Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller (28 page)

On 3 July, Heath arrived at the fashionable Durban Club on the Esplanade, looking for a room. Guy Lomax, the secretary of the club, said he could be accommodated for six days. Again, Heath claimed to be a major in the SAAF and signed the register as a member of an affiliated club. Four days later, he went to the main branch of the Standard Bank of South Africa in West Street at about 10 a.m., claiming to be a Captain Gill. He wanted to cash a cheque for £15, which was duly processed by the bank manager.

It is while he was based in Durban during July that Heath claimed to have experienced another blackout. He had been to a dinner party and left in his car with a young woman he knew. He remembered nothing more until he found himself in bed back at the Durban Club. He later heard that he had violently attacked the woman, but said he had no memory of it.
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This incident cannot be substantiated as no charge was brought against him and there is no report of the incident in the South African press at the time. Significantly, Heath only referred to these blackouts after he was arrested.

Heath left the Durban Club on 9 July, owing £37 7s. 1d., and gave his forwarding address as the Rand Club in Johannesburg, asking that the bill be sent on there. Just before he left, he cashed another cheque for £10 1s. 0d. All the cheques he signed in Cape Town and Durban bounced. He left a trail of bad debts and dud cheques throughout South Africa and it didn’t take long for the various authorities to catch up with him. In the first place he was arrested by the SAAF police for being absent without leave and was told he would be facing a court martial. But before being disciplined by the military, he was handed over to the South African civilian police. In running away from the reality of his divorce, he had only brought more trouble on himself. But the debts and the divorce were not the only issues that were about to engulf him. He had left a combustive situation in England that was also threatening to catch up with him.

In September of 1944, though still apparently happily married to his wife in South Africa, Heath had got engaged.

Twenty-one-year-old Zita Williams was a respectable girl from Nottingham, the daughter of William H. Williams, an inspector of the Nottingham Co-operative Insurance Society and a chief inspector of the Nottingham City Special Constables. Zita had first met Heath, whom she knew as Jimmy Cadogan, at a dance at Steeple Claydon in Buckinghamshire, whilst she was serving with the WRNS at HMS Pembroke V and he was training at RAF Finmere, six miles away.
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She saw a lot of him over a three-week period, during which time he proposed to her several times. As with many of the women in his life, Heath swept the impressionable Zita off her feet: ‘I was told by a good many people how lucky I was to merit Jimmy’s attentions.’
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After he had baled out in Holland, Heath took the two weeks’ survivor’s leave that was due to him and returned to London. It is during this leave in November that he and Zita stayed in a double room at the Pembridge Court Hotel. Like Yvonne Symonds, Zita may have felt that she was ‘unofficially engaged’ to Heath before agreeing to sleep with him. He had told her that he had been married, but assured her that the divorce had been finalized the previous September. Their official engagement was announced in the local paper in Nottingham. All the preparations were made including the purchase of Zita’s trousseau. The church was booked, the reception organized and the wedding cake ordered. Zita looked forward to a perfect wedding and a wonderful life together with her dashing and heroic pilot husband. However, in February 1945, Heath told her that they would have to postpone the wedding as he had to return to South Africa.
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He gave her a photograph of himself saying he would be back in three weeks. She would never see him again.

Upon returning to South Africa, Heath wrote to Zita, informing her that his wife would not divorce him. This was a huge shock to her and the first indication she had that he was not in a position to marry. When Zita replied by letter, she told him that the situation was serious. Since he had left for South Africa, she had discovered that she was pregnant.
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When he next wrote back, Heath said he wasn’t getting a divorce and advised her of a reliable clinic in London where she could get an abortion. This is particularly curious as at this time Heath’s wife was telling him that a divorce was
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what she wanted from him. For whatever reason, Heath didn’t want to marry Zita Williams. In all probability she was not the only young woman, either in England or South Africa, to fall for Heath’s extraordinary charm and to have gone through a fantasy ‘engagement’ in order for Heath to seduce her into bed.
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Zita’s father immediately wanted to sue Heath for breach of promise. From what he had told Zita and her family, they had assumed him to be a man of some considerable means. Had he not told them that he was the nephew of the Hon. Edward C. G. Cadogan, KBE, of the Carlton Club in London?
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Mr Williams’ lawyers contacted the SAAF in an attempt to make Heath face up to his responsibilities, but to no avail. By this time, the authorities in South Africa had more serious issues to discuss with Heath than a jilted girl back in England.

Out of the blue, on 12 February 1946 – a year after he had left her to go back to South Africa – Zita received, given the circumstances, an extraordinary telegram from Heath saying:

Just returned England. Staying Strand Palace. Meet me today. Telegraph by return stating time. Love, Armstrong.
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Zita didn’t answer the telegram, nor did she go to London. Her father wrote to Heath at the Strand Palace Hotel and told him that Zita wanted nothing more to do with him.

Eleven days later, Heath would be caught in the same hotel having tied, punched and thrashed Pauline Brees. She was not to know it at the time, but Zita Williams had potentially had a narrow escape.

After Heath’s arrest, Zita and her father were interviewed by the police and both were coy in their statements about her ‘friendship’ with him. They didn’t mention that she had been engaged to him, nor did they mention the fact that she had been pregnant by him. Mr Williams was silent about his desire to sue Heath for breach of promise, perhaps stung by the social stigma that his daughter had incurred having been involved with such a man. By this time, whether she had lost the baby or had the abortion that Heath had coldly suggested, it seems that her child by Heath did not survive.

As a consequence of his treatment of Zita Williams, Heath also lost one of his greatest and most committed supporters, Mr Scott of the Borstal Association. Scott had been corresponding with Heath and his family throughout the war. Heath himself had written to Mr Scott, telling him about the relationship with Zita and the fact that she was pregnant. He also wrote that he had suggested that Zita should consult an abortionist. Scott felt that if Heath could behave so callously towards Zita and so cruelly to his own wife, then he would have nothing more to do with him. In a sad final note in Heath’s borstal record, Mr Scott recorded a few last lines about Neville Heath, once his star borstal boy, now turned bad.

A very disappointing end to what could have been an outstanding career. The war gave him his chance and the chance provided the atmosphere that proved too much for him. I fear his post-war career as a ‘civvy’ will come as too great a contrast to the life he has been living since 1940. It would not surprise me to hear him next in custody charged with F. P. [false pretences] or bigamy.
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Mr Scott was not to know that Heath was capable of much darker crimes.

On 27 July 1945, Heath sent a letter to Elizabeth – rather formal in tone and clearly meant to be referred to in future legal negotiations between them.
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In it he stated that he would not be returning to her and that she may instigate divorce proceedings against him. In this letter he made clear that he had no interest in challenging her for the custody of their son. Three days later, he appeared at Durban Magistrates’ Court charged with defrauding the Standard Bank in Durban and the Durban Club.

At his appearance at Durban he presented himself as a man who was not fully in control of his actions and he gave plausible reasons for his erratic behaviour. Estranged from his wife, he had nowhere to stay and knowing that his rank as temporary captain was not sufficiently senior for him to be accommodated at the Durban Club, where they only took senior officers, he pretended to be a major. He was unable to collect his pay from the SAAF because he was absent without leave and without any money, he couldn’t pay his hotel bills.

When I returned home I found my home was not a happy one so I decided to leave my home. Since I left home I have had this misfortune. I was boarded back from Holland with sinus trouble. I have had medical attention. It is still giving me trouble. I had this domestic trouble. I took it badly and lost my head . . . the normal person does not lose his head or get shot up.
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The magistrates at Durban found Heath guilty of fraud on both charges and he was given two sentences of hard labour or a fine. But sympathetic to the war-damaged officer before them, the court suspended both sentences for two years on the condition that he repaid the debts and didn’t commit similar offences within that period. Elizabeth arrived at the courthouse and paid Heath’s debts, so at this point, it seems that relations between him and his wife were at the least civil. Immediately he was released from the magistrates’ court, he was once again arrested by the SAAF police on several counts, for being absent without leave, for masquerading as a major and for wearing the ribbons of both the DFC and – a new addition – the OBE.

At the beginning of August, Heath’s lawyer sent a cheque to the Queen’s Hotel at Seapoint, repaying the debts that he had incurred. But the legal process had already been set in motion and the hotel explained that the matter was out of their hands – but that Heath could come and collect his suitcase if he liked.
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The debt to the Queen’s Hotel must also have been covered by Elizabeth’s family, so relations between them and Heath were still amicable. But shortly afterwards, Heath advised his lawyers that despite what he had agreed in July with Elizabeth and her family, he had changed his mind about his relations with his son. Though he was happy for Elizabeth to remain sole guardian of the child for the time being, he was not prepared to give up rights in the child ‘for all time’. He stipulated that the reason for this was that he was sure that his wife would marry again and that he might not approve of her choice of husband as a suitable stepfather for his child – an extraordinarily unreasonable rider given his own extremely dubious career and criminal record.
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This gambit may have been inspired by Heath’s attempt to secure his own position by exploiting the Rivers family’s desire to protect the child’s future.

Elizabeth’s mother, who Heath had little respect for – later accusing the family of dominating their daughter – then became involved in the proceedings. From the incomplete correspondence between Heath’s solicitors and those who represented the Rivers, it seems that Heath eventually agreed to sign away all his rights in his child’s future and upbringing if the family would stand his bail money and pay off his debts.
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Despite Heath’s later avowed love for his son, he used him at this point as a bargaining tool.
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At the end of August Heath appeared at Randfontein and was found guilty on another charge of fraud. Now that he had agreed to give up any say in his son’s future, Elizabeth’s family paid the debt and the £20 bail money. Heath was ordered to return to the court for sentencing in February 1946. He was released only to be sent to Cape Town to face the fraud charges in relation to the Queen’s Hotel debts and was due to appear before the magistrates on 6 September.

Heath was under pressure from all sides. His marriage was over and he had effectively sold the rights to a relationship with his son. He had faced a litany of charges and fines from all parts of the Union and his military career looked set to collapse as he faced his third court martial in less than a decade. In England he had lied to his parents, alienated his most fervent supporters, detonated his relationship with his sometime fiancée and might even be facing a lawsuit from her father for breach of promise. His finances, his career and his personal relationships were all in free fall.

And yet, his next step was to turn a bad situation into, potentially, a disastrous one.

While awaiting his court martial hearing, Heath was held at the Youngsfield Army Base in Cape Town. He was billeted in a room next to Flight Lieutenant Chapman of the RAF.
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On 5 September, the day before the court hearing concerning the Queen’s Hotel debts, Heath accompanied Chapman and a Major Erick Donnelly of the SAAF on a trip into Cape Town, travelling there in a pick-up truck. Major Donnelly was also based at Youngsfield but was about to go on leave, so needed some money from his bank.
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He came out of the bank with about £50 in cash, which he kept in a roll in his trouser pocket. The three men returned to Youngsfield and bought each other drinks in the mess of 62 Air School. As the bar closed early, they bought a bottle of brandy and a bottle of gin to drink in the lounge. Donnelly suggested that they go into town to a nightclub, but Chapman wasn’t keen. Heath said he didn’t want to go without Chapman and the idea was dropped. After five or six drinks, Chapman decided to go to bed and left Donnelly and Heath in the lounge alone together, this being about 11.30 p.m. When he left, Chapman felt that Heath seemed merry but that Donnelly was getting drunk. The two men continued drinking and then left together for Donnelly’s room where they had more drinks. By the end of the evening, Donnelly was so drunk that he fell over, so Heath helped him undress and put him to bed. Heath went back to his own room, which was in the same corridor as Donnelly and Chapman’s.