In February 1946 hotel staff at the Strand Palace in London heard screaming, forced a bedroom door, and found a woman named Pauline Brees naked and tied up, with Neville Heath standing over her. She declined to press charges, because pressing them would have meant publicity. Margery Gardner was killed four months later.
Heath was twenty-nine and had spent the war acquiring and losing commissions. He traveled under other men's ranks and other men's names: Lieutenant-Colonel Heath at the Pembridge Court Hotel in Notting Hill Gate, Group Captain Rupert Brooke at Bournemouth. The borrowed authority is the whole of his method. It got him into hotel rooms.
Margery Gardner died at the Pembridge Court on the night of June 20, 1946. She had been bound at the wrists and ankles, beaten with a whip whose tip was metal, and suffocated. Heath went to Bournemouth, and on July 3 he killed Doreen Marshall, who was twenty-one, on the cliffs and beach at Branksome Chine. On July 6 an officer interviewing him about Marshall recognized him as the man wanted over Gardner and asked whether his real name was Heath. He denied it, then asked to be allowed to fetch his coat from his hotel. A police officer fetched it instead. In the pocket was half a railway ticket in Doreen Marshall's name and a left-luggage receipt, and in the left luggage was the whip.
The trial opened at the Old Bailey on September 24. Heath had told his counsel to plead guilty, and when Casswell queried it he said to put him down as not guilty. The defense was insanity, and Heath would not help it: he did not want Broadmoor. Casswell called a criminal psychiatrist, William Henry de Bargue Hubert, who told the court that Heath had known what he was doing but not that it was wrong. The prosecution took the argument apart. What Casswell did not know, and what came out later, was that Hubert was addicted to morphine and was under its influence in the witness box. Two prison doctors testified that Heath was a psychopath and a sexual sadist and was not insane. The jury took about an hour.
There was a defense available that nobody ran. It emerged after the trial that Margery Gardner was a masochist who consented to being bound and whipped, which raises the question of manslaughter rather than murder, and the injuries she actually died of go well past anything she could have agreed to. Heath did not advance it. He appears to have preferred hanging to Broadmoor and said as much in his conduct throughout.
The second charge was never tried. Heath had been charged with Margery Gardner's murder on July 8 and with Doreen Marshall's on July 29. The prosecution chose to try the Gardner case, because Marshall's killing had been so savage that it risked strengthening a plea of insanity, and after he was convicted of killing Gardner the count relating to Marshall was not proceeded with. Doreen Marshall, born in Brentford in 1924, had served in the WRNS during the war and had been discharged only on June 27, 1946; her body was found in the bushes at Branksome Dene Chine on July 8, her throat cut. Some published accounts say Heath was convicted of both murders in separate trials. He was not.
He was hanged at Pentonville on October 16, 1946, by Albert Pierrepoint. Offered the customary glass of whisky beforehand, he asked for a double. He wrote to his parents that his only regret in leaving the world was that he had been unworthy of them.