Bid to stop fraudster getting fortune of hols death wife
GOT €4M LIFE INSURANCE BEFORE POOL DROWNING
AN IRISHMAN wept as a court heard details of his daughter’s drowning as part of a civil suit to stop the woman’s husband inheriting her estate.
Willy Leeson, from Wicklow, is taking legal proceedings against convicted fraudster Donald McPherson to stop him collecting on his late wife’s estate.
Mr Leeson also wants a judge at Manchester Civil Courts of Justice to rule that McPherson unlawfully killed Leeson’s daughter Paula by drowning her in a swimming pool while on holiday in Denmark, so he forfeits any legal entitlement to benefiting from the life insurance policies or his late wife’s will and estate, worth £4.4 million (€5.13 million).
Swim
McPherson (50), who had taken out €4.08 million in life insurance policies on his wife, was accused of her murder in 2017 and went on trial but was found not guilty in 2021 on a judge’s direction due to insufficient evidence.
On Thursday, the court heard injuries found on Ms Leeson’s body could have been caused by a hand or arm around her neck, a court heard.
Paula Leeson (47) was found to have 13 separate injuries on her head and body after she drowned while on holiday with McPherson.
McPherson is not present or legally represented at the hearing and is believed to be living somewhere in the south Pacific.
Ms Leeson’s elderly father, Willy Leeson, wept as the Danish pathologist who carried out the post-mortem examination on his daughter answered questions from Lesley Anderson KC, representing the family. Danish police initially wrongly told Professor Peter Leth that Ms Leeson was a non-swimmer.
He said if Ms Leeson could not swim it would have “enhanced” her chances of drowning but if she could swim, it would have reduced them.
Ms Anderson also said the depth of the pool was not 180cm as police had initially reported to him but in fact 120cm.
Prof Leth said if the pool had been 180cm deep then Ms Leeson would have been out of her depth - but not at 120cm as she was 168cm tall and could simply have stood up if she was drowning.
He said it is possible to drown in shallow water but normally that involves children or vulnerable people but for an adult that was “highly unlikely”.
Prof Leth was then asked about the lesions or bruising found around the neck of Paula Leeson, which could have been caused by the rescue attempts
Courts of Justice in Manchester to get her out of the pool.
Ms Anderson asked what else could have caused the injuries.
Prof Leth said: “It could have been a hand or arm around the neck, some kind of blunt force trauma.”
Ms Leeson’s death was initially treated as an accident by the Danish authorities but McPherson was later arrested in the UK as police looked into his financial background.
The court has heard McPherson being described as a “Walter Mitty” who had changed his name multiple times, had 32 convictions spanning 15 years in three countries, and whose previous wife and their child died in a house fire.
McPherson and Ms Leeson married at a no-expense-spared ceremony at a Cheshire castle in 2014, following a “whirlwind romance”.
Skip
He claimed to be a property developer and she oversaw the skip hire part of her family’s successful ground-working business that her father Willy (80) had built up near Manchester after emigrating from Co Wicklow in the 1960s.
Ms Leeson and her brother Neville stood to inherit the business.
McPherson told police he awoke to find Ms Leeson face down in the swimming pool at the holiday cottage in remote western Denmark he had booked for the couple, on June 6, 2017.
Within hours he was transferring thousands of pounds from her accounts to cover his debts.
Then McPherson cleared their home of herpossessionsandjoinedabereavement group, Widowed And Young, which he called “Tinder for widows”.
His murder trial was halted in March 2021 due to lack of evidence.