Cheating the noose

Incredibly boring. That’s how a cracking courtroom drama seems at first. Case closed. We know whodunnit already. Alma Rattenbury, a luscious middle-aged nympho, has bashed in the skull of her deaf old husband with the help of a teenage builder, George, who shares her bed.

Incredibly boring. That’s how a cracking courtroom drama seems at first. Case closed. We know whodunnit already. Alma Rattenbury, a luscious middle-aged nympho, has bashed in the skull of her deaf old husband with the help of a teenage builder, George, who shares her bed.

Newspapers carry lurid reports of a drunken Alma dancing in her husband’s blood and trying to seduce the policemen who came to arrest her. This bad-taste orgy of violence took place in Bournemouth in 1935 but the authorities gave it ‘a West End transfer’ by selecting the Old Bailey for the trial. Crowds of journalists, prudes and villain-oglers thronged to the high court to see the depraved sexpot swing for her crime.