Margery Gardner (nee Wheat) was the first victim of Neville George Clevely Heath. She was a trained artist and occasional film-extra. Separated from her feckless alcoholic husband, she had a young daughter but was living alone in Earls Court, London at the time of her death. On 20 June 1946, she met Neville Heath and spent the evening with him at the Panama Club, Knightsbridge. After midnight they took a taxi to the Pembridge Court Hotel in Notting Hill. Her savagely mutilated body (she had actually died from suffocation) was discovered the following afternoon in the hotel room that had been taken in the name of Heath several days earlier though he had also added Lieutenant-Colonel, a rank to which he was not entitled. He had joined both the Royal Air Force and South African Air Force but was a fantasist, thief and fraudster, living on his wits. Good-looking and well-spoken, with a plausible charm that made him undoubtedly attractive to women, he found it easy to find female company and, having escaped from London, made his way to Bournemouth where, posing as Group Captain Rupert Brooke, he persuaded newly-demobbed WREN Doreen Marshall to join him for afternoon tea and later that day, dinner at his hotel. Although she wanted to return to her own hotel by taxi, he persuaded her to let him walk her there. She was never seen alive again, her brutally stabbed and slashed body being found several days later in a lonely wooded spot some distance away. Although Heath was charged with Doreen's murder, his subsequent trial and execution related only to his earlier murder of Margery Gardner.
Margery Gardner (nee Wheat) was the first victim of Neville George Clevely Heath. She was a trained artist and occasional film-extra. Separated from her feckless alcoholic husband, she had a young daughter but was living alone in Earls Court, London at the time of her death. On 20 June 1946, she met Neville Heath and spent the evening with him at the Panama Club, Knightsbridge. After midnight they took a taxi to the Pembridge Court Hotel in Notting Hill. Her savagely mutilated body (she had actually died from suffocation) was discovered the following afternoon in the hotel room that had been taken in the name of Heath several days earlier though he had also added Lieutenant-Colonel, a rank to which he was not entitled. He had joined both the Royal Air Force and South African Air Force but was a fantasist, thief and fraudster, living on his wits. Good-looking and well-spoken, with a plausible charm that made him undoubtedly attractive to women, he found it easy to find female company and, having escaped from London, made his way to Bournemouth where, posing as Group Captain Rupert Brooke, he persuaded newly-demobbed WREN Doreen Marshall to join him for afternoon tea and later that day, dinner at his hotel. Although she wanted to return to her own hotel by taxi, he persuaded her to let him walk her there. She was never seen alive again, her brutally stabbed and slashed body being found several days later in a lonely wooded spot some distance away. Although Heath was charged with Doreen's murder, his subsequent trial and execution related only to his earlier murder of Margery Gardner.
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