My dad was stolen from me
Carolyn spent four frantic years searching for her dementia-stricken father after his new partner cut him off from his family and he was put in a care home without her knowing. Even more astonishing – it was all perfectly legal
What a shock it can be to see an adored parent suddenly shrunken in a care home bed.
Professor Carolyn Stephens was immediately struck by her father’s frailty. ‘My father had been a big man — 6ft 2in and strong — but he was so so thin. Bed-ridden, yet it was obviously him. the thing I remember most is his smile.
‘he seemed to recognise me. It broke my heart, really. all he said was “surprised, surprised”. he kept repeating it. I remember giving him a hug.
‘I suppose I was in shock. this was clearly end- stage dementia, but . . . that smile.’
those passing the room where Carolyn sat holding her father’s hand would have thought little of it, although they might have wondered why the care home manager was there too, watching her every move.
the truth is that, until that day, in December 2022, staff at the care home had no idea that the dementia-stricken gentleman in that room, the one who had no visitors for months on end, even had a daughter.
they had no idea that Carolyn — Vincent Stephen’s only child and once ‘the apple of his eye’ — had been desperately searching for him. For four years, she had not even known whether he was alive.
While there was immediate elation in finding him, she tells me of the mounting horror as she looked around that small room.
‘there was nothing of him in it, save for one painting on the wall that had been in my parents’ house. there were none of his golf trophies, pictures of his family. No plants — Dad always loved a chrysanthemum. My aunt put it well later. She said it was as if he had been robbed of his entire past.’
People talk of losing their loved ones to dementia long before they die. there is an element of that to this story, but it’s only a small part.
For Carolyn says her father wasn’t accidentally lost to her. She believes he was deliberately estranged from his family, ‘dumped’ in a care home and duped into believing he had been abandoned.
She only found him at all because she embarked on an epic trawl through public records. When, on the third long day of poring over physical copies of the electoral roll at the British Library she finally chanced upon his name, showing him resident at this Norfolk care home, she let out such a cry that the librarians had to tell her to shush.
Who would deny a loving daughter the right to even know if her father was alive? More importantly, how could the law allow it to happen?
Carolyn traces the beginning of the problems to the arrival of the late Iris Keyes, a woman her widowed father met on a Saga holiday in 2012.
at first she was pleased her dad had found a new ‘companion’, but she was concerned when Iris, a widow, started answering her dad’s phone for him.
‘this was as soon as they got back from that holiday,’ she recalls. ‘alarm bells rang then.’ So began a chain of events Carolyn calls textbook ‘alienation’. Over a period of years, Carolyn alleges she was removed from her father’s life, first by Iris, then, more inexplicably, by her daughter Penny. that it happened as Vincent’s dementia was being investigated is ‘unforgiveable’, she says.
She cites three events over the space of a week in 2018. ‘First, this woman took my father to a register office and tried to marry him, but the registrar refused saying that he did not have the capacity. he couldn’t answer basic questions, like his own address.
‘But just a week later, a solicitor signed a piece of paper that gave her Lasting Power of attorney, over not only finances and property, but health and welfare. It gave her the power to remove me from his life.’
The third event? Carolyn was reported to the police, accused of abuse and harassment of her father. No charges were ever brought, and she has since had an apology from the Chief Constable of Norfolk Police.
Frantic, Carolyn attempted to challenge this, but everywhere she turned — to social services, to her MP, to the Office of the Public Guardian (the body which oversees lasting power of attorney orders) — she hit a brick wall. that she found her father at all seems to have come down to pure tenacity, and love.
elements of Carolyn’s shocking story have emerged via the BBC. the Corporation tried to investigate her father’s ‘disappearance’ as far back as 2021, although then the story was told anonymously. More recently, she has gone on the record in Finding My Father, a podcast presented by the reporter Sue Mitchell. Carolyn has agreed to speak to me because she wants to warn of the potential for ‘ dangerous abuse’ of Lasting Power of attorney legislation.
her concerns — shared by the Law Society — are timely. For most families, putting in place a Lasting Power of attorney — which gives relatives power to make vital decisions — is a wholly sensible move, but the process can be cumbersome.
Legislation passed last year promised to streamline it, but it horrifies Carolyn who believes there should be more safeguards around Lasting Power of attorney applications, not fewer.
‘ It used to require two witnesses, and family had to be informed. that is no longer the case, meaning the process will be even simpler — and more open to abuse.’
In theory, you can challenge an Lasting Power of attorney via the Office of the Public Guardian. Carolyn was shocked to learn fewer than 25 per cent of cases reported are investigated. ‘they would not take action in my case, so I would like to ask in which cases do they actually act?’
how on earth did this unfold? Carolyn tells me that her parents, who were married for 50 years, were devoted to one another. Ditto to their only child, whose career took her from their Suffolk home all over the world. a letter from an aunt — which now forms part of an extraordinary dossier of evidence — refers to Carolyn as ‘the apple of his eye’.
When her mum Rosemary died, Vincent struggled. ‘Mum had been his world. as much as I tried, I couldn’t be there for him to watch tV with every night. I was happy when he found a companion.’
enter Iris. and immediate tensions. even during their first meetings, there were clashes. ‘ She told my father that I’d said things I had not
said, and he was confused. He said, “I don’t understand why you don’t get on”.’
There is no requirement to get on with a parent’s new partner, but when Carolyn tried to talk to her father alone, she struggled. ‘I’d phone. She would say “he doesn’t want to speak to you”, or put the phone down. It was distressing for him. There was one conversation where she was shouting at him that he didn’t love me, and he was saying “yes, I do. She is my daughter”.’
No one is disputing that Vincent enjoyed the company of Iris. In 2014, Vincent sold his house and moved 30 miles to Norfolk to be closer to her.
By now other family members and old friends were openly worried about how much Iris was controlling all contact with Vincent, but there were bigger concerns: Vincent’s cognitive decline. By 2018, a fall in the garden sparked a row about whether he needed medical treatment.
Carolyn made a GP appointment for him, and he had a set of tests.
He was asked to come back for further investigation — but the appointment was cancelled.
Carolyn rebooked the tests — sparking fury from Iris, who insisted he did not have dementia. Nor did he want Carolyn meddling in his life, Iris said. Carolyn wrote to his GP and emailed Iris’s daughter Penny, pleading for help. ‘There was no response.’
Then, the series of bombshells. There was a confrontation on the phone where, Carolyn claims, ‘Iris screamed at me that they were married now, “so you are not his next of kin any more” ’. marriage? It was the first she had heard of this. Shockingly, her father seemed unaware if he was married or not.
‘I called the registrar and discovered they were not married, learning later that the registrar had not allowed it. I was told I should immediately place a caveat — an objection, should they try to marry again. It would be flagged up if they tried to marry in any register office in the country.
‘I said, “I thought these things only happened in films”.’
Yet a week later, a solicitor accepted that Vincent had enough capacity to sign the power of attorney forms — and his signature on that document would render Carolyn powerless.‘People think it can’t happen, but it did,’ suggests Carolyn. ‘ The shock was overwhelming. Everything I had done was for the wellbeing of my father’.
The problem is that, even then, Iris and her family were insisting they were the ones who had Vincent’s wellbeing at heart. They repeatedly told Carolyn, and the authorities, that he wanted nothing to do with his daughter.
It is impossible to know the truth here. ‘But not once, in all of this, did my father say to me that he did not want me in his life,’ says Carolyn. Her account is supported by a breezy email from Vincent — at a point where he is supposed to have wanted her out of his life — saying, ‘I have been at Iris’s for the last week. She is a far better cook than me. Just taking it easy. The weather is still fine, hope you are both well, Lots of love Dad xxxxx”.’ Later, all emails stopped, ‘when his email address was changed’.
HAVING already been warned by the police, what choice did Carolyn have but to back off? The wider family, too. ‘ This was not just me. It was the same with Dad’s family and friends. We continued to send birthday cards — all by recorded delivery, which is utterly mad but has proved vital.
‘Having to prove your love for a parent, providing evidence that you tried, is so upsetting. Later, social services were told that we, his family, had abandoned him. It is simply not true.’
For the next few years, she was in limbo. Then, in may 2022, Carolyn learned, from the public records she regularly trawled, that Iris had died. ‘There was no mention of my father in her obituary. He had disappeared from the narrative.’ Also, from the electoral roll.
So where was Vincent? on may 9, 20 members of the Stephens family wrote to Penny, ‘ and got no response’. An aunt phoned. ‘A man answered. He said “I cannot help you”, and put the phone down.’ With Iris dead, the Lasting Power of Attorney was in the hands of Penny, whose involvement is utterly baffling.
Dr Penny Sorensen is also an academic, a researcher at the University of East Anglia, with a special interest in elderly care. In 2012 she submitted a PhD — about elderly men and social isolation.
A source, who knows her family and spoke to the mail off the record, says she believed she was respecting what she saw as his wish for his daughter not to know where he was. Yet Penny has refused to elaborate, either to us, or the BBC, on why she declined to tell his family where Vincent was.
Then, in December 2022, Carolyn finally found him in the electoral roll. A few days later she was knocking on the door of the care home. ‘The visiting log showed that Dad was left alone for 346 days, without any visitors, in 2022 alone. He had no visits at all from January 1 to June 16. No one visited him on his birthday.’
Even after they found Vincent, the ordeal continued, with Penny instructing the care home not to allow further visits from his blood family. ‘Beyond cruel,’ says Carolyn. ‘Even if she felt I was the most evil daughter in the world, to exclude my father’s family . . .’
Eventually, the authorities did act. Carolyn was advised to make an emergency appeal to the Court of Protection, the only place you can go to challenge a power of attorney. Two days later, a judge immediately granted Carolyn permission to visit.
Finally, in December 2023, an application to lift reporting bans was granted, which has allowed us to identify Penny (who had previously been granted anonymity).
Carolyn was able to spend the last six months of her father’s life finally able to play the role she thought was hers by birth, and by right.
She filled his room with photographs and plants, and the sound of his favourite opera arias — ‘the ones the care home staff didn’t even know he had liked’.
Vincent died, peacefully, on June 18 last year. on Father’s Day, as it happens. ■ THe Radio 4 documentary, Finding My Father, is available on BBC sounds: BBC Radio 4 — Finding My Father. Have you got a story to tell about a loved one and a lasting Power of Attorney? email femailreaders@dailymail.co.uk