Final disgrace of the dodgy duke
He’s the blue-blooded bigamist caught red-handed on a bungled burglary. And nobody’s less shocked than his ex-wives!
WHEN, just a few days ago, Norma Lopez was woken at 2am by a burly, shirtless man prowling around the hallway of her Las Vegas home, she immediately called the police.
In little doubt there was a burglary in progress, she was directed to hide in the bathroom – and did as she was told.
She could scarcely have known, but this was no mere break-in, but the latest tawdry instalment in the long-running soap opera of Britain’s most bizarre – and notorious – branch of the aristocracy.
When police arrested the intruder, they discovered he was Alexander Charles David Drogo Montagu, the 13th Duke of Manchester. The 53-year-old was charged with burglary and bailed until his trial in September.
It is hardly the behaviour you would expect from the bearer of one of Britain’s great hereditary titles, scion of a family which once owned four vast estates in England and Ireland, and whose former seat, Kimbolton Castle in Hunting- donshire, was the last home of Catherine of Aragon. But close observers have long since stopped being surprised by the thrice-married, twice imprisoned and once deported (from Canada) Duke. Five years ago he was exposed as a bigamist at London’s High Court following a custody fight with his second wife, Wendy. When he lost that battle, he sent their two children, Alexander and Ashley, back to her with nothing but the pyjamas they were wearing.
He now lives in Las Vegas with his American third wife, Laura, and is in dispute with the trustees about what remains of the family fortune.
Most of the inheritance has been squandered by successive Montagus who have displayed a predilection for gambling, alcohol and adultery and occasional indulgence in narcotics, not to mention a resolute contempt for the law which has seen four successive generations put behind bars.
The exasperated trustees may be resigned to his delinquency but the Duke’s first wife Marion, whose life came close to ruin at his hands, has decided now is the time to come out fighting.
Since their split in 1984, she has done everything she can to shield herself from her ex. But, antagonised by libellous allegations, she is initiating legal proceedings.
‘I’m not scared of Alex any more,’ she says at her home in Melbourne. This despite the fact that he once attempted to kill her with a spear gun. Wendy, meanwhile, mother to his two children, has suffered a long-running campaign of threats and harassment, something experienced by many of those who cross the Duke.
Neither woman is in any way surprised he is in trouble with the law, once again. ‘This isn’t bad luck,’ says Wendy, 49, from her native California. ‘What’s happening to him is fair, for all the bad things he’s done.’
Marion, 66, is blunter still: ‘He’ll never change.’
Alex and Marion’s marriage may have been brief but it was nonetheless an ineradicable nightmare. The Duke, although a British aristocrat, was born and brought up in Australia where his father, Angus, later the 12th Duke, had met the first of his four wives.
Alex and Marion were introduced by her solicitor in 1983. ‘He said, “This is Lord Alexander Montagu”,’ recalls Marion, who was then 34 – 13 years the Duke’s senior. At the time she was combining work as a waitress with modelling for Myer, the Melbourne department store, as well as occasional TV work.
The young, powerfully built aristocrat asked her out for dinner. He said little about his family. She remembers he was ‘very well mannered, rather handsome, a thorough gentleman’.
He refrained from explaining that his great-grandfather, ‘Kim’, the 9th Duke, was consigned to Wormwood Scrubs for defrauding a firm of pawnbrokers, although not before his maid had woken him one morning at Kimbolton to find him entertaining four women in his bed, including film star Tallulah Bankhead.
Or that his father Angus was being tried for fraud at the Old Bailey when he succeeded to the title (on that occasion, he was acquitted but later received a three-year sentence for wire fraud in the US in 1996).
At the time of his death in 2002, he was living in a flat in Bedford, from which his 20-stone frame had to be crane-lifted by the fire brigade.
As Marion later learned, Kimbolton Castle was sold by Alex’s grandfather in 1951 for just £12,500.
Soon Alex was visiting the house in Melbourne which Marion shared with her two children Lisa, 14, and Daniel, 12. He seemed different from her macho first partner.
‘He’d visit about two or three times a week,’ she says. ‘He was very good to the children, would sit there and talk to them. He said that he’d never had that with his family. I thought he was really genuine.’
Early in the New Year, at the age of just 22, he began to talk of marriage. The ceremony, on March 17, 1984, was held at her mother’s house, with Marion’s younger sister, Gabi, as matron of honour. Another sister, Pia, took the photographs.
And there the romance ended. There was no honeymoon. Instead, the couple moved back into Marion’s house. The change in her new husband was immediate. ‘I couldn’t even walk to
my mother’s,’ she says. ‘He’d ring, “Get home.” I was a possession.’
Once, hearing that she was visiting a friend, he hurried round and dragged her out by her hair.
She also became concerned for Daniel and Lisa, who was slightly disabled – her left arm had never fully developed, and she had difficulties with her speech.
Marion says: ‘One Saturday morning Lisa was watching TV; Alex grabbed her by the back of the neck, pushed her down the steps, told her to weed the garden. He locked the door and turned to me and said, “If you unlock that door, Marion, God help you.”’
She was further disquieted by his working environment: an imposing Melbourne house, screened from view by a high wall and electronic gates, monitored by video camera and patrolled at night by armed men with dobermans and alsatians.
This was the home of Tom Erickson, Alex’s then employer, an associate of Chris Flannery, ‘Mr Rent-A-Kill’, one of Australia’s most notorious hitmen. Flannery disappeared in 1985. Erickson, who was subsequently bailed for sex offences, would die four years later – on the day he was due to face 11 charges of threatening to kill.
Marion never quite established what her husband’s job was – he spoke about repossessing cars – but she encountered his colleagues ‘big men, carrying shotguns, with handguns strapped to them as well’.
Marion did her utmost to have friends in the house, but Alex alienated them, insisting they addressed her – incorrectly – as ‘Lady Marion Montagu’. Mercifully, a local garage owner and his wife were present when Marion retaliated.
She says: ‘I caught Alex in the mouth, a real beauty.’ She fled to
He pointed and fired. The spear would have ripped my body apart
their bedroom. ‘He came flying in, grabbed me by the throat, pushed me down.’ The garage owner managed to drag Alex off.
Soon afterwards, he trampled over the man’s car, leaving dents in the roof and bonnet. When the garage owner retaliated, Alex pursued him with a spear gun – watched by Daniel. ‘It was gas-operated, powerful,’ Daniel remembers. ‘He got the guy, stood over him.’ Marion claims Alex then tried to pull the trigger. ‘He had it on “lock” [safetycatch].’ The momentary delay allowed his victim to escape.
A few nights later, Marion and a friend, Mandy, were in the kitchen when they saw Alex barge into Lisa. ‘I said, “What do you think you are doing? Don’t touch my kids.”’
She felt his right hand thudding into her face, then watched as he began pacing through the house, before returning to the kitchen and opening a broom cupboard.
Inside it were his spear guns – harpoons used for fishing expeditions. He selected the most powerful – ‘like a big shotgun. Professionals use it’. Marion knew that the point of the spear opened up ‘like a claw’ on impact.
She says: ‘He was 12ft away. He loaded it. I stood there and stared him in the eye. He pointed and fired. I didn’t move; I didn’t even blink. It missed me by a foot. It would have ripped me apart.’
In the silence that followed, Alex headed to the bathroom. ‘I said to Mandy, “Get your car keys ready. Unlock the front door, take the kids and run”.’ Alex emerged from the bathroom, his face coated in talc – ‘his eyes looking out, staring at me’.
By now Mandy and the children were outside. Marion tried to follow. She’d reached the lawn when her husband’s hand locked around her left arm. ‘I screamed, “Drive, bloody drive!”’ As Mandy sped away, Marion was frog-marched back into the house, her left arm wrenched up behind the back of her head.
The next morning, he left. Marion says: ‘I bolted, went to my sister, Gabi’s, to ring the police.’
Her marriage was over, but not her ordeal. She secured a restraining order, moved in with a family friend who had his own guard dog and switched the children to different schools.
But her sense of unease persisted: ‘I didn’t have him charged because I was afraid of Erickson and his men. I was always looking over my shoulder; I didn’t go to the shopping centres for ten years.’
She hired a bodyguard, Steve; today, she’s married to him. But even now, she still struggles to free herself from Alex.
In 1996, she was approached by his mother, seeking a divorce on her son’s behalf – three years into his marriage to Wendy, a law firm receptionist. Recently, however, Marion has become aware the signature on the divorce papers purporting to be Alex’s is not his, but a crude attempt at forgery.
‘The divorce papers say he signed them in Australia,’ she says. ‘But he wasn’t in Australia at the time – he was in America.’
Even now she feels persecuted. A rambling blog written by the Duke’s current wife, Laura, contains a torrent of libellous fiction including claims Marion had been ‘paid to extort the Manchester family’, was ‘a fraud and well known to local police’, that she – not the Duke – was a bigamist who was married at the time of their wedding, and that their marriage was ‘fake’ or never happened.
Laura, now 53, claims that she is pregnant with Alex’s son who – because his second marriage was ruled to be bigamous – will become the Duke’s heir.
Marion and Alex’s marriage was indisputably genuine. She says: ‘Laura’s written I’ve ruined two children’s lives. It was Alex who ruined my children’s lives and my life.’
Wendy, too, continues to suffer at his hands. Her ex-husband periodically leaves messages brimming with menace, demanding to speak to his children, Alexander, 23, and Ashley, 17, neither of whom has the slightest desire to see him.
In one email to Wendy, he wrote: ‘I will enjoy taking your insides out while you are alive and watching.’
Little wonder she warns Laura: ‘She should be fearful for her life.’ Or as Marion puts it: ‘He’s capable of anything. Evil is the word.’