'My husband was a bigamist'

Published Aug 13, 2015

Share

London - Vicki Smith never imagined a man like her husband - an eminent research scientist with a doctorate in biochemistry and a professional reputation to uphold - could have become embroiled in such a tawdry farrago of fraud and betrayal.

But now she has had the leisure to reflect on the enormity of his duplicity she wonders whether, in fact, there is an even more convoluted web of lies to be untangled.

It is now two years since Vicki learned that Dr Robert Marchmont, the man she had married in Scotland in 2006, was not, in the eyes of the law, actually her husband at all.

In fact he was a bigamist and their marriage was a sham: he had not divorced his first wife, chemistry teacher Clare - the mother of his two children - when he and Vicki made their wedding vows. Clare had refused to get a divorce and the pair had separated.

Marchmont’s audacity went further because he committed the same crime twice. After his marriage to Vicki was exposed as fraudulent and finally annulled in September 2013 - but before he was officially divorced from Clare - he was married bigamously for a second time, to pharmaceutical rep Lesley Kenneally, 61, his third and current wife.

Marchmont has been prosecuted twice.

Vicki, 45, marketing manager for a chemical company, who lives in Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear, reflects: “I was absolutely stunned when I realised the scale of Bob’s deceit. I never thought he was capable of breaking the law. He’d never even park on yellow lines. And I felt so stupid that I’d been taken in by him. I’m supposed to be intelligent. This sort of thing doesn’t happen to people like us. I felt embarrassed.

“Bob was the first man I’d really loved and I thought he’d loved me, too, but when he was exposed as a liar and a fraud I began to question everything he’d done.

“For a year I felt total despair. A lot of my friends said: ‘He did love you, you know,’ but I honestly wonder. I think it was very convenient for him that we both travelled a lot for work because when I was abroad or he was going to ‘business meetings’, I realise now he was taking advantage of my absence to see other women.

“He told so many lies. On Christmas Eve in 2007 he dashed off, supposedly to see his first wife Clare who’d been rushed to hospital with pneumonia. I’ve since learned that she wasn’t ill at all and he hadn’t been to see her. So where was he?

“And although he earned a lot - around £130 000 a year with bonuses - he never had any money. His overdraft was always at its £9 000 limit. I re-mortgaged my home, which I bought before I met Bob, several times to pay off his credit card debts. So I wonder now if there were multiple wives and houses, perhaps even other children, he was paying for.

“I’m convinced other women will come out of the woodwork now and say he deceived them, too.”

Marchmont, 59, now living with his third wife Lesley in Darlington, County Durham, has been prosecuted twice in one year for the same offence.

In February he was convicted of bigamy, fraud and falsification of a legal document in Dumfries and Galloway, following his marriage at Gretna Register Office to Vicki, and ordered to do 120 hours of unpaid work.

Magistrates were told he married Clare, his first wife, who taught at a top Catholic all-girls grammar school, in 1979, but they had never formally divorced. In mitigation, his barrister said the first case of bigamy against his client had taken a long time to get to court and by the time it had, the new offence had been committed after the second relationship had broken down. He also stressed that his client had not gained financially from the marriages.

A probation officer said he had asked why Marchmont had gone ahead with the weddings and was told a breakdown following the death of his father had affected his personal life and “thought processes”.

“When it came to the third marriage, he said he had found someone he could be himself with. He did not want to jeopardise the happiness he had found and, by his own admission, he just went along with it.”

And last week he appeared before magistrates in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, to admit bigamy in relation to Mrs Kenneally. He escaped prison again, and was ordered to do 150 hours unpaid work.

“He should have gone to prison,” says Vicki. Although she tries to be positive and avoid brooding on the past, a quiet rancour simmers. She recalls how they first met in 2001 when they both worked for the same, small biotech company in Newcastle. By July 2002 a romance had begun.

“Bob had understated charm,” she says. “He was intelligent, slightly shy; the last person I’d have imagined would be a womaniser. We went out, one evening, a group of us from work, to a bar in Newcastle and Bob ended up kissing me. The relationship became physical more or less straight away. I really fell for him.

“Within a month he’d moved in with me. I’d never met anyone I loved as much as him. It was a physically passionate relationship; quite exciting, and he’d buy me expensive gifts. He’d take me into designer fashion shops such as Vivienne Westwood and say: ‘You have to have this dress.’”

Vicki was 32 when they met; Bob 15 years her senior. A graduate in German and History, she had lived and worked in Germany - first as an au pair, then for a biotech company - but having tired of her rootless expat lifestyle, she returned to her native North East, and bought her neat, three-bedroom semi.

It was in this modest home that she and Bob began their lives together. In September 2002, a new job took him to San Franciso, but there were frequent trips home and, on one of them, just before Christmas in 2003, they became engaged.

“We’d gone to a jeweller’s to buy a christening gift and Bob saw this beautiful solitaire diamond in a platinum setting. He said: ‘You’re trying that on.’ It fitted perfectly. Then he said: ‘I don’t think that ring’s coming off your finger,’ and he proposed. I was delighted, flattered.”

Although she was now engaged to Bob, Vicki knew little of his family history, other than that he had been married to Clare, a devout Catholic, for 20 years; that they had a grown-up son and daughter, and were now (she assumed) divorced.

Vicki never met Bob’s children. “I used to get very upset about that but when I did he’d walk off in a huff,” she remembers.

They settled, however, into a glamorous, high-flying lifestyle. Cigar-smoking Bob took out a bank loan and bought a £75 000 Porsche 911. Vicki drove a smart company Audi. They enjoyed three foreign holidays a year and skiing every winter.

But even in the early days of their relationship, Vicki now realises, there were clues that Bob was not the devoted partner he seemed.

“He’d say he was going to visit his daughter, and he’d take my car, but he’d take everything out of it first,” she remembers. “Once I left a lip gloss in it and, when he got home, he said his daughter had seen it and wasn’t happy. Apparently - even though Bob and Clare hadn’t been together since 1999 - their children were still unhappy about him seeing other women.”

She wonders now, of course, whether Bob’s trips were, in fact, clandestine visits to other women.

They were married at Gretna Register Office - Bob producing a decree absolute for the registrar - in March 2006. “I’ve no idea how Bob got hold of the forged decree absolute. He just disappeared one day and produced it. It had a court seal on it and appeared to be authentic. I was certainly convinced it was real - and evidently so was the registrar at Gretna.”

A second, humanist ceremony followed with a reception for 65 guests at Linden Hall, an 18th-century manor house in Northumberland: it was, she recalls, a glorious day.

Vicki, by then 35, was keen to start a family, and seven months after the wedding, Bob - who’d had a vasectomy - had the procedure reversed so they could try for children. Vicki, however, failed to become pregnant and between 2007 and 2009 underwent four unsuccessful attempts at IVF. “Each time it failed, it became harder emotionally,” she recalls.

“When I got to 39 I knew it was time to give up. I thought: ‘I have to look after what I’ve got. Bob and I will enjoy our lives together.’”

So they threw themselves into other pursuits. In 2010 they climbed Kilimanjaro to celebrate Vicki’s 40th birthday. But the intimations that all was not well began to build.

At the last minute, Bob cancelled a trip to a music festival on the Isle of Wight. “I was disappointed,” she says, so she went with a girl friend.

Bob, moreover, was jealous of her wide circle of female friends and was often moody and distant. But while he tried to restrict her socialising, she had to endure his frequent and sudden absences. In May 2012 he made elaborate plans to attend a weekend business trip to Leuven, Belgium. “He almost gave me too much detail,” she remembers.

Her suspicions aroused, she looked through his wallet when he returned and discovered from a plane ticket that he’d actually been to Munich. She also found a scrap of paper with the name Rita and a phone number on it.

“I confronted him and he said I was ‘deceitful’ for looking through his wallet,” she recalls. “Later he admitted Rita worked in a lap-dancing club in Munich.”

Vicki was distraught. Bob told her he needed “time alone”, and shortly after, having guessed his email passcode, she unearthed details of a property he’d rented: “I was shaking when I found the tenancy agreement. I felt sick.”

Bob went on more “business trips”. Finally she confronted him. “I said: ‘I know you’re planning to move out. I know you’ve been lying,’ and again he accused me of being deceitful.” He duly left and Vicki recalls: “I thought my life had ended. It was worse than knowing I wasn’t going to have kids. I could hardly pick myself off the floor.”

Bob was absent for three months during the summer of 2012, but as the weeks wore on he tried to woo Vicki back, besieging her with calls and emails, deluging her with flowers and cards.

Finally she agreed to meet him in Chicago. They stayed at the Trump Tower hotel. The old spark was rekindled: Vicki agreed to take him back. “I forgave him. So did friends and family. Even my dad gave him a hug and said: ‘Don’t you think about doing that again. Remember she’s my little lass.’”

It seemed, for a blissful four months, that Vicki’s happiness was restored. “We spent Christmas 2012 on the Caribbean island of Curacao: it was a fantastic,” she recalls.

“But throughout January his mood was sour,” she says, “and when we went on our annual skiing holiday he didn’t come near me. Then he said he’d have to come home early to see a customer at Manchester University.” Vicki called his bluff and said if he was leaving, she would too. “So he decided to stay,” she remembers.

Further upset ensued. Vicki lost her job and in February went to a networking conference in London. Bob dropped her at the station that morning. It was the last she saw of him. “When I got home all his stuff had gone from the wardrobe, even his skis,” she says.

“I half expected it. I was in tears. The next day was Valentine’s Day and I’d bought us tickets for The Who. But I’d got over the major heartbreak the summer before.”

Events then moved swiftly. Vicki opened a letter to Bob containing the receipt for a £2 500 three-piece suite. The delivery address was his new home. She rang the mobile number on the document. A woman answered. She hung up.

Then she went to her solicitor’s. It was the day she got the most momentous shock of her life. “I was talking to my solicitor about a divorce from Bob and my mobile kept ringing,” she remembers. “Finally, I answered and it was Bob’s sister-in-law Pauline. She just said: ‘Vicki, he’s still married to Clare!’

“I said: ‘He can’t be. I saw a decree absolute.’ But Pauline, who’d always been supportive of me, said she’d called Clare wondering if she knew where Bob was. During their conversation, Pauline had said Bob and I had married - and Clare had replied: ‘I’m still married to him.’”

Outraged by her husband’s duplicity, Vicki reported him to the police. It took until February 2015 for the courts to sentence him on this first count of bigamy, by which time - in December 2013 - he had already committed a second bigamy offence by marrying Lesley Kenneally.

A shocked Vicki discovered this when she stumbled on their wedding photos online: the ceremony had taken place at The Morritt country house hotel ten months after Bob left Vicki. “I saw the photos and burst into tears,” she says.

Lesley, now the third Mrs Marchmont, saysshe is standing by her husband, who is a “good man”.

Meanwhile Vicki remains resolutely single. She reflects: “I wasted my child-bearing years with Bob and, in some ways, I feel he robbed me of the chance to have children.

“He was also deceitful and manipulative, and I wish I hadn’t let myself be bullied by him.”

She speculates, too, on why Robert Marchmont seemed to revel in duplicity and concludes: “I think he craved excitement. He thrived on secrecy, on conspiracy. He’s a fantasist. Outwardly he’s the image of respectability, but there’s a very twisted side to him.”

ADDITIONAL REPORTING: NAZIA PARVEEN

Daily Mail

Related Topics: