He’s the Devil incarnate... We’ll never stop fighting for justice for our Paula
That’s the grief-stricken promise of the family who watched a serial conman cleared of murdering their daughter — despite the judge’s grave doubts. Here they give their own damning verdict
THe phone call that shattered the Leeson family’s happiness forever was cold, emotionless; abrupt in its awful finality. When Donald McPherson rang his brother-in-law Neville Leeson from a remote holiday chalet in Denmark to tell him that his only sister Paula had drowned, there was no regret, no tears; not even the courtesy of condolence.
‘It was as if he was talking about the weather,’ recalls Neville. ‘He said: “Where are you?” and I told him: “I’m with my parents.” He said: “I have some bad news. Paula has been involved in an accident.”
‘I said: “What do you mean? Is she all right?” and he said: “She’s passed. She’s drowned.” There was no emotion at all.
‘I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. How could Paula have drowned? It was surreal. Just the two of them in a small house. How could she have drowned in such a little pool, a plunge pool?’ His incredulity still blazes.
‘I was angry. I said: “Where were you? Where were you?” I was very forceful with him. And first he said he was putting his bags in the car. Then he was on the balcony (there was no balcony at the chalet) and later he said he was asleep in bed.
‘It set alarm bells ringing. Paula never went swimming, she never went near the sea; she never even bought a swimsuit. She never had anything to do with water, whatsoever.
‘Yet here she was, drowned. We couldn’t comprehend it.’
Four years after Paula Leeson’s sudden, inexplicable death, her close-knit, loving family — parents Willy and Betty Leeson, her son Ben and Neville — are still broken by grief. But the abiding anguish the family endures is compounded by a burning sense of injustice.
For Paula’s husband, a serial liar with a string of aliases and 27 convictions for dishonesty, who was jailed in 2000 for his part in stealing £12 million from a German bank, was last month cleared of murdering his wife.
The jury at Manchester Crown Court was not given the chance to consider the whole of the evidence on McPherson, as he then styled himself; a fraudster who took out £3.5 million in life assurance — no fewer than seven policies, apparently without his wife’s knowledge — during his four-year marriage
The Leeson family’s emotions as his trial was abruptly halted by the judge, were of shock and utter disbelief, for the outcome was as unexpected as it was dramatic.
MrJuSTICe GooSe said there were two available possibilities as to what had happened to Paula. Firstly, McPherson restrained her under water or overcame her in a struggle or pushed her to cause her to drown. or secondly, that she drowned by accident, by a trip, fall or a faint, causing her to fall into the water.
He added: ‘ While the first of those alternatives is clearly more likely, that does not mean that a jury, on the face of the pathological evidence alone, could be sure of it.’
He said that while the ‘substantial body of circumstantial evidence’ has caused ‘strong suspicion’ McPherson may have caused his wife’s death, it was ‘insufficient’ to disprove it was an accident.
After McPherson walked free, the family resolved to uncover any new evidence that could overturn the not guilty verdict on him.
Today, Willy Leeson, 78, sits, quiet and dignified, in the immaculate reception room of the family’s home in Sale, Greater Manchester, and tells us he makes a solemn promise at his daughter’s grave every Sunday.
‘I tell her: “I will fight for you”,’ he says, and invested in that pledge is a weight of sorrow and anger that threatens to engulf him. ‘ Paula was taken from us and not a day goes by when we do not think of her,’ he says.
‘I will keep fighting for justice for her until my last breath. I won’t let up. I won’t give up until I die,’ he says in the family’s first full interview this week. ‘We’re heartbroken at the judge’s decision,’ Neville adds. ‘We believe from the amount of evidence at the trial it should have been given to the jury to make the decision. That’s what we’re struggling with.
‘Manchester police did three-anda-half years of absolutely incredible work uncovering the truth about this man and everything he had done. To our minds, it seemed to be completely undermined by this procedure in court. They might as well not have done any of it.
‘ You’re destroyed a second time. You have faith in the justice system and even that lets you down in the end. It’s a double whammy.’
The family gives high praise to Greater Manchester police for the rigour of its investigation into
McPherson’s murky past — as this newspaper revealed last week, a previous wife and their infant daughter died in a house fire initially thought to be linked to his crimes while he was in jail — but they are dismayed that their evidence was not heard by a jury.
‘We feel that’s wrong. It seems the justice system is too heavily weighted in favour of the defendants — and convicted criminals in this case — over my sister, a victim,’ says Neville.
The Leesons have been told there is no legal pathway for them to appeal the judge’s ruling, which they find ‘incomprehensible’, but they are hoping an inquest, which resumes in August, will conclude that Paula was unlawfully killed.
‘I think the weight of evidence was overwhelming — we believe everybody knew and could see that he was guilty,’ says Neville. ‘Yet even though the judge said it was “more likely he did it”, he allowed McPherson to walk out of that courtroom.
‘He didn’t get a slap on the wrist, he just walked.’
Neville’s quiet fury simmers. Like Willy he has braced himself to fight for Paula, the sibling he describes as ‘ kind and warmhearted; the loveliest sister I could have asked for’.
Articulate and thoughtful, Neville, 46, has become the mouthpiece for his family’s anguish and disquiet. He remembers the phone call from Denmark that pivoted their lives from contentment into the bleakest tragedy. ‘Mum and Dad could hear the conversation I was having with Don,’ he says, and Betty, 72, remembers: ‘Willy was standing up and he fell back in his chair.’ She cries.
Willy adds: ‘I said: “He’s killed her. He’s killed her.” ’
Despite voicing their concerns about the nature of Paula’s death to the British embassy in Denmark, they say they were ignored. And the family reserves the full force of its condemnation for the Danish police.
‘They really let us down,’ says Neville. ‘They never did forensic investigations, they just believed McPherson at his word that it was
an accident.’ From the outset they had suspicions about McPherson. When he first came into their daughter’s life, Willy — a successful businessman who runs the family’s civil engineering firm in Worsley, Greater Manchester — was unimpressed.
With no knowledge of his past, to both Willy and Betty it seemed he had appeared ‘from nowhere’.
The couple, married for 52 years, emigrated from Ireland and Willy set up the family business in the 1960s, overseeing its expansion into a million-pound enterprise in which Neville, Paula and her only child Ben all worked.
Paula, her brother and parents were a mutually supportive unit and Ben was raised by his mum and grandparents in the home — a handsome, 1930s detached house.
Into this loving, familial closeness, McPherson arrived, short, stocky and scruffily- dressed, falsely purporting to be a successful property developer with a portfolio of houses; all, it later emerged, mortgaged for around £1.5 million.
Introduced to Paula through one of the Leesons’ clients and newly arrived in Manchester, in 2013, he swiftly wheedled his way into her affections. ‘ He realised the way to her heart was through Ben and he pretended he’d written a will leaving everything to him,’ says Neville.
‘He also lied that he was raised in foster care, a doorstep baby [actually he was born in New Zealand, the son of two loving parents], and Paula was the type to feel sorry for him.
‘ She was kind- hearted. She always wanted to help people.’
Both Betty and Willy were suspicious of McPherson from the off. ‘But Paula would become defensive if we said anything against him so we didn’t criticise. We put up with him for her sake,’ adds Betty.
She suffers from a heart condition, exacerbated by stress and grief; her voice, soft and breathless, falters. When, just three months into their relationship, Paula told her parents she and McPherson wanted to marry, they urged her to wait.
Much has emerged since about McPherson’s financial affairs: profligate and sinking into debt, he ‘wanted to get a plan in place’ Willy believes, to secure his future. This, the family contends, involved marrying Paula and insuring her life to the hilt.
In June 2014, they duly married at Peckforton Castle, a luxury venue set in rolling Cheshire acres. It was a lavish affair, paid for by Willy and Betty; the first wedding for their 47-year-old daughter who seemed besotted.
‘She took me to one side and reassured me: “I’ll be looked after Dad. I’ll be all right,” ’ recalls Willy.
But even in the run-up to his wedding, McPherson, was, it seems, spinning extravagant tales, claiming at the 11th hour that his best man, due to fly from New Zealand, could not attend as his wife had just died in childbirth.
And it struck them as odd no one from Don’s past came to the wedding. McPherson explained this by trotting out his habitual lie about being raised in foster care. Unsurprisingly today, every photo of the wedding bar one — a lovely shot of Paula beaming next to her mother — has been removed from the family’s sitting room.
After the wedding, Paula moved into a £285,000 three-bedroom detached house she’d bought with McPherson, nearby.
As soon as he was married, however, McPherson was orchestrating what the Leesons now believe was a cynical plan. He paid £460-a-month in life insurance policies — despite being overdrawn.
‘He wouldn’t come to family events unless he had to,’ recalls Neville. ‘He’d sometimes come grudgingly then sit on his own and never speak. If he did, it was always about making money.’
‘We talked about not liking him,’ adds Willy, ‘but we wouldn’t do anything to upset Paula. She was totally fooled.’ He also seemed incapable of showing his wife affection. ‘We all noticed it. He didn’t hug her properly,’ adds Betty. And overshadowing the relationship was a permanent pall of secrecy. In fact, as our own inquiries revealed last week, McPherson — then using the assumed name Donald Somers — was serving time for embezzlement when his Swedish wife Ira Kulppi and their four-yearold daughter Natalie died in a house fire.
‘Somers’ insisted they had been murdered, reporting ‘several death threats’ and telling German police he believed his enemies had killed his family after he was imprisoned.
Throughout his life, it seems, he has reinvented himself under a series of aliases.
Born Alexander Lang, he is believed to have changed his name to Alan Atkins in 1995. Later he became Donald Somers, then he appeared in Scotland in 2010 as Donald McPherson.
A year later he had transformed into Donald Anderson, then back to McPherson in 2013.
Had Paula known about these multiple identities, Neville is adamant: ‘She would have run a mile. She would still be alive now.’
He calls for a new law — Paula’s Law — which prevents convicted criminals from expunging their past by assuming new names.
‘As it is, he will do it again,’ says Neville. ‘His life history shows it’s the same pattern.
‘The judge has condemned someone else, another family like us. You wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
‘As soon as Paula died, he took control of her life insurance policies and her will.’
The will, changed in McPherson’s favour, was later proved to have been forged in 2014 and the allegedly forged trust documents, through which he gained control of Paula’s life insurance, were dated April 2017, a couple of months before her death.
And throughout he expressed no sadness, emotion or sympathy with the family.
‘He didn’t tell Ben he was sorry his mum had died,’ says Neville. Ben, ‘quiet and very private’ according to his uncle, doesn’t attend our interview. ‘He’s not doing very well,’ adds Neville. ‘He would hopefully have had his mother for another 40 years. That’s been taken from him.’
For Betty the days passed in a blur of grief. ‘I went to see Paula at the undertaker’s,’ she says. ‘I wanted to be on my own with her. I had a little chat with her, told her how much I loved her.
‘Willy said to me: “You were the first one to see her. You should be the last one, too.” ’
The family’s suspicions were further aroused when they went to see Paula’s body, repatriated from Denmark, at Tameside Hospital, Ashton-Under-Lyne.
‘I’d asked [McPherson] if there were any marks on Paula and he said, “nothing”, but she had a
— and Meghan Markle came of age just as America began a period of self-abasement, with its special target being white privilege, the fight against racism and a concentration on ‘female empowerment’.
Many British readers may disagree but Meghan strikes me as a perfect example of a decent enough person ‘blowin’ in the wind’ of this Zeitgeist.
She is not out to trade on her skin colour or gender but genuinely believes that, even in today’s America with a black female VicePresident, those two qualities could be held against her.
Put this highly developed sensitivity and mindset in Buckingham Palace and the results were bound to be disastrous: uncomprehending on the part of the royals, who have never dealt with a person of colour in the family before, let alone an American bent on consciousness-raising.
Although Meghan herself has grown up in the most favourable time for black Americans, her mother was much closer to the terrible legacy of slavery, most horribly exemplified by the murder, vicious dogs and water hoses that greeted attempts to integrate Southern schools in the 1960s.
Such memories from Doria, an admirable achiever herself, would bear down on Meghan.
And they obviously did. The toxic moment came when Harry told Meghan of a conversation involving a royal individual, discussing the possible colour of the Sussexes’ future child.
There must be about 30 royals in the extended palace family and it’s hard to pinpoint the guilty party, since Harry — bits of his British restraint intact — refused to divulge the name.
For her part, Oprah turned theatrically slack-jawed when this exchange was revealed. But unless we are not being told about something really horrid — and the couple didn’t seem in the mood to pull any punches — in that conversation, I simply don’t understand what was so upsetting.
All prospective parents muse on their coming newborn’s physiognomy, hair or eye colour. The interracial couples I know have always talked about it. Frankly, it would be unnatural for them or their families not to speculate on pigmentation, let alone the royals, who now join the British aristocracy in moving towards an accommodation with interracial marriages — think of the Marquis of Bath and toffs such as Algy Cluff and George Hulse, with their lovely black wives and beautiful mixedrace children.
I’ve tried to see how this reported conversation was so upsetting. Perhaps my insensitivity comes from having never lived in anything but a white skin. There may be a hundred and one nudges and unpleasant moments we don’t see that left their mark on Meghan. She tells us that in the face of the Palace’s deafening silence in response to vile comments about race on social media and what Meghan viewed as ‘smear stories’ in the Press, her mental state led to suicidal thoughts.
Suicidal claims are textbook suicidal ideation — someone who states out loud their intention to take their own life rather than attempting to do so. But they cannot be dismissed. Whether the words were motivated by a feeling of being a burden — ‘I thought it [my death] would have solved everything for everyone,’ she claimed in the interview — or resentment at lack of help from the Royal Family, there is always the chance that suicidal feelings will turn into the real thing.
The Palace should have acted fast on this.
But I am still left wondering why Meghan would want to leave the warm reception by the Queen that she made clear she so appreciated for the racism of the U.S. which she has often deplored.
Call me a cynic, but could it be that these days, being mixed-race in diversity-mad Hollywood and in U.S. politics is a definite plus?
A month has passed since that interview and I have replayed it over and over to try to gauge what the blazes created such a fuss. It is agony to watch — classic feely American, which is pretty much nails-in-the-palm to us Brits, with Meghan’s full- on emoting as she talked of the deliberate character assassination the Palace allowed.
I have no doubt she was sincere in believing every word she said and it may, in its own way, be true. But in royal circles and in much of Britain, to emote is about as acceptable as public purging.
In her memoirs, published 20 years after the Abdication, the exiled Duchess of Windsor wrote of the Press and Royal Family: ‘To be accused of things that one has never done . . . to have one’s character day after day laid bare, dissected and flayed by merciless hands . . . is the most corrosive of human experiences.’
The parallels with Meghan’s claims of Palace and Press character assassination are plain.
How this will play out is problematic. No one knows what goes on inside a marriage. As for their financial situation, it’s a bit murky. Those millions in Netflix, Spotify and Apple deals are production budgets and it is not clear how much goes personally to Meghan and Harry.
The stunning new home has a hefty mortgage — and speaking as a chatelaine who has run large houses, it costs the earth to maintain an 18,000 sq ft home with acres of gardens and high property taxes.
And how, when the novelty has worn off, will Harry take to life in the celebrity fast lane after the more sedate life of British royalty, adrift from his family and friends?
The Sussexes could well be on the way to entrepreneurial riches and stability and — in time — a reconciliation with the Royal Family. But nor can you rule out those now famous ‘ rescue chickens’ of Meghan’s one day coming home to roost.
You can’t rule out those rescue chickens coming home to roost