Sotheby’s legend fleeced by carer is left penniless
He ONCE presided over what he called ‘ the most exciting jewellery sale ever’ — a dazzling twoday Sotheby’s auction, held in a marquee on the shore of Lake Geneva in 1987 and attended by the likes of Joan Collins and elton John, at which the fabulous collection belonging to the Duchess of Windsor was sold for a record $33,507,131 (almost £54 million today).
But there has been the saddest of postscripts to the life of old etonian nicholas Rayner, who died in December aged 79. His will, which has just been published in London, discloses that he died penniless.
This pitiful state of affairs was not one of his own making but resulted, instead, from the ruthlessness with which he was systematically defrauded by his carer, Kumari Murphy, a woman who cruelly isolated him from his family and friends by eavesdropping on his telephone calls and withholding letters from him.
The gruesome truth emerged in the High Court in 2010 when Murphy sued Rayner, alleging that he had reneged on a ‘ promise’ to give her his Belgravia house.
Rayner, a stroke victim, was by then frail and unrecognisable from the daredevil he had been in his youth when he excelled at the Cresta Run, raced his classic Aston Martin across the frozen lake at St Moritz, and flew his own Auster plane in all weathers, once knocking off a wingtip after colliding with telephone wires.
But it became apparent that Rayner, not Murphy, was the victim, with Judge Jeremy Cousins condemning her ‘emotional blackmail or bullying’, as he found that she had cheated Rayner out of almost £780,000, persuading him to pay tens of thousands of pounds in school fees for a daughter she did not have. She also ran up a staggering £ 160,000 bill for personal telephone calls.
Cousins ordered Murphy to repay £ 1.2 million, including interest — a decision confirmed three years later when the Court of Appeal rejected Murphy’s claim that she had not had a fair trial.
It appears Rayner, who had substantial legal bills of his own, never received a penny. His family, to whom he was known as ‘nicol’, remembered that, such was his exhaustion preceding the auction of the Duchess of Windsor’s jewels, they squirted drink down his throat to keep him going. Tragically, his health never fully recovered.