British serial bride facing jail term

LONDON - Emily Horne has always liked attending weddings - especially her own.

Yesterday the 30-year-old former model pleaded guilty in a Manchester court to a charge of bigamy.

She has been married five times but only her first, 13 years ago, was legal. Since then she has married four other men, but has never bothered to divorce her original husband. She faces seven years in prison at sentencing on July 27.

Ashley Baker only found out his new wife was already spoken for when she confessed on their honeymoon. It is a pattern Horne, who worked as an escort and appeared in adult movies under the name of Amilieannya Carmichael, has adopted since she was 18.

Just a day after her 18th birthday, she married Paul Rigby, a soldier, in York. But, when he was posted away, the pair lost touch and failed to get a divorce. In 1999 she married Sean Cunningham, 33. In December 2000 she married husband number three; Chris Barratt, 21, after meeting him on a bus.

She met James Matthews, 34, on a train, proposed to him by text message and married him four weeks after they met in 2002. A week later she admitted she was still "married" to her third, second and first husbands. Matthews reported her to the police and in 2004 she was sentenced to six months in prison. She married Baker in 2007.

Horne said yesterday that she was receiving treatment for bipolar disorder. She said: "I genuinely regret causing any hurt to the men I married but I am trying to put it all behind me now."

- INDEPENDENT