Couples Who Kill

by Carol Anne Davis

  John Duffy now stated that David Mulcahy had become so violent that he, Duffy, feared for their victims’ safety. Yet he alleged that he met up with Mr Mulcahy to attack Alison Day on 29th December 1985.

  But the defence noted that Mr Mulcahy had been ill with bronchial pneumonia from the beginning of December 1985, and that he’d had a home visit from a doctor a few days before. His employer confirmed this. His wife Sandra was in India so he probably had a friend or relative helping look after his three sons, who were seven, five and just over a year old at the time.

  Mr Duffy said that Mr Mulcahy had made Alison walk along the outside edge of the bridge that they used to cross the canal. He said that his friend raped her twice and that they both strangled her with a portion of her blouse and a piece of wood. He became tearful as he described her death.

  Turning to the murder of Maartje Tamboezer, Duffy said he and David Mulcahy had attacked her as she returned from a sweet shop, and that they’d split the twenty pounds she had with her. But the defence noted that the day after the murder, Mr Duffy had paid twenty pounds off his TV arrears. He claimed that the money came from his own bank account, but this was disproved in court as his bank records didn’t show a withdrawal for that period.

  Mr Duffy also said that the string used to tie the victim’s hands had come from Mr Mulcahy – but forensic tests proved that the string came from a ball found at John Duffy’s parents home.

  John Duffy said that he’d raped Maartje Tamboezer and that David Mulcahy hit her across the head with a heavy stone. Mulcahy had then allegedly wound the girl’s belt around her neck and told John Duffy to ‘do this one.’ Duffy said he’d twisted a piece of wood into the belt to make a tourniquet and used it to kill the teenager. At one stage during Duffy’s fourteen days of testimony, David Mulcahy shouted that it was ‘all lies.’

  The prosecution said that Ms Tamboezer was subjected to a long and terrifying walk through fields, and that one man couldn’t have acted alone. But the defence noted that John Duffy had controlled various rape victims on his own – after all, he owned several knives and was skilled in martial arts.

  Finally, turning to the murder of Anne Lock – which he’d initially been acquitted of due to lack of forensic evidence – John Duffy said that he had raped her but that David Mulcahy had strangled and suffocated her.

  This murder had taken place on a Sunday (18th May 1986) but Sandra, David Mulcahy’s wife, said that he always spent Sundays with her and the children. It was their regular family day out.

  Most of the five month trial centred around John Duffy’s testimony, and for several months the jury were subjected to photographs of the murder victims. Three of the rape survivors also attended the trial.

  David Mulcahy was linked to six of the rapes by Duffy’s testimony and purely circumstantial evidence – in other words, as a young man he’d been Duffy’s best friend and they’d enjoyed scaring courting couples together. But he was linked to the rape of one of the Danish au pairs on scientific evidence as a forensics laboratory had found that semen stains on her briefs and trousers matched his DNA profile. (Confusingly, the au pair had thought that her attacker was black.) The prosecution stated that there was only a one in a billion chance that the DNA was not David Mulcahy’s whilst the defence argued that the bag which contained the items of clothing had been opened at least four times since being stored away in 1984 and could therefore have become contaminated.

  In February 2001 David Mulcahy was found guilty of raping and murdering Alison Day in December 1985, Maartje Tamboezer in April 1986 and Anne Lock in May 1986. He was also found guilty of seven rapes and five conspiracies to rape, given three life sentences and incarcerated at a high security prison in York. The trial had cost more than two million pounds.

  Since then the forty-three-year-old, who was in his twenties at the time of the murders, has continued to protest his innocence of all these crimes.

  The controversy continues

  David Canter, who produced the insightful profile which helped to identify John Duffy, has subsequently written of the case that ‘There are still unanswered questions around these assertions, even though Mulcahy had now been convicted of the crimes.’

  In March 2004 I wrote to David Mulcahy, noting that though John Duffy and the police’s version of the Railway Murders had been widely reported, his own version had not. I asked to see his document A Case For Innocence, as its existence had been briefly referred to in the London press.

  Mr Mulcahy wrote back and I spoke on the phone with one of his friends. I subsequently received A Case For Innocence and a second set of papers relating to the case.

  David Mulcahy states that after John Duffy raped Margaret Duffy, he asked Mr Mulcahy to provide him with a false alibi, but that Mr Mulcahy refused. When the police approached David Mulcahy, he confirmed Duffy owned the weapons which were used during the rape on Duffy’s wife. Subsequent to John Duffy being arrested for this rape, his blood was cross-referenced to various rapes and ultimately to the murder of Maartje Tamboezer. He believes that this gave John Duffy a reason to want revenge. (An obvious question is why Mr Duffy waited for twelve years to exact this revenge but when he was asked by his mother in 1999 why he hadn’t told the police about his accomplice over a decade sooner, he simply replied ‘the time wasn’t right.’)

  Mr Mulcahy also pointed out something previously detailed in this profile – that the Danish au pair who was linked to his DNA described her rapist as being black. The Ham & High newspaper dated Friday 20th July 1984 describes both rapists as coloured.

  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.

  Life sentences

  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.

  16 A HOUSE DIVIDED

  BRITISH COUPLES WHERE ONE PARTNER IS EXONERATED

  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 Victoria Rattenbury & George Percy Stoner

  Al
ma 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.

  The first husband

  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.

  The second husband

  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.

  The third husband

  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…

  George Percy Stoner

  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.

  A pivotal moment

  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 r
educed 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.