Literary icon Alice Munro's husband accused by ANOTHER young victim as dark family drama takes another twist

Alice Munro suspected that her husband was a rapist and murderer, her daughter has claimed, after another woman revealed she too was abused by him as a child.

The reputation of Canada's Nobel Prize-winning author has taken a battering since it emerged that she stood by husband Gerald Fremlin, the man who abused her own daughter from the age of nine.

Munro, who died in May at the age of 92, screamed at police and told them her youngest daughter Andrea Skinner was a liar when they arrived to charge Fremlin with sexual abuse in 2004.

But Fremlin found himself confronted by a 'lioness' of a mother when he exposed himself to the nine-year-old daughter of family friends while staying at their home.

'I was really lucky,' Jane Morrey, now 64 told the Toronto Star. 'I was lucky that my mom never questioned that it happened and believed me instantly.'

Fremlin, a cartographer, received a suspended sentence and probation for two years in after admitting indecent assault against Skinner after she went to police in 2004.

But the case was not reported on, and Munro stood by him until his death in 2013 - the year she won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Morrey's parents were friends of the family and Fremlin was a 'constant visitor' to their Toronto home, she said.

Morrey's father, Cliff Webb, had secured a job as professor of Philosophy at Toronto University in 1969 and the family had moved into a new home with a study which is where Fremlin would sleep on a camp bed when he came to visit.

'I went into the study to ask Gerry what he wanted for breakfast,' Morrey recalled.

'I sat at my father's desk as he asked me what the options were.

'Suddenly, Fremlin threw back the covers revealing his erection, which he was stroking.

'I had never seen an erect penis and was utterly shocked. I instinctively threw my hand up to cover my face, but not before I saw his expression.

'It was a look I can only now describe as hopeful. What I remember was how eerily calm he was. I muttered something about oatmeal and left the room.'

Morrey fled to the kitchen where Fremlin caught up with her and sat down opposite.

'Well Janey, I guess I shouldn't have flashed my c*** at you,' he said.

'I continued to look into my bowl of oatmeal, not knowing what I should do,' she recalled.

'Then he said, 'Well you did get to see mine, maybe you'd like to show me yours?'

'At that I said, 'Excuse me a minute'.'

The little girl ran upstairs to her mother who screamed before storming down and throwing Fremlin out of the house.

'Your mother was a lioness,' Webb told his daughter when she asked him about it years later.

'Fremlin broke down and cried,' Morrey said.

'He said that it was supposed to be just a game and that he thought I would never tell.

'My mother said, 'That's just what you pedophiles are counting on, isn't it?'

Morrey believed her mother, Nellie Thompson, was already wary of Fremlim and warned her daughters to be careful on family camping trips with him.

Morrey's older sister Marianne told the Star: 'I remember my mom saying 'Oh, don't make any shadows. Don't turn that flashlight on. Gerry will be watching'.'

But other warning signs seemingly went unnoticed by the parents.

Morrey was just 'six or seven' when Fremlin began sending her postcards and gifts, one of which was a recording of the 1968 hit 'I Gotta See Jane' by R. Dean Taylor.

'When I listen to it now, I'm astounded that my parents didn't question why a 44-year-old man would give an eight-year-old a recording like this,' she said.

'The lyrics relate the story of a man desperate to get back to the 'arms that once held me' and 'when love and happiness were mine, I gotta find that world of Jane and me like it used to be'.'

'It made me feel special,' she said. 'What transpired between us was a textbook case of sexual grooming.'

In 1976 Morrey's parents split up and her mother inexplicably got back in touch with Fremlin, inviting him and Munro over to her new home in Fergus, Ontario.

'Although I was astounded that she could reconnect with a pedophile, I never said anything,' Morrey said.

'I knew instinctively that she would no longer support me. It would be impossible to be friends with them without denying that what he did, by his own admission, was indeed criminal and (had an) impact.'

But Munro's possessiveness ensured that the rekindled relationship did not last.

'My mother told me that one day Gerry had phoned her from a pay phone as he didn't want Alice to see her number on their long-distance phone bill,' she said.

'Alice was consumed with jealousy and made his life miserable.'

It was not until 1992 that Skinner directly confronted her mother about the abuse that had happened after reading one of her short stories about a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.

'She reacted exactly as I had feared she would, as if she had learned of an infidelity,' Skinner recalled.

'As it turned out, in spite of her sympathy for a fictional character, my mother had no similar feelings for me.

'She said that she had been 'told too late', she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children and make up for the failings of men.

'She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.'

Munro briefly separated from Fremlin telling her daughter he had been accused of exposing himself to a 14-year-old girl.

She also shared her fears that her husband was responsible for one of Canada's most infamous child murders.

Twelve-year-old Lynne Harper was found raped and murdered in June 1959 in woods outside the Fremlin family hometown of Clinton, Ontario.

Steven Truscott, who was 14 at the time spent nearly five decades behind bars for the crime until he was exonerated in 2007.

Munro eventually reassured herself with the knowledge that her future husband had sent letters to his parents from Alaska that summer, and detective work by Skinner has been unable to pin down his exact movements.

Munro returned to her husband after a short separation but Skinner went to police in 2004 after being revolted by a gushing magazine piece Munro had written about her cartographer husband.

Fremlin had written letters to the family in which he admitted to the abuse but blamed it on Skinner, describing her as a 'homewrecker' and accusing her of going into his bedroom 'for sexual adventure.'

Skinner wonders whether even rape and murder would have been enough to make Canada's most celebrated writer turn her back on her husband.

'I thought she would have stayed with him no matter what he had done to me and others,' she said.