I plotted to behead Duke, says ex-wife

Plan to decapitate him with fishing line or finish him with shotgun

Alexander Montagu, 13th duke of Manchester, currently awaiting transfer to High desert State Prison, nevada, may feel aggrieved that he’s facing a five-year stretch for attempted burglary.

In fact, he’s lucky to be alive at all, according to an extraordinary disclosure by his first wife, australian former model Marion Stoner.

She explains that when pushed to ‘breaking point’ by his relentless stalking after their shortlived marriage ended, she plotted to kill him, arming herself with a fishing line and shotgun.

‘It wasn’t something that I’d planned for a week; it was just that night I’d had enough.

‘It was either me or him,’ Marion tells me from her home in Melbourne. She says that she and her two children by a previous partner, lisa, then 14, and daniel, then 12, had been living in fear ever since fleeing the marital home after the duke had fired a spear-gun at her from 12 feet — and missed — just months after their wedding day in 1984.

‘every night, we were picking up the children’s bedding, sleeping here, sleeping there,’ says Marion, adding that they often stayed with her sister gabi — waiting, in terror, for the sound of alexander’s motorbike.

‘I’d say to my children: “go and hide in auntie gabi’s wardrobe — and don’t come out till Mummy gets you.” gabi was petrified of him, too.’

Finally, says Marion: ‘Fear went to anger. I called a friend of mine, and asked him to bring a fishing line and shotgun.

‘We tied the fishing line to a tree opposite and let it lie flat on the road. It was going to get pulled up when he came along and get him around the neck. If it didn’t take his head off, I was going to go down and shoot him

‘I would have shot him, I swear to god.

‘He missed me, but I wouldn’t have missed him because I would have been standing over him.

‘If he’d had a bike helmet on, I was going to shoot him in the chest.’

Fortunately for all concerned, alexander failed to materialise that night. Marion subsequently hired a bodyguard — and married him.

By then, she says, she was aware of how it’s possible to ‘drive a normal person to be a murderer.’

thrice married bigamist Montagu, 53, was jailed after he broke into a woman’s home in las Vegas.