Wealthy butcher’s daughter cut from will in favour of wife

THE disinherited only daughter of a millionaire butcher is fighting in court over her 94-year-old father’s will, claiming he was lured into a “predatory marriage” by his carer.

Robert Harrington died aged 94 in May 2020 – just 11 months after marrying Guixiang Qin, who was 39 years his junior.

Mr Harrington, who lived an isolated rural life in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, had buried his first wife of 66 years, Eileen, in January 2018.

In March 2020, two months before his death, he made a new will, leaving everything to his new bride and cutting out his only child, Jill Langley, 70.

Mrs Langley, who says her parents both “idolised” and shared a “close and loving relationship” with her before their deaths, is now accusing Mrs Qin of exerting undue influence on her ailing father in order to pocket his fortune.

But lawyers for Mrs Qin deny the allegations, insisting father and daughter were estranged. She also denies she was merely a carer and insists that Mr Harrington proposed after they embarked on “a loving and sexual relationship”, leaving her everything because he “wanted to look after her”.

James Mckean, for Mrs Langley, told Recorder Robert Mcallister at Central London County Court that Mr Harrington ended up in an “ill-maintained grave” separate to the plot where he had wished to lie alongside Eileen.

Giving evidence, Mrs Langley said: “There was never any doubt that I would be the sole recipient of my parents’ inheritance.”

Her father had already been displaying “strange behaviour” when he moved into his home in King’s Lynn in 2015, her barrister continued.

Medical evidence suggested he was “most likely suffering from a paranoid delusional disorder” in his final years, he added.

The hearing continues.