Marguerite’s Resentment Began To Fester Until She Finally Snapped
Every time her husband made her angry, Marguerite wrote it down in a journal. She kept a record of every single thing she hated about him, including one entry that claimed that he forced her into doing things in the bedroom that she was not comfortable with. Some might say that Karma served her some justice, since she took advantage of men for so long. But her independent and strong nature would not allow her to continue living her life trapped in that situation.
They’d only been married for about a year, when Marguerite Alibert convinced her husband to travel to London together so that she could see an opera. They were staying in the Savoy Hotel together, and they got into a heated argument. The hotel employees could hear gunshots coming from the room at 2:30 AM. She shot her husband several times in the back and his head. Somehow, he was still alive when help arrived, and he died in the hospital from his injuries.
This murder was clearly premeditated because it was no mistake that she wanted to kill him in England. If she tried to kill her husband in Egypt, she would have been sentenced to death for murdering a nobleman on the spot. But in England, she actually had a chance to use her connections to save herself. Marguerite pulled out those saucy letters that she saved all of those years from Prince Edward, and used them as blackmail when she asked him for a favor in the royal court. This totally worked, because the royal family did everything within her power to make sure she did not go to jail for murdering Ali Kamel Fahmy.
During the trial, the judge and the lawyers were instructed to not bring up her past as a sex worker, or her connection to Prince Edward. The jury thought she was a high-class lady who got married to an Egyptian prince. The lawyers painted Ali Kamel Fahmy Bey as being a monstrous man who was abusing Marguerite, and she felt that she had no option but to shoot him. The jury believed her, and they declared that it was self-defense. All charges were dropped against her.
After going free, she moved to Paris and continued her old lifestyle of dating wealthy men. She called herself “Princess Marguerite”, because no one was the wiser. She was not allowed to keep all of Fahmy Bey’s money, though, because the Egyptian court system knew that she was a murderer.
For the rest of her life, she lived quietly in her apartment in Paris and spent a lot of time visiting her daughter, Raymonde, and her grandchildren. She managed to live comfortably for the rest of her life, until she died at age 80. After her death, her grandson was going through her paperwork, and saw that Marguerite had managed to quietly get married and divorced another five times without her family knowing about it.
Where did we find this stuff? Here are our sources:
The Woman Before Wallis: Prince Edward, the Parisian Courtesan, and the Perfect Murder. Andrew Rose. Picador. 2013.