Final disgrace of the dodgy duke
He’s been jailed twice, exposed as a bigamist and even deported. Now his ex wives reveal...
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 that 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, 13th Duke of Manchester. The 53-yearold 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. 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 in their pyjamas.
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, despite the fact that he once attempted to kill her with a spear gun. Meanwhile Wendy, mother to his two children, has suffered a long-running campaign of threats and harassment.
Neither woman is in any way surprised the Duke 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.’
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 and the aristocrat asked her out for dinner. He said little about his family, such as his great-grandfather ‘Kim’, consigned to Wormwood Scrubs for defrauding a firm of pawnbrokers, although not before his maid had found him entertaining four women in his bed, including film star Tallulah Bankhead. Nor did he mention his father Angus was being tried for fraud at the Old Bailey or that the family seat, Kimbolton Castle, was sold off 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 was very good to the children, would sit there and talk to them. I thought that he was really genuine.’
But after they married 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 was further disquieted by his working environment: an imposing Melbourne house, screened from view by a high wall and electronic gates, monitored by video cameras and patrolled at night by armed men with dobermans and alsatians.
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. Mercifully, a local garage owner and his wife Mandy were present when Marion retaliated: ‘I caught Alex in the mouth, a real beauty.’
He retaliated but the garage owner managed to drag Alex off. The Duke trampled over the man’s car and pursued him with a spear gun. Marion described how he also threatened her with a spear gun: ‘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.
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. She said the signature on the divorce papers purported to be Alex’s but were a crude attempt at forgery.
Yet 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.
Wendy continues to suffer at her ex-husband’s hands. He leaves messages brimming with menace, demanding to speak to his children who have no 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.’
Marcus Scriven is author of Splendour And Squalor: The Disgrace And Disintegration Of Three Aristocratic Dynasties.
He pointed and fired. The spear missed me by a foot