BRONCO STAR’S BUCKS PASS
LEAGUE STAR ASKED TO COUGH UP $100K TO HELP ’POOR’ MOTHER
THE millionaire captain of the Brisbane Broncos has inherited $623,000 from his grandmother, a court has heard — and his Gold Coast mother, who claims to be poor, will get a slice.
Gold Coast-born Darius Boyd was the sole beneficiary of the will of Delphine Merle Boyd, a widowed dressmaker who died aged 87 on September 17 last year.
Details of the windfall were revealed in the District Court in Brisbane where Boyd’s mother, Rochelle Lyndal Fleur Boyd, 53, of Coombabah, (pictured above with Darius) has asked a judge to approve of her receiving a $100,000 slice of Darius’s inheritance. In her application filed last Friday, Rochelle Boyd said she did not receive a cent under her mother’s will dated August 2012, and she is poor, with total assets of $52,209. Ms Boyd receives a disability pension and lives in a share house, the court has been told. Darius Boyd’s $623,063 inheritance includes $318,895 from an accommodation bond refund and $278,499 in a Challenger care annuity.
Delphine (inset) died at Sandbrook Aged Care at Burleigh Waters and was buried at Southport Lawn Cemetery on September 26.
Boyd last year spoke of how Delphine had been a great support for him and took him in at age 15 after his mother, Rochelle, suffered mental health issues and was institutionalised.
Boyd had never known his father and was being raised by Rochelle, a single mother, until she fell ill.
“Mum was great for me in those years, she did a really good job,’’ he once said of his childhood. “I don’t want to talk about it too much, she just … she became mentally unwell.’’
Under his grandmother’s care, Boyd then grew up on the Coast and fought his way up through the ranks in rugby league, playing his junior football for the Mudgeeraba Redbacks.
He graduated through the renowned Palm Beach Currumbin High School league program to become an Australian Schoolboys fullback, before cracking the NRL with the Brisbane Broncos under master coach Wayne Bennett.
Boyd called his grandmother his “No.1 support’’.
Delphine and her husband Herbie had adopted Rochelle when she was a baby.
After a stint in Sydney, Boyd, an Australian Test and Queensland Origin star, moved back to Brisbane at the end of 2014, when he reconnected with his mother. “We didn’t speak for a long time and she’s been through her own battles but it’s good to have her back in my life,’’ he told the Bulletin in 2016.
Rochelle Boyd told her son’s lawyers on March 13 she wanted a slice of the inheritance, and on August 21 at a settlement conference with the footballer’s lawyers they agreed to pay his mother $100,000, court documents state.
Ms Boyd was the only surviving child when Delphine died, the court has been told. Delphine’s son and Ms Boyd’s brother, Dallyn Beau Boyd, died when Darius was eight. He was reportedly Darius’s “chief father figure”.
Court documents state Rochelle Boyd suffers from an intellectual disability, depression with psychotic features, severe pathological gambling and poor impulse control.
Occupational therapist Regan Brown has told the court Rochelle Boyd was managing independently in her Gold Coast rental home with a housemate, and she recommended Ms Boyd be given an allowance of about $3000 a year for an annual holiday. The matter is due in court on October 2.