Jailed duke is given extra 2½ years over stolen car
HARD to imagine that the reputation of Alexander Montagu, 13th Duke of Manchester, could plunge any lower. But the 54year-old Duke — thrice married, once deported from Canada and exposed as a bigamist in 2011 — is evidently determined to prove otherwise.
Less than three weeks after receiving a five-year prison sentence for attempted burglary in his adopted home city of Las Vegas, the Duke has now been hauled back into court, picking up another sentence — this time for 30 months — for attempted possession of a stolen motor vehicle.
And I can disclose that the Duke’s contempt for the law has seen him flout the conditions of his housearrest — under which he was required to remain at home, wearing an ankle-bracelet, prior to his court appearances — with the result that he was behind bars even before the first of the two sentences was passed.
‘He had been under house arrest but violated his terms, and so they took him into custody,’ explains Mary Ann Price, the Court Information Officer.
The verdict is welcomed by the second of the Duke’s ex-wives, Wendy (nee Buford), an American whom he married in California in 1993.
He had neglected to tell her that he remained married to his first wife, former model Marion Stoner, whom he wed in 1984 in Australia, only for Marion to flee less than three months later after Alexander fired a spear-gun at her. ‘It looks like he finally got it: he’s going to be in prison,’ Wendy tells me, whose relief comes as no surprise given that after their divorce in 2007, Alexander accused her of being addicted to drugs and cutting the brake cables on his car, prompting the police to investigate.
Tests speedily showed that the drugs accusation was baseless, while the police concluded that, though the brake cables on Alexander’s car had indeed been cut, it had been Alexander himself who had severed them.
There is only one small crumb of comfort for the disgraced Duke, who will serve his time in Nevada’s High Desert State Prison, Nevada: the latest sentence will run concurrently with the first — though that can only be a cause for regret for beleaguered Wendy and Marion.