The femme fatale who scandalised Britain: Murder at the Villa Madeira that gripped the country

Police were called following a horrifying attack on Francis Rattenbury, a retired architect, as he sat in his favourite armchair in the drawing-room of Villa Madeira. His wife Alma (pictured), an attractive woman in her early 40s, claimed to have gone to bed early, only to be woken by a noise downstairs

Spring arrived punctually in Bournemouth on Sunday, March 24, 1935. The sun was out, the sea was calm, and the deckchairs along the pier were full of what the local paper described as ‘lightly-clad people, some knitting, others reading, while others dozed’.

It looked like the good weather was set to stay and this was said to have proved fatally significant in the events which unfolded that night at Villa Madeira, a white, pebble-dashed house set among holiday homes and B&Bs on a winding avenue a short walk from the sea.

A riot of floral wallpaper and chintz, it could have been any one of millions of middle-class homes in Britain between the wars. But that night the police were called following a horrifying attack on the owner Francis Rattenbury, a retired architect, as he sat in his favourite armchair in the drawing-room.

His wife Alma, an attractive woman in her early 40s, claimed to have gone to bed early, only to be woken by a noise downstairs. Rushing down she found Francis, who was 25 years her senior, slumped in his chair with blood flowing from his head.

As she ran towards him in her bare feet, she said she had trodden on something sharp: his false teeth. By then hysterical she had forced the dentures back into his mouth in the hope he might speak and when he failed to respond she ordered her maid to summon the family doctor who in turn called the police.

The first officer on the scene was a PC Bagwell who quickly realised Mrs Rattenbury was drunk. A whisky and soda in her hand, she tried to kiss him even as her husband was being operated on at the local hospital.

Staggering from one policeman to another, she made a series of ever more confusing comments, including a confession that she had hit her husband with a mallet. On a search of the garden early the next morning, PC Bagwell found just such a weapon. On it was some hair and a piece of bloody flesh.

Following Francis Rattenbury’s death from his injuries four days later, his wife was charged with murder. In a statement she said worries about their investments during the slump of the Thirties had exacerbated the depression to which her husband was prone. That night he asked her to kill him and so, considerably intoxicated, she had duly obliged.

Following Francis Rattenbury's (pictured) death from his injuries four days later, his wife was charged with murder. In a statement she said worries about their investments during the slump of the Thirties had exacerbated the depression to which her husband was prone. That night he asked her to kill him and so, considerably intoxicated, she had duly obliged

Following Francis Rattenbury’s (pictured) death from his injuries four days later, his wife was charged with murder. In a statement she said worries about their investments during the slump of the Thirties had exacerbated the depression to which her husband was prone. That night he asked her to kill him and so, considerably intoxicated, she had duly obliged

It seemed a clear-cut, if rather curious, case but then came a baffling development. Unbeknown to her husband, Alma had begun an affair with their live-in chauffeur and handy-man George Stoner, a good-looking youth who, at 18, was less than half her age.

When questioned, he insisted it was he who had carried out the attack after returning to Madeira Villa that evening with a mallet borrowed from his father to put up a canvas sun shelter for the coming hot summer.

It only became a murder weapon when, standing in the back garden and looking through the French windows, he had spotted Alma giving her husband a good night kiss. This ordinary domestic scene saw his jealousy turn to fury and he’d waited until she’d gone up to bed then mounted his attack as Rattenbury dozed in his armchair.

With two murderers claiming responsibility, the Director of Public Prosecutions had no choice but to let a jury decide who was telling the truth and who was lying to protect the other. And so the glamorous femme fatale and her lover appeared together in the dock at the Old Bailey’s infamous Number One Court.

The crowds who packed into the public benches, some with picnic baskets, were not disappointed by the lurid story of adultery, alcoholism and drugs which became known as The Murder at Villa Madeira.

That very phrase evokes a lost world of steam trains and railway bookstalls, Wolseley saloons and Craven ‘A’ cigarette cards and it was a world in which Alma Rattenbury was as much on trial for her loose morals as she was for murder.

The public regarded her as a sex-hungry vixen who had exploited a guileless young man to her own advantage. Even her own barrister admitted that she was a ‘selfish, designing woman’. But was she capable of committing — or inciting her lover to commit — murder?

It seemed a clear-cut, if rather curious, case but then came a baffling development. Unbeknown to her husband, Alma had begun an affair with their live-in chauffeur and handy-man George Stoner (pictured), a good-looking youth who, at 18, was less than half her age

It seemed a clear-cut, if rather curious, case but then came a baffling development. Unbeknown to her husband, Alma had begun an affair with their live-in chauffeur and handy-man George Stoner (pictured), a good-looking youth who, at 18, was less than half her age

She undoubtedly stood to benefit financially from her husband’s death, his will granting her a widow’s pension equivalent to some £400,000 a year in today’s money.

That might have been tempting for a woman who later admitted that her relationship with her husband was mercenary rather than romantic and that their marriage had been arranged by her mother Frances.

A professional singer, Frances had focused all her own frustrated ambitions for fame and fortune on Alma, her only child. Although she appeared regularly with the renowned D’Oyly Carte Opera Company in London, Frances had never been a leading performer and, in 1891, she and her husband Walter, a printer, moved to British Columbia, the westernmost province of Canada, to make a better life for themselves.

Alma was born there the following year and grew up to be a pretty and precocious child whose talent for playing the piano saw her hailed as ‘Canada’s Musical Prodigy’ at 18.

Success as a concert pianist seemed assured and her future looked even brighter when in 1913, aged 22, she married Caledon Dolling, an Irish aristocrat seeking a new life in Victoria, the capital of British Columbia.

When World War I broke out, the couple moved to London where Alma began working at the War Office and Dolling signed up with the Royal Welch Fusiliers, only to be killed in action in France in August 1916.

Widowed at 24, and with her heart broken, Alma decided to help men like her husband and volunteered as an orderly with a Scottish ambulance unit stationed in France. She later received the Croix de Guerre for her bravery in helping to establish a field hospital closer to the Front than the military deemed safe, but the loss of Dolling also brought out a less admirable side in Alma.

‘She became a cynical woman of the world, taking her pleasures where she could find them,’ wrote one journalist. Within days of returning to England in 1918, she began an affair with Thomas Pakenham, a married Guards officer who divorced his wife to marry Alma in July 1920.

Whatever love existed between them could not overcome the money worries caused by the crippling costs of Pakenham’s divorce. As he struggled as a writer, she despaired of his future prospects and moved back to British Columbia in 1922, taking their one-year-old son Christopher with her.

It was in Victoria that, two years later, she met Francis Rattenbury, a Yorkshire-born architect. He was a friend of her mother’s sister and Frances encouraged the relationship even though Francis was also still married when Alma met him.

His marriage had broken down long before the war but his wife Florrie refused to divorce him, prompting Rattenbury to harass her by inviting Alma to visit him in the drawing-room at their family home.

Forced to retreat upstairs, Florrie could hear Alma playing the piano down below and one night, when she complained that this was stopping her sleeping, the interloper responded by playing the Funeral March as loudly as she could.

Eventually, Florrie agreed to a divorce and Francis married Alma in April 1925. With money, servants and a son, John, born in 1928, the new Mrs Rattenbury’s future seemed assured, although she never gained the approval of her husband’s grown-up son and daughter.

They later told reporters they regarded her as a ‘vulgar’ woman who seduced money from their father and ‘drank continually’ but kept his favour by constantly flattering him.

That was something Alma admitted. ‘I don’t think I ever spoke one word of truth to Ratz,’ she wrote after his death. ‘He knew as much about me as I know about Timbuktu. All he saw was a smile, all he heard was the ‘yes darling, no darling’ — a mask that agreed with his every mood.’

The views of Francis’s children were echoed by polite society in Victoria, the ostracism the couple endured prompting their move to suburban Bournemouth in 1931.

While Francis settled into retirement, Alma behaved increasingly eccentrically. Lying in bed until noon, she wore pyjamas around the house for the rest of the day, smoking and playing the gramophone or piano until late at night.

They led increasingly separate lives at Villa Madeira, sleeping not just in different bedrooms but on different floors. He was by then impotent and a bored Alma was drinking more and more.

Her frequent mood changes — sometimes very excited and running about, at other times in a stupor — suggest she might also have been using cocaine and even heroin, both then prescribed by GPs as painkillers and sedatives.

And she certainly appeared to be under the influence of something when, in October 1932, she tried to force herself on Frank Hobbs, the 34-year-old she had recently hired as a cook. ‘I chose you because you have sex appeal,’ she announced one evening. And when he rejected her advances she persuaded Ratz to dismiss him.

Alma later set her sights on George Stoner, who was hired as the family driver in September 1934. A 17-year-old local boy who had been regarded as somewhat ‘backward’ at school, George was only 5ft 6in but he had blond hair, blue eyes, and a fit physique honed by working as a building labourer.

‘We loved each other from the moment we met,’ she said. ‘We just came together because it was fate.’ Although she claimed the attraction was mutual, at more than twice his age and his social superior it seems likely it was Alma who initiated relations, and on November 22, days after his 18th birthday, they had sex for the first time.

From then on Stoner stayed in Villa Madeira’s empty master bedroom, creeping across the landing to Alma’s room each night. A young, inexperienced man, new to adult relationships, he was intense and passionate, as Alma discovered when she began to worry about the age difference.

In January 1935, she told Stoner she wanted to end the relationship but he wouldn’t hear of it, losing his temper whenever she broached the issue and, in one argument, grabbing her by the throat before her maid Irene separated them.

Despite the rows, they continued to enjoy many happy moments together and in the week leading up to Francis Rattenbury’s death, they’d spent a few days together in London, staying at the fashionable Cumberland Hotel and shopping at Harrods, where Alma treated her paramour to a new suit.

It was in that suit that Stoner appeared alongside her in the dock at the Old Bailey when their trial began that May. By then, she had been persuaded to retract her confession following a visit to her cell in Holloway prison by her 14-year-old son Christopher.

Her lawyers had explained to him that his mother was in great danger and that they needed him to persuade her to tell the truth. Finally she broke down and, for the sake of her children, changed her story to say that it was Stoner who had killed Ratz, not her.

For his part, Stoner remained silent throughout. His defence lawyer’s only hope of saving him from the hangman’s noose was to argue that he was guilty but insane because of the drugs he was taking, but the prosecution had already demonstrated that he had no idea what cocaine even looked like — describing it as brown with black specks, rather than white.

After a trial lasting three days, he was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging.

As for Alma, she was cleared yet ultimately suffered the worse fate of the two. She had been demonised in the Press for corrupting a much younger lad of previously good character and the judge’s severe criticism of her during his summing-up was a portent of the vilification to come.

Describing her as ‘an adulteress of the most unpleasant type,’ he understood that the jury could not have ‘any feeling except disgust for her’ but urged them not to let that cloud their judgment.

Racked with guilt that it was her evidence that had sent Stoner to the gallows, she decided to take her own life, stabbing herself to death as she plunged into a stream near her home less than a week after the trial had ended.

After hearing the news, Stoner made a statement in which he claimed that he had lied to protect her and that it was in fact Alma who had killed her husband.

This was dismissed by the Court of Appeal but soon afterwards a petition signed by some 350,000 people persuaded the Home Secretary to commute Stoner’s sentence to life. In the end, he was imprisoned for only seven years, released in 1942 and served in France with the Royal Army Service Corps. He subsequently enjoyed a happy family life, living in Bournemouth with his wife Christine and daughter Yvonne.

When he finally died of a brain tumour in March 2000, aged 83, it was in Christchurch Hospital, only a few miles from Villa Madeira and in sight of the stream where Alma killed herself.

Which one was guilty of murder? Or were they in it together? We may never know. The only people who knew the answer are long dead but their story continues to fascinate — a terrible reminder of the sort of thing that can go on in even the most respectable looking house in suburban England.

  • The Fatal Passion Of Alma Rattenbury by Sean O’Connor, is published by Simon & Schuster, £20. To buy a copy for £16 (20% discount), call 0844 571 0640. Offer valid until July 29, p&p free on orders over £15.

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