walk her home instead.

She never returned to the Norfolk Hotel where the manager alerted the police.

Her body was found at Branksome Dene Chine after a young woman walking a dog saw flies swarming over a rhododendron bush.

Doreen was naked, except for her left shoe, covered by discarded clothing and with artificial pearls from her broken necklace lying nearby.

She had been savagely wounded and her throat cut.

Later ‘Group Captain Brooke’ – Heath – went to the police station volunteering information about his dinner guest – and an observant policeman recognised his likeness to the man wanted for the earlier murder of Margery Gardner.

Complaining of being cold, police went to fetch his coat from his hotel room and found in a pocket a cloakroom ticket issued at Bournemouth West station. With it they recovered a suitcase found to contain a blood-stained scarf and leather riding whip.

And they found a single artificial pearl and a few hairs on a bloody handkerchief that matched Doreen’s.

The weight of evidence against him became even heavier after it was discovered that he had pawned a ring belonging to Doreen, as well as a fob watch in Parkstone.

It transpired that Heath had returned to his hotel and scaled a ladder to get back to his bedroom unnoticed by the night porter who, at 4.30am had checked to see if he was back and saw him sound asleep.

Justice moved swiftly, and on September 24 1946 he was sentenced to be hanged for the murder of Margery Gardner. The charge of murdering Doreen was not proffered.

Heath was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint and Harry Kirk at Pentonville on October 16.

Doreen’s body was laid to rest by her father, William Marshall, in Pinner cemetery in London. Broken-hearted, William died just eight years later at the age of 54 and is buried nearby.

Today, Doreen’s final resting place has been recognised by the War Graves Commission which has added her name to the the Debt of Honour Register – the commission’s database listing the men and women of the Commonwealth forces who died during the two world wars.

“It took three months after I put her name forward but I was thrilled by the result,” said Winston Ramsey, who instigated the move.

“Her case was one of the most gruesome in the book. What I cannot understand is how Heath persuaded her, after leaving the Tollard Royal, to walk in the opposite direction to her hotel when she was already tired.”