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Fatal Attraction

A married soldier's affair led to murder

A POLICE helicopter was hovering over the woods of Drumkeeragh Forest Park in Northern Ireland . It was a fine afternoon on 27 March 1991, and armed members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary on the aircraft were scanning the ground below through binoculars. They were looking for a deranged killer who had apparently attacked two women without warning.

Penny McAllister (28) had been murdered, fatally stabbed at least a dozen times in the back and neck. She had left her job in the shop at Drumadd Barracks, where her husband Duncan (32) was a captain in the Royal Corps of Signals. Mrs. McAllister planned a lunchtime stroll in the nearby woods with her two dogs. And she had arranged to meet a young friend named Susan Christie.

Soon after 1.30pm, two boys had seen Susan Christie in a state of great distress come stumbling from the edge of the trees, her clothing stained with blood. One of the boys stayed with the distraught woman while his friend ran for help. When the police arrived, Susan claimed that a wild, bearded man leapt out from bushes and struck out at them with a large knife. Susan had escaped by running away whilst Penny had been killed. She gave a detailed description of their attacker, which was circulated as a Photo. Meantime, a massive police manhunt was launched, but in spite of combing the woods, no one who might be the killer had been located, and no murder weapon was found.

It was not until four days after the murder, when Captain Duncan McAllister admitted having an affair with Susan Christie that the police began to suspect her story. It was also odd that though she had Penny's blood all over her clothes, Susan herself had not been wounded by their mysterious attacker. At first Ms Christie denied a sexual relationship with Captain McAllister, but eventually she made a statement in which she claimed that she could not remember anything of the circumstances surrounding the murder. She concluded, “I must have done it. I don't remember. There was no one else there. Oh, God. I could not kill Penny. She was my friend!” Immediately after making this statement on 31 March 1991, Susan Christie was charged with murder.

The adulterous couple had first met when Susan, then a 21-year-old private in the Ulster Defense Regiment, joined the sub-aqua club run by Duncan McAllister. They were mutually attracted and the friendship soon developed into an affair. But it was really one-sided. Captain McAllister had no desire to leave his wife for a few flings with the young private. Over the summer months of 1990, as Ms Christie's obsession for the handsome captain strengthened, so McAllister began to look for ways to end their affair.

In October Susan informed him that she was pregnant with their child. McAllister, mindful of his obligations as an officer and gentleman, responded with support and understanding, which Susan interpreted as love and affection. McAllister paid for the abortion in December 1990. Soon after, Susan was accepted for officer training, necessitating her spending some time in England at Sandhurst . It was the opportunity that Duncan McAllister had been waiting for. A few days before Susan was due to go he told her that he was never going to leave his wife, and that their affair was over. Susan seemed to take it well. There were no tears, no hysterics, no threats of exposure. In fact, she and Penny McAllister (who had no suspicion of her husband's affair) seemed to become closer as female friends. Then, on 27 March, Susan suggested that they should meet up in the afternoon and take their dogs for a walk in Drumkeeragh Forest Park.

Susan Christie's trial opened at Downpatrick Crown Court on 1 June 1992. She denied murder, entering a plea of ‘Not Guilty'. It was the sort of case that British tabloid newspapers live for. Scores of journalists and artists jostled for space in the press gallery. Photographers and TV crews had to wait outside to snatch pictures of the captain and his former lover as they entered and left the courthouse. Inevitably the case had been dubbed ‘The Fatal Attraction Killing', after the 1987 movie starring Michael Douglas, Glenn Close and Anne Archer.

Mr. John Creaney, QC for the Crown described the obsessive jealousy which overcame Susan Christie. “She had reached a stage where she regarded the captain's wife as an obstacle, and she was determined to remove that obstacle”, he stated.  On 3 June a tearful Ms Christie sat in the dock whilst her former lover gave witness evidence of their stormy affair.

The moment the crowded court had been waiting for arrived on 8 June when Susan Christie gave evidence in her own defense. Here at last was an opportunity to present her own side of the affair. Susan described meeting McAllister at the sub-aqua club in Armagh . “He told me it was obvious that I fancied him and said that he felt the same way about me. I was very attracted to him, but he was married and I wasn't sure what I wanted.  As the months went by he was all I ever thought about.  I had never felt this way about anyone in my life.”

She claimed that she had become pregnant in the autumn of 1990, and when she told her lover he gave her an ultimatum: either she had an abortion, in which case he would support her all the way. But if she insisted on having the child, he would deny being the father and leave her.  In December 1990 she had an induced miscarriage.

Cross-examined by Mr. Creaney about Penny's death, Susan was asked, “Do you now accept that you killed her?” She replied, “I would say that I killed her for Duncan . I meant to get Duncan for myself. I was that much in love with him that I would have done anything.”

She later admitted that, “It took me over a year to accept it. I have never been able to say, ‘Yes, I did kill her'. I really believed that at the time I never killed her; that it was somebody else. When I was talking to the police I really believed that I was innocent and that there was a man out there to look for.”

The judge, Lord Justice Kelly, summed up favorably for the defense. He posed this question for the jury, “Can you conceive of a girl of her background sharpening a knife and carrying out this vicious act of killing if she had not taken leave of her senses?”

The Crown prosecutors had refused to accept a plea of ‘Diminished Responsibility', but Judge Kelly clearly had not, and neither had the twelve members of the jury. After a retirement of three and half-hours they returned a verdict of ‘Guilty of manslaughter with diminished responsibility.'

In what was to be a most controversial sentencing, Lord Kelly gave Susan Christie a five-year prison term – which meant that, allowing for the 15 months she had already spent on remand plus full remission, she could have been free within a year. He told Ms Christie, “You will still be a young woman when you are released from prison. I hope that you will find some degree of happiness which has eluded you so far.”

If this statement was meant to be provocative, it succeeded. A spokesperson for Ms Christie stated, “She is an extremely relieved young woman indeed, because even up until the moment she was sentenced she was expecting far worse.” Quite so. Anyone with any concern for justice could not have been comforted by the fact that Susan Christie had been given two and a half years in jail for a murderous attack on a person who had never harmed her. She had brutally stabbed to death a person who had regarded her as a close friend.  What was more puzzling perhaps was that Lord Justice Kelly, while invoking Ms Christie's unstable mental state as a mitigation of sentence, failed to make an order requiring her to undergo psychiatric treatment.

Duncan McAllister, who had refused to speak to or even make eye contact with Susan throughout the trial, was furious. He told reporters, “The bitch should have been put away for ever!”  It's probably fair to conjecture that there was some guilt mixed with the anger of his reaction.

Although the Crown could not appeal against the verdict, it could ask the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal to review the sentence. This was duly done. In October 1992 Mr Brian Kerr presented the case for the Attorney General, emphasizing the aggravating features of the killing such as the degree of responsibility, the extreme violence used, and the innocence of the victim. In his view, he stated, the sentence should be doubled. One month later a decision was announced by the Appeal Court – and it held few surprises. Susan Christie sat impassively in the dock while Sir Brian Hutton, Northern Ireland's Lord Chief Justice told her that, by a majority decision, he and his colleagues intended to increase the length of her sentence from five to nine years.

Lord Justice Murray stated that, “The killing of young Mrs. McAllister by Susan Christie was a wicked and evil deed, prompted not by any grievance, real or imagined, that she felt against her victim. Nor was she prompted by hatred or even dislike of her victim. She was driven by a murderous jealousy, which she allowed to find entrance to her heart and mind.”

The third judge of appeal, Lord Justice McDermott dissented, stating that he found the trial judge's sentence to be appropriate. Susan Christie served out her sentence at the maximum security Maghaberry Prison near Belfast and with remission was released in December 1995. Duncan McAllister did not visit her in prison. She was dishonorably discharged from the Army, and never went to the Royal Academy at Sandhurst .

(Research: ‘The encyclopedia of Women Killers' by Brian Lane , Headline Books 1994)

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