Reading the coverage of Carol Anne Hunter’s plot to kill ex partner, Mr Love, one begins to wonder if her prison sentence might have been a little shorter had her plan been a little less well thought out. The “cold, businesslike callousness” with which she organised her plot seems to have been far more offensive than the crime itself. Described by her former colleagues as “superwoman”, and her ex partner as “a career icon”, the implication seems to be, that like so many people, she began to take that tough business attitude home with her. Yet we somehow swallow this behaviour from father’s who treat their wives and children like employees, while customers and useful acquaintances are handled like family. Perhaps if Hunter had been a little more reassuringly hysterical she’d be looking forward to a few less prison suppers.
Hunter’s desire to murder her ex partner came after his decision to disinherit her and their children from the £600,000 Bedfordshire mansion, Lionsfield House, in which she owned a 40% stake and had paid the entire £80,000 cash deposit for. According his new will, the house would now go to Mr Love’s new wife, a childhood sweetheart he contacted on the internet after feeling “lonely and isolated” due to Hunter’s frequent business trips.
Another view would be that Mr Love couldn’t cope with his wife’s financial success, was failing in his own career- peddling his lectures like a travelling salesman, but yet had grown accustomed to the luxuries his wife’s hard work had afforded him. Childhood sweetheart kept stum and didn’t answer back and he married her after little more than a year, a public commitment he didn’t consider during the 22 years he spent with his sugar mummy. ‘Lonely and isolated’ or otherwise, Love deserved a good deal of what he got from Ms Hunter, except her house that is.
Back in the courtroom, Hunter has been sentenced to eight years. The judge appears to have watched a little too much film noir, branding Hunter ‘manipulative’ using her ‘infatuated’ new partner, Mr Lee, in order to ‘achieve her evil aims.’ So the plot thickens, first she’s the ice-queen tycoon who froze out her long term partner and couldn’t keep a man because she was devoted to her job, now she’s the smouldering femme fatale who all the boys go crazy for: Mr Lee himself has admits to being an “old fool, blinded by love.” You can just see the Judge nodding slowly relieved that Lee has remembered his lines, then reiterating, “You had taken leave of your senses, you were deeply infatuated.” (Loony Tom Cruise to play this part in the movie version.)
Lee’s involvement was of course the (bungled) hiring of a hit man to murder/maim Mr and Mrs Love. Lee was a financial adviser with Rothschilds, and only became interested in the plot after realising that the way things were going he would never get a slice of that Bedfordshire mansion and something had to be done about it. Lee received a sentence half the length of Hunter’s.
The sentences come at the same time as new reports suggesting that women who choose to have children face more discrimination at work than any other section of society.(Like we didn't already know.) Hunter was one of the few that successfully managed the juggling act: two children, whining partner and a £150,000 a year job running a large company. I’d bet my bottom dollar that she was the one slipping away from a meeting if one of the kids got sick to boot. No wonder she reached breaking point when her partner, who’d enjoyed the fruits of her labour for more than two decades and never made a public commitment to her, repaid her by STEALING from her and their children; a truly callous act of revenge in response the humiliation he suffered as a result of his inadequacy in contrast to Hunter’s competence.
Hunter does have something to look forward too though. Going down to the women’s prison canteen to collect her porridge, she’ll be universally hailed as a heroine by her new housemates.
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