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Kill Total: |
1 |
Kill place: |
London |
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Kill date: |
24th March 1935 |
Victim(s): |
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Date of Birth: |
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Marital Status: |
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AKA: |
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Francis Mawson Rattenbury met Alma Pakenham
in Canada, in 1923 and fell in love.
Alma was beautiful, talented and exotic.
Still in her twenties, she already had lost one husband in
the war and divorced a second. She had served as a
transport driver and nurse at the front, where she was
twice wounded. An accomplished musician, Alma was visiting
Victoria from her home in Vancouver to give a recital, but
within weeks of their meeting she had set up shop in the
capital as a music teacher.
Alma and Rattenbury carried on their affair openly, with
no concern for public opinion or for his wife, Florence's
feelings. They appeared together at social functions and
gossips circulated the rumour that the pair were sharing a
cocaine habit as well as a bed. When Florence refused to
grant him a divorce, Rattenbury began entertaining his
mistress at the family home in Oak Bay.
Florence finally gave in and granted Rattenbury his
divorce. In the spring of 1925, he and Alma married. But
their affair had left them social pariahs, even after they
had a son and settled into a respectable domesticity. At
the end of 1929 they packed up and moved to England,
settling in Bournemouth.
During the height of his success, Francis Mawson
Rattenbury seemed an unlikely object of scandal. He had
arrived in British Columbia from his native England in
1892, a 25-year-old architect with little experience but
full of charm and self-confidence. Within ten months of
his arrival he had entered, and won, a competition to
design the new Parliament Building planned for Victoria.
The commission was a great coup, and Rattenbury went on to
establish a flourishing practice, designing such notable
buildings as the Vancouver Court House (now the Vancouver
Art Gallery), the Crystal Garden in Victoria, and assorted
banks, homes and hotels all over the province.
England was not a cure for Rattenbury's discontent. As the
years passed, he became a sulky, impotent, alcoholic old
man, burdened with financial worries. Alma, on the other
hand, was still young and enjoying success as the composer
of popular songs. Inevitably, she took a lover, and her
choice showed her usual carelessness. George Stoner was an
18-year-old school dropout, hired to be Rattenbury's
chauffeur. Besotted with Alma, jealous of her husband,
afraid that the two might reconcile and toss him out, he
was a ticking bomb waiting to go off.
The explosion occurred on the evening of 24th March 1935,
when George took a mallet and beat Rattenbury's head in
while the architect sat in a drunken stupor. Both Alma and
George were charged with murder. Their trial gave the
British public everything it could have wanted: sex,
drugs, celebrity and, in the end, tragedy.
After five days of titillating testimony, a
jury took 50 minutes to find Alma innocent and her young
lover guilty.
The story that began with a fateful meeting in the Empress
Hotel on a winter evening in 1923 ended four days after
the verdict when Alma committed suicide by stabbing
herself through the heart and falling into the River Avon.
Apparently she expected that Stoner would hang, as did the
judge who sentenced him to death. But an outraged public
blamed Alma for corrupting the boy and when presented with
a clemency petition signed by 350 000 people, the Home
Secretary agreed. Stoner got a life sentence instead, and
was out of prison in seven years, the sole survivor of
British Columbia's most notorious love triangle.
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