IT was the thriller that gripped the nation. In March 1935 when eminent architect Francis Rattenbury was bludgeoned to death with a mallet in his Bournemouth home, few would have known the story that was to unfold would be so sensational.

Rattenbury’s wife Alma, who, at 39, was almost 30 years his junior, and his teenage live-in handyman George Stoner were jointly charged with his murder.

Alma was later released while Stoner was found guilty and condemned to hang, despite many people believing he was covering for Rattenbury’s wife, who was also his lover.

Days later, a distraught Alma plunged a knife into her heart on an isolated riverbank along the River Avon in Christchurch before falling into the water.

Stoner, meanwhile, won vast public support as it was felt Alma, bored of her much older husband, had seduced Stoner and led him on from the day he answered an advert in the Bournemouth Echo in September 1934 for a “daily willing lad, 14-18, for housework”.

Public pressure forced the Home Secretary to reduce his death sentence to life and he served just seven years before he was released to serve in the war.

The tale, dubbed the Murder at the Villa Madeira after the name of the Rattenburys’ home in Manor Road on the East Cliff, inspired books, television programmes and a 1987 TV play, called Cause Célèbre, by Terence Rattigan.

To mark the 100th birthday of the playwright’s birth, the play is now being revived in the West End, with Shameless actress Anne-Marie Duff playing the role of Alma.

Born in Canada, Alma was a talented pianist on the brink of stardom when she met and fell in love with an Englishman she met there.

She followed him to England when war broke out, but he was killed in the trenches two years later.

At the end of the war, Alma was married again, to Captain Compton Pakenham, a dissolute minor aristocrat, and they had a son. But the marriage fell apart within two years and Alma was 28 when she met Rattenbury, a highly successful Yorkshire-born architect, who was to become her third husband.

Rattenbury’s story was one of achievement that began way back in Bradford where he was born.

He left Britain aged 18 to seek his fortune in Canada and, at the age of 25, entered a competition launched by the province’s prime minister to endow Victoria with a legislative building worthy of housing its government.

Rattenbury’s design was chosen out of the 65 entries and he went on to design The Empress Hotel on the West Coast, which attracted guests such as Rudyard Kipling and the Prince of Wales.

At its inauguration in 1908, the achitect was unable to attend, and so missed out on the performance of 15-year-old Alma Woolf, a prospector’s daughter who would grow up to become a beautiful and famous composer of popular songs.

But 15 years later, the pair did meet, when Rattenbury was guest of honour at a function at the hotel where Alma was again playing the piano.

It was love at first sight and, amid much scandal, Rattenbury divorced his wife of 30 years, Florrie, and the couple married in 1925 and had a son, John.

But, both being divorcees, they were shunned by society where they had made their home, and eventually retired to Bournemouth.

Rattenbury became reclusive and took to alcohol, while Alma’s career thrived.

But the real crossroads in their life came when the placed the advert in the Bournemouth Echo and took on George Stoner.

The following March, Alma took George to London, where she bought him new clothes in Harrods.

George, a simple man without much schooling, fell deeply in love with her, and became dangerously possessive.

It is said that, when Alma told her lover that she and her husband were going on a weekend trip to visit friends in Bridport, he snapped, telling her he was going to give old Rattenbury “a bloody blow”.

Alma did not take him seriously and the rest, as they say, is history.

When the police arrived at Villa Madeira, Alma, who had taken to drink, told them she committed the crime. It is thought she was trying to shield her lover from the blame.

She was charged with murder when Rattenbury died three days later, but when George confessed, they were both tried for one of the most notorious crimes in British history.

When George was found guilty, Alma wrote a tender letter of farewell before taking her own life.

She is buried in the cemetery in Wimborne Road, Bournemouth.

George, meanwhile, fought in the Normandy invasion after he was released. He later remarried and lived to a ripe old age in Bournemouth.