‘Cold’ husband had Viagra & Champagne after heiress died
A CLEANER for a wealthy heiress who drowned in a swimming pool on holiday found Viagra and her husband’s wedding ring in the bathroom of the family home shortly after her death, a court has heard.
Karen Mairs said on the same day she found two Champagne glasses and empty bottles, and suspected Donald McPherson, 50 – later cleared of the murder of his wife Paula Leeson, 47, from Sale – had been sleeping with someone.
Convicted fraudster McPherson was ordered to be found not guilty of the 2017 murder of his wife on a judge’s direction to the jury halfway through his trial in 2021 due to insufficient evidence.
While cleared of murder, Ms Leeson’s family have brought legal proceedings against McPherson at Manchester Civil Courts of Justice, asking a judge to rule he unlawfully killed her by drowning in a swimming pool on holiday in Denmark, so he forfeits any legal entitlement to benefiting from his late wife’s will and estate, worth £4.4m.
The court has heard McPherson being described as a ‘Walter Mitty’ who had changed his name many times, had 32 convictions in three countries, and whose previous wife and child died in a fire.
McPherson, who denied murder, had taken out ‘secret’ life insurance policies on Ms Leeson worth £3.5m.
Mrs Mairs said she cleaned the couple’s home in Sale and found the Viagra, empty Champagne bottles and bedding shoved behind a headboard ‘to stop the headboard banging against a wall.’
Mrs Mairs told the court McPherson
was ‘cold’ and showed no emotion, and began clearing the house of any of his late wife’s possessions soon after her death.
After McPherson joined a bereavement group, Widowed And Young – that he called ‘Tinder for widows,’ Mrs Mairs said he began going out in Manchester and London. McPherson met Ms Leeson in 2013, using a ‘story’ of being an orphan to hide his past after serving time for an £11m bank fraud in Germany, the court heard. He claimed to be a property developer and she oversaw the skip hire part of her family’s ground-working business her father Willy, 80, had built up in Sale.
Ms Leeson’s brother Neville said he took the call from McPherson following her death, saying his sister had been in an ‘accident.’
He told the court: “I said ‘What do you mean?’ He then said to me very calmly that ‘she’s passed, she’s passed.’ He wasn’t in tears. I remember that he then told me three versions of what had happened.
“As the rest of my family were close, they heard what was going on and I remember my dad shouting ‘He’s killed her.’”