No jail time for Emily Horne

Former glamour model and a serial bigamist Emily Horne allowed to walk free

A former glamour model who married five men without divorcing any of them was given a suspended prison sentence yesterday by a judge who said she had “undermined the institution of marriage”.

During the past 13 years, a soldier, a bank worker, a website designer, a train guard and a salesman have all believed they were legally married to Emily Horne, 30, who says she likes “making people happy”. Only the first wedding, in 1996, was legal.

Horne, from Kingswinford, West Midlands, escaped with a ten-month jail sentence, suspended for two years, after a court was told that she was receiving treatment for personality disorders.

The woman who maintains that “the thing I’m guilty of most is falling in love” is in the process of divorcing her only real husband and has pledged to send back all five wedding rings.

Labelled a “manipulative woman” by Judge Mushtaq Khokhar, she claims to be considering a vow of chastity before becoming a nun.

Speaking after walking free from Manchester Crown Court after her sentencing, Horne declared: “I am feeling great. I have been vindicated. It’s about time I got a divorce.”

Horne, who was 12 when she persuaded her parents to buy her first wedding dress, was cautioned after her second bigamous marriage and jailed for six months after her third.

Undeterred, in 2007 her fourth fake marriage and her fifth in total, was to Ashley Baker, a 25-year-old salesman who met her when she was working in a massage parlour.

He discovered his marriage was a sham only when Horne confessed as the newlyweds prepared to depart for a honeymoon in Scotland.

Her fantasy world extended beyond the register office, where she used a series of different names to avoid detection and listed her father variously as a postman, a computer programmer and a retired army major .

She also lied, to different boyfriends and husbands, about her work as an escort, a strippagram and an actress in adult movies, fabricated a university education and distorted her family background. Horne claimed falsely that she had cancer and HIV, had lost a daughter to meningitis and had given another up for adoption.

Separating fiction from reality was beyond most of her besotted lovers. One described Horne as “an intoxicating mix of intellect and sexiness that was quite unique”.

Born in York, she met her first and only genuine husband, Paul Rigby, at school and married him in 1996, shortly after her 18th birthday. Horne left him after five months and in 1999 married a Leeds bank worker, Sean Cunningham. She met Chris Barrett, a website designer, and married him in 2000.

Husband number four, in 2002, was James Matthews, a train guard from Ipswich. After he discovered her past, the police were alerted and she was jailed for six months.

Last month she pleaded guilty to bigamy in marrying Mr Baker two years ago at a register office near Oldham. Her new partner, Wayne Harper, was in court yesterday for her sentencing.

Judge Khokhar said that he had intended to jail Horne but decided to suspend the sentence because a psychiatric report said she was reponding well to treatment for bipolar and personality disorders.

He told her: “It undermines the institution of marriage when someone contracts marriages at the drop of a hat. You are impulsive and also very manipulative but I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt because of your psychiatric condition.”

Paul Hodgkinson, in mitigation, said: “She has not received financial support from any of these men and it is right to say that the marriages have cost her dearly financially and emotionally.

“She admits she is an attentionseeker and a lady with emotional difficulties. She is sorry for what she has done and sorry for the hurt she has caused the men in these marriages.”