Couples Who Kill (31 page)

A fragment of Afro-Caribbean hair was found on one of the Danish au pair’s undergarments, which tied in with her assertion that her attacker was black but the forensic report held at the testing lab had been lost by the time of David Mulcahy’s trial, so this evidence wasn’t available for the defence to test. He notes that the bag which contained the other au pair’s briefs had ‘four incisions made into it, all of which had been resealed and signed’ and states ‘Due to the nature of the resealing, an independent forensic expert…made the evidential statement that tampering with the contents would be possible.’

David Mulcahy recalls that he was sometimes with his wife and young children at the time when John Duffy alleged that he committed the rapes and murders and that on another occasion his workplace gave him a cast iron alibi. On yet another occasion John Duffy said that David Mulcahy left his children with his (David Mulcahy’s) two sisters. They had alibis showing that they were elsewhere so Mr Duffy then changed the dates of the attacks, explaining that his memory had let him down.

John Duffy had told his psychiatrist that Alison Day was
walking along the outside of the bridge with her hands on top, and that David Mulcahy prised her fingers off the bridge, so that she fell into the canal. But Mr Mulcahy notes that when video footage of the bridge was shown in court, it demonstrated that the reach from the ledge to the handhold of the bridge was well over eight feet tall and Alison Day was only five-foot six. John Duffy then changed his story to suggest that her hands were stretched out side to side.

John Duffy and David Mulcahy are currently incarcerated in separate Yorkshire prisons. John Duffy’s parents have maintained contact with him and if he’s eventually freed he may be repatriated to Ireland. David Mulcahy is unlikely to be released unless he can appeal successfully against his convictions. He has the full support of his family and friends, who believe wholeheartedly in his innocence.

Nowadays when a couple is charged with murder, society tends to assume that the woman has played a lesser role. But in the second case in this chapter the woman was found guilty and the man acquitted. In the first case, the woman – Alma Rattenbury – was found to be innocent, but the hatred of the British public ensured that she lost the will to live…

Alma was born in 1896 to a German father and an English mother with the surname of Clark. She was born in Canada and stayed there with her wealthy parents throughout her childhood. Her father worked as a printer (though other sources suggest he was briefly a gold prospector) whilst her mother put all her energies into turning Alma into a musical protégé. Indeed, the couple had originally called their newborn daughter Ethel but changed it to Alma because they thought it was a better name for a girl who they wanted to appear on the musical stage.

Alma’s mother beat little Alma if she thought that the child wasn’t giving her full attention to music. By eight, Alma – who was genuinely gifted – was playing the piano publicly. She enjoyed being in the limelight, a trait which would remain with her throughout her increasingly unhappy life.

But she yearned for love and ran away in her teens with an older man called Caledon Dolling and married him. They travelled together, living first in Vancouver and later in England where she worked at the War Office and he joined the army. They were devoted to each other and she was devastated when he was killed in the First World War. Alma then became a nurse in Scotland and was herself wounded twice, receiving an award for bravery.

Though she was a very hard worker, she craved both sexual satiation and romance. Fortunately her appearance – large grey eyes and an exceptionally full lower lip – was attractive to men, and she had many suitors. Unfortunately, perhaps because her unhappy childhood had left her with skewed notions of love, she often made the wrong choice of man.

She married in 1921 for the second time, choosing Captain Thomas Compton Pakenham, an officer in the Coldstream Guards. He was as handsome as Alma was beautiful so they made a striking couple. They had a son, Christopher, and the three of them eventually emigrated to the USA. There, he became a music critic and she gave piano lessons. But money was scarce, Thomas was often unemployed and Alma yearned for a more exciting life. She soon deserted her husband and travelled back to her native Canada with her toddler son.

In Canada she met her third husband, an English architect called Francis Mawson Rattenbury. She was still in her
twenties whilst he was almost thirty years her senior. He was already married but was drawn to her beauty, her musical accomplishments and general good nature – though he wrote to his sister of the sadness in Alma’s eyes.

Perhaps she saw in him a loving father figure who would help repair the damage that her over-ambitious mother had done, or maybe she just craved the financial security which he offered. Whatever her motivation, Alma married Francis in 1925 after he divorced his wife. Two years later she bore him a son, John.

The couple, John, and Alma’s firstborn Christopher now relocated to England and rented a house, the Villa Madeira, in the seaside town of Bournemouth. Thereafter Frances Rattenbury opted for a quiet semi-retirement – but the much younger Alma revived her musical career, writing emotional song lyrics which earned her significant royalties. She spent these on expensive clothes and partying and often asked her husband for even more money, inventing reasons why she needed the additional funds. Sometimes she pretended the money was for various operations: either Frances was very naïve or he believed he had an increasingly sick wife!

Cracks soon began to show in the marriage as her husband worried about possible bankruptcy. His unhelpful response was to take to drink, sometimes consuming a bottle of a whisky a day. She tried to cheer him up by playing cards with him every evening but he remained maudlin and frequently threatened to commit suicide.

Despite her outwardly flamboyant nature, Alma was a very caring woman and she confided in her live-in housekeeper that she worried about Francis’s moods. She asked him to accompany her to various musical evenings
but he was happiest in his own company and invariably turned her down.

She watched his strength continue to decline – and in 1932 her own health failed and she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She, too, now took to drink. One night the couple fought so violently that he gave her a black eye and she bit him. Both continued to rely on whisky to get through the long, lonely nights.

They stopped sleeping together – and she would later suggest that he made it clear she could go elsewhere for sex. Alma soon did just that, with ultimately fatal results…

She placed an advert asking for a youth to do general chores and drive her to cocktail nights. The advert was answered by seventeen-year-old George Stoner and he was given the job.

George, the son of a bricklayer, had been backwards as a child. Unlike the educated Alma, he was barely literate. He had no male friends and had never had a girlfriend. But he was both easygoing and easy on the eye. Alma chatted to him as he cut the lawn and washed the windows, and the mutual attraction grew.

Three days after his eighteenth birthday, she seduced him. The pair of them now had sex as often as they could. Alma even persuaded George to leave his parents’ house and move to the bedroom next to hers, and he would come to her bed late at night and leave early the following morning.

It’s probable that Alma’s husband knew about these trysts. His bedroom was directly downstairs and journalist Roger Wilkes, who later visited the house, says that it’s
sufficiently small that you can hear people walking from room to room. But the architect was now in his late sixties, partly deaf and further de-energised by maudlin thoughts and bottles of whisky. Perhaps he no longer cared about fidelity or sex.

The affair continued and was so selfish that George Stoner would come to Alma’s bedroom even when she was sharing it with her youngest son John. (He went to boarding school during the week but came home at weekends.) Alma swore that the five-year-old slept through these amorous encounters which took place in the bed next to his. It was a strange arrangement as they could have easily gone to Stoner’s bedroom which was just down the hall.

Alma’s previous lovers had been superficially powerful men – men of war like her first two husbands or men of stature like her current husband, who had been given two very highly paid architectural commissions within days of their meeting. She was now determined to remake the teenage George Stoner in their image and bought him numerous expensive presents and encouraged him to dominate her. But the subtleties of a sexual powerplay relationship were lost on the well-meaning but out of his depth youth Stoner, and he turned into a bully determined to get his own way.

He became increasingly jealous of any time that Alma and Francis spent alone and she fuelled this jealousy by threatening to finish with him. After she made these threats, he produced an air pistol (some reports have wrongly said it was a knife) and said that he would kill her rather than accept the end of the relationship. A more balanced woman would have gotten herself a new
handyman, but Alma had a love of the dramatic. She saw this as proof of the boy’s intense passion so continued to sleep with him. She even told the live-in housekeeper about the relationship.

If Alma and George had simply remained lovers at the Villa Madeira, the murder might never have taken place. But Alma took her handyman to London with her for a four day holiday and introduced him to the hotel staff as her younger brother. For the first time, the awkward teenage boy was treated as a man of substance, a fabrication which Alma bolstered by buying him lavish gifts. Perhaps the boy began to see himself as a potential fourth husband or, at the very least, a full-time companion on subsequent trips.

But the honeymoon was over as soon as they got back to Bournemouth, finding Frances Rattenbury in a very black mood. He’d been reading a book about suicide and admitted that he once again felt suicidal. Alma, who still cared deeply for the older man, suggested that he and she go to Bridport together. George Stoner objected to this, terrified that the husband and wife would renew their sex life during a weekend away.

He began to shout at Alma, saying that if the Rattenburys went on the trip he would refuse to drive them. He clearly dreaded being reduced to the role of chauffeur when, only yesterday, he had been a man about town.

The teenager left her house in a rage and went to his grandparents’ house where he borrowed a carpenter’s mallet. He’d already decided to remove his rival…

The night of the murderous attack (24th March 1935)
Alma went to bed – and when her young lover joined her he was clearly upset and couldn’t settle. Eventually he blurted out that he had ‘hurt Ratz.’ Alma went downstairs and found that Francis Rattenbury had sustained three heavy blows to the back of his head as he sat reading or dozing in his chair. The attack on the sixty-nine-year-old had been so brutal that it drove fragments of bone into his brain and made his false teeth shoot out of his head. He was unconscious so she screamed for the housekeeper to fetch medical help.

Alma had been drinking whisky earlier that evening and now helped herself to more. By the time the police arrived she was talking to herself and pacing the house and sometimes vomiting. She was so drunk that she even flirted with the constables and tried to kiss one of them. She told the police ‘I did it. He has lived too long. I’ll tell you in the morning where the mallet is.’ (George Stoner had already told her that he hit her husband with a mallet and hidden it. Police soon found the weapon hidden in the garden under a bush.)

Medics took the injured man to hospital. Meanwhile a doctor arrived and gave Alma morphia but within two hours the police had woken her up again and taken a statement. Sleepless and still deeply drugged, she said ‘I did it deliberately and would do it again.’ She added that she had killed her husband because he wanted to die. (He was still unconscious in hospital.) She was arrested and sent to prison to await trial. Three days later a doctor would find that there was still enough morphia in her system to cause serious disturbance of thought. On the one previous occasion that her doctor had injected her with it she’d slept for twelve hours – but on this occasion
she had only been asleep for two.

Meanwhile, George Stoner told the housekeeper that he was the one who’d bludgeoned Mr Rattenbury, using gloves so as not to leave fingerprints on the mallet. He said that the mallet belonged to his grandparents and that he’d used it to beat Mr Rattenbury because he’d found him having sex with Alma earlier that day. The sex was all in his imagination – a boy with a prodigious sexual appetite, he imagined that everyone else was equally passionate. Now, out of his depth, he started running drunkenly up and down the road shouting that he was responsible for Alma’s plight.

He was soon arrested for the assault. Frances Rattenbury died of his injuries that day so the charge became murder. George confessed to the police that he’d bludgeoned his alleged rival and said that Alma wasn’t to blame.

Alma was now visited in prison by her first-born son, thirteen-year-old Christopher. It seems that she decided her first loyalty was to both her children and she wrote to her housekeeper of the remorse that George Stoner must feel at ‘what he’s brought down on my head.’ It was her first public admission that he was the guilty one of the pair.

There wasn’t a vacant seat in The Old Bailey when the trial started on 27th May 1935. Public opinion had initially assumed that Alma Rattenbury was guilty of the murder – but that opinion changed as they heard her speak. She was clear and articulate and refreshingly honest. The adultery wasn’t a problem, she implied, because her husband had told her to live her own life when it came to sex. She admitted that she had loved George and clearly still felt protective towards the youth.

He did not give evidence in his own defence, merely pleading guilty through his solicitor. He had tried to blame the attack on his being in a cocaine-fuelled state, but witnesses noted that he could not accurately describe cocaine. It was thought that he’d made up stories about taking drugs in order to appear more interesting to Alma Rattenbury.

The jury were out for less than an hour before they came back with their verdict. Alma was found not guilty but George was found guilty and the death sentence was passed. Alma came close to hysterics – and her mood was not helped when she was booed by the crowds outside the court. The newspapers also had a field day, painting her as the whore and George Stoner as a simple lad who had been led astray.

The beautiful and talented Alma had always enjoyed public praise but now she was portrayed as a stupid, immoral woman. She had lost her husband and now her lover was about to be hanged. Her husband’s relatives became so alarmed about her mental health that they booked her into a nursing home to save her from further press intrusion. She seemed to improve there and was allowed to go out alone on the third day after the trial.

Alma still had her two children but she decided they weren’t enough reason to live. Determined to end it all, she went to Oxford Circus and tried to throw herself under a train but there were too many passers-by and she lost her nerve. Later that day she considered falling under the wheels of a bus but again the number of onlookers put her off. Finally she walked for many hours until she reached
the River Avon at Christchurch and wrote a note which in part said ‘it must be easier to be hanged than to do the job oneself… Pray God nothing stops me tonight.’

Nothing stopped her and she took out a knife and stabbed herself six times (three of the blows entering her heart) before falling into the river. George was heartbroken when he heard.