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.The third husbandIn 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…George Percy StonerShe 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.A pivotal momentIf 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
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