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.
The trial
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.
Suicide
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.
Ironically, his death sentence was reprieved after 350,000 people signed a petition calling for mercy and he served just seven years in jail, being released to join the armed forces during the Second World War. He later found happiness with another woman and married her. By then he had changed his story to suggest that Alma was the one who had attacked her husband and he had opted to take the blame. Whatever the true nature of events, the newspapers now left him alone.
But scandal again entered George Stoner’s life when he was seventy-four and assaulted a twelve-year-old boy in a Bournemouth public toilet. The offence, for which he stripped nude, took place in 1990 and he was given probation for two years.
Deadlier than the male?
In retrospect, it’s clear that George Stoner was more violent than Alma Rattenbury and that he was the one guilty of his rival’s murder. Granted, she wanted excitement – and the occasional loud argument or jealous fight added to that excitement – but she didn’t want anyone to die. In the next case, however, that of a murder for profit, there was more doubt about who did what but the judiciary ultimately found the woman culpable.
Louisa & Alfred Merrifield
Louisa May was born in 1909 to a Methodist minister and his wife in Wigan. Her childhood was strict and joyless. She was a physically unattractive and ill-educated woman who would fail in every one of her relationships.
She married an iron worker called Joseph and had four children by him, working throughout the marriage until his death from a diseased liver. It’s likely that heavy alcohol consumption contributed to this. Louisa made it clear that she’d despised him – she’d go on to make similar comments about every husband she had.
Three months later she married her lodger, Richard Watson, who was aged seventy-eight. She herself was only in her thirties. He died two months later of a heart attack. Determined to enjoy a better quality of life, she committed ration book fraud, obtaining seven ration books by deception. In 1946 she went to prison for 84 days. The following year, her three youngest children were taken into care as she’d been neglecting them.
At forty-six she married for a third time, choosing Alfred Merrifield, a Blackpool-based pensioner in his late sixties who was very deaf. She told acquaintances that she married him because he kept pestering her to do so but it’s more likely she thought that she wouldn’t be able to tempt a younger and more vital husband, for by now Louisa was bespectacled, increasingly plain and several stones overweight.
She certainly hadn’t married Alfred for his money because he didn’t have any. From the start, the couple had financial problems so she did cooking and nursing work. But she was so difficult to get on with that she went through twenty jobs in just three years, couldn’t earn enough to supplement his pension and took to pawning the few possessions they had.
On 10th March 1953 she spotted an advertisement in the West Lancashire Evening Gazette asking for a live-in housekeeper in Norbreck, a salubrious part of Blackpool. Mr and Mrs Merrifield went along and were given the job. It’s unclear why this ill-matched couple were chosen as there were fifty eager applicants for the work. Their new employer was a seventy-nine-year-old invalid called Sarah Ricketts who wanted someone to do the chores, keep her company and provide the occasional cooked meal. Partially paralysed, she spent most of her life in bed and often ignored food in favour of cheering alcoholic drinks. She was known to be difficult and demanding and was forever changing her will in favour of various tradesmen and women, possibly as a way of emotionally blackmailing her daughters to bow to her often eccentric requests.
The day after answering the advert, the Merrifields moved in to Mrs Ricketts’ cosy bungalow. Louisa cooked the meals and cleaned the rooms whilst Alfred cleared the overgrown garden. Sarah Ricketts was delighted with her new housemates and praised them to the skies. After all, she’d been living off cereal and jam and now they were providing her with nutritious hot meals. The Merrifields also sat by her bed for hours talking to her and she gladly handed over her chequebook so that they could pay the bills on her behalf. It’s likely that during these long talks they encouraged her to think badly of her daughters, the beneficiaries to her estate.
Whatever the sequence of events, within days of making their acquaintance she decided to change her will in their favour. She told her solicitor that the couple were looking after her so now she was looking after them. The solicitor was surprised but it was clear that she wasn’t senile so the changes to the will were duly made and signed.
That same month, both Mr and Mrs Merrifield travelled to Manchester where they bought rat poison. Mr Merr
ifield clearly wasn’t concerned about getting himself noticed for he spoke to the shopkeeper about his leg ulcers and about being deaf. Buying rat poison was perfectly legal – but they had travelled fifty miles to buy a poison that they could have purchased locally.
By April, Louisa was complaining openly to tradesmen that Sarah Ricketts was difficult to nurse. The elderly lady often tried to get out of bed at night, constantly complained of the cold and sent back meals uneaten. She told the man who delivered her regular supply of alcohol that she thought the Merrifields were spending her money and that they’d have to go…
At this stage someone put rat poison into Sarah Ricketts’ food and she began to complain of terrible stomach pains. She cried when she went to the bathroom and after four or five hours of suffering lost the power of speech. She died on 14th April 1953, five hours after the poison was administered. It was also less than five weeks after inviting the Merrifields into her home.
Poison was found in the old woman’s body and immediately suspicion fell on the oddly-matched housekeeping couple. First, Louisa showed no sadness at her employer’s death and boasted to anyone who would listen that she now owned the old lady’s bungalow. She also told journalists that she believed her husband, now seventy, might have been tempted into bed by the partially-paralysed invalid. She clearly hated her husband and described him as an idiot and a bore.
The couple were quickly arrested and went on trial that summer. Alfred Merrifield denied ever being in Manchester – but his general confusion clouded many of the issues. He also denied having any kind of sexual relationship with his elderly employer and cut a kindly – if somewhat self-pitying – figure in the dock. Meanwhile his wife repeated her suspicions that Sarah Ricketts had tried to cajole Alfred into bed. As a result, the judge described Louisa Merrifield as ‘a vulgar and stupid woman with a dirty mind.’ Her stupidity was such that she had told a woman at a bus stop that she’d inherited a bungalow. The problem was, she’d said this three days before Sarah Ricketts died…
The trial lasted nine days at the end of which she was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. The jury couldn’t decide about Alfred so the judge ordered a retrial. But before the retrial could take place the Attorney General decided that the murder charge against the old man should be dropped. He did not make his reasons for this public, something he was not obliged to do.
Meanwhile Alfred Merrifield gave an interview to a national newspaper, admitting that he was increasingly afraid of his imprisoned wife. He’d found out that she’d taken out seven insurance policies on his life and added that during their marriage she’d treated him so badly that his health had broken down. Nevertheless, he found the energy to visit her twice before she was hanged at Strangeways Prison, Manchester on 18th September 1953, the last woman to be executed at the jail.
Alfred’s health continued to decline, not helped by the fact that the courts eventually ordered him to give up the bungalow. He tried to make some money by appearing in local fairground sideshows but ultimately died in penury in a Blackpool hospital in 1962. He was eighty years old.
17 MAD WORLD
BIZARRE COUPLES WHO KILL
Most of the deadly duos in this book had a clear motive. That is, they were impoverished and killed to inherit wealth or they were deeply misogynistic and killed for sexual satisfaction. But the following cases have weirder elements.
Christine & Lea Papin
The Papin’s double murder is strange because the violence used was so excessive and because one sister exactly copied the other in gouging and battering their victims to death.
Christine Papin was born near Paris in 1905, the second daughter of a deeply dysfunctional couple. Seven years later her parents gave her a sister, Lea. Their father was an alcoholic who sexually assaulted their older sister – and the girls fared little better with their mother who had a hysterical personality.
Eventually the family broke up, the oldest girl fleeing to a nunnery whilst Christine went to a convent school and Lea to an orphanage. They never again saw their elder sister after she became a nun. But they doubtless heard that their uncle had committed suicide and that one of their cousins was committed to an insane asylum until he died.
Christine and Lea grew up to look so similar, with their almond-shaped eyes, full mouths and wavy hair that they could have passed as twins. When the girls were of age they were reunited and found jobs together as live-in maids. They were hard workers but would frequently change jobs in search of better pay. They were wholly reliant on each other and never went to social events like other teenage maids did and it was suspected that they were lesbian lovers, a claim which both would later deny.
In 1927 – aged twenty-two and fifteen – the Papin sisters found employment at the beautiful home of retired lawyer Monsieur Rene Lancelin, his wife Madam Lancelin and adult daughter Genevieve. They were employed as housemaid and cook by the family and given a bedroom in the upstairs part of the house. They ate the same food as the Lancelins, earned enough to amass substantial savings and had a heater in their room, something that was unusual for servants in 1930s France.
But the girls’ lot was not a happy one. After they had dusted, Madam Lancelin would walk around the house wearing white gloves and touching the surfaces in search of specks of dirt. And she would send notes of complaint down to the kitchen if she wasn’t happy with the meals. In the six years that the Papins were to work there, she rarely spoke to them directly, communicating with glares and scribbled complaints. The girls sat in their room night after night and read religious tracts which promised that the meek would inherit the earth. But Christine, increasingly suffering from a persecution complex, was tired of being meek.
On 1st February 1933, the iron broke and Madam Lancelin deducted five francs from Lea’s wages to pay for the repair. The following day the iron broke again, this time fusing the lights. The sisters were frightened as they waited for their mistress to return, unsure of what she would do or say.
A double murder
Within hours of the iron fusing, Madam and Mademoiselle Lancelin returned home, bringing a parcel of meat with them. For some unknown reason they were ascending the stairway with the meat when they were confronted by Christine who explained about the iron. Sensing that the older woman was going to hit her, she jumped – strangely – at her daughter Genevieve and gouged out her eyes. She shouted to Lea to do the same to Madam Lancelin and Lea immediately copied her actions, leaping onto the older Lancelin and pulling out her eyes with her fingertips.
Whilst the sightless victims blundered around in agony, Christine dashed downstairs and returned with a kitchen knife and a hammer. The Papins then took turns in bludgeoning the still-conscious women. Christine would stab one victim then hand the knife to her sister who would stab the other victim in the exact same way. Christine also grabbed a pewter pot from an occasional table and bludgeoned the screaming victims with that.
When the two women were dead or dying, the sisters pulled their fingernails out and partially undressed them. They pulled Madamoiselle Lancelin’s knickers down and stabbed her multiple times in the buttocks and in the calves. During the assault they knocked out all of their mistress’s teeth and some of Genevieve’s teeth – one of her molars would later be found embedded in her scalp. Lea finished the mutilation by stabbing Genevieve’s thigh tops as Christine had told her that the source of life was between the thighs.
Afterwards the sisters rushed to their room and stripped off their blood-stained clothes then got into one of the beds together and lay there waiting for the police to arrive. The newspapers would suggest that they were naked but they had actually put on dressing gowns.
That day Monsieur Lancelin got no answer when he phoned home – and he returned to find himself locked out though he could see candle light shining from the maid’s room. Alarmed that something had happened to his family, he contacted the police. They broke in and saw the half-naked corpses then found themselves staring at the disembodied eyes
.
Trial
The trial took place on 20th September 1933. Both women moved slowly as they entered the courtroom, their faces betraying no emotion. They seemed unaware of the enormity of what they’d done and, when asked if they had any regrets, neither replied.
Christine said that she wasn’t prepared to be hit by her employer so had struck first. Lea, clearly the passive one of the sisters, corroborated this. The sisters had such a poor defence that their appalling childhoods weren’t referred to and psychiatric reports suggested that both young women were of sound mind. In reality, Christine had started to have holy visions whilst awaiting trial and had become so animated that she managed to extricate herself from her straitjacket, a feat previously believed impossible. Lea also acted oddly in prison, so distraught without Christine that she rarely moved or spoke. Both girls ceased to menstruate whilst in prison and Christine often went into sexual paroxysms during which she begged for her sister to be brought to her.
Eventually Christine went on hunger strike, at which point the authorities briefly reunited her with her sister. But she fell on Lea so passionately that the younger girl began to choke. She tried to tear Lea’s blouse off, begging ‘say yes to me, Lea, say yes.’ Lea remained completely passive throughout this show of combined lust and love.
Couples Who Kill Page 30