Joy of postie’s widow after victory over stepson cut out of £600k will
A WIDOW cheered as she left court yesterday after winning a seven-year battle over her late husband’s £600,000 estate.
An Appeal Court judge backed Kim Payne in her fight with one of her stepsons over a will drawn up ‘over a cup of tea’.
John Payne, 57, insisted there was ‘no way’ his late father, also called John, would have cut his children out and left everything to his second wife.
He claimed his father made another will just before he died in 2012, trumping one drawn up in 1998, that left Mrs Payne just £15,000 and the rest to him and his son Tommy.
But at London’s Civil Appeal Court yesterday, Lord Justice Henderson ruled that the 1998 will was validly executed and held sway. The judge told Mr Payne he ‘must accept’ that his stepmother would get the whole of his father’s estate.
His father was 59 when he left his first wife, Vera, with whom he had four children, and married Kim, who was then in her twenties, in 1997. He died in 2012, aged 74, and since then a furious battle has been raging between Mrs Payne and John Payne Junior over an estimated £600,000 inheritance.
Mrs Payne claimed her husband signed over everything to her ‘over a cup of tea’ in a will witnessed and signed in 1998, the year after they married. The estate includes a three-quarter stake in a £450,000 east London terraced house and a share portfolio Mr Payne says is now worth £250,000.
In February last year, after a ‘protracted’ battle between Mrs Payne and her stepson at Central London County Court, Judge Diana Faber concluded that neither will was in fact valid. The 2012 document was ‘not witnessed correctly’, and the judge would not approve the 1998 will because it had not been signed by the witnesses, who instead wrote their names in capital letters.
But Lord Justice Henderson said the 1998 will ought to have been approved, having heard fresh oral evidence from one of the neighbours who witnessed it.
That witness, costume designer Robert Gordon, had ‘a reliable recollection’ of having been asked to Mr Payne’s house with another man. They witnessed the making of the will, he told the court, and wrote their names.
The judge, sitting with Lord Justice Flaux, said there can be ‘no sensible reason to doubt’ that they intended to witness the will being made, despite printing rather than signing their names.
‘There was no requirement in law for the witnesses to have signed the will in the modern sense of that word, as opposed to writing their names with the intention of attesting it,’ he said
He added that the 1998 will ‘gives every appearance of having been validly executed’.
Addressing the visibly upset son, the judge said: ‘It is important that John Payne should now accept and recognise our decision.’
Mr Payne’s mother, Mrs Gabriel, who also attended court, said her son had been ‘crucified’ by the strain of the battle.
‘My son has been crucified’