Our £100 m battle of wills
TWO days after his father’s funeral, Bill Reeves noticed his sister Louise had changed her profile picture on the messaging service WhatsApp. ‘There was a lovely picture of Dad with me and Louise as kids that we’d put on the order of service,’ he recalls. ‘She had used the picture but cut me out, so it was just her and Dad. I thought it was a bit of an odd thing to do.’
It made a lot more sense later that same February day in 2019. At about 6pm, an email arrived in Bill’s inbox from a solicitor.
It contained a copy of his father’s will, the details of which came as something of a shock to him.
Contrary to a version drafted in 2012, in which father Kevin Reeves’s estimated £100million estate was to be split between Bill, Louise and other family members, this new will, dated 2014, left the vast majority — not to mention his beloved Rolls-Royce Phantom — to 35-year-old Louise. And, save for £200,000 in personal effects, 47-year-old businessman Bill had been cut out entirely.
‘Just like in the photo,’ he says. ‘Changing it was her way of letting me know she had done me. It wasn’t a coincidence. It was twisted. I could honestly hardly believe my eyes.’
The discovery proved to be the start of an extraordinary, rancorous three-year legal battle in which Bill, convinced that his ‘ruthless’ sister had tricked their father to change his will in her favour, determined to get it overturned.
It was a dynastic dispute among warring siblings to almost rival the plot of hit TV series Succession, except that this drama was set not in New York but in rather less glamorous Southampton. Late last month, Bill’s fight — culminating in a three-week trial with 47 witnesses — ended in victory when a judge found that the ‘very materialistic’ Louise probably ‘engineered’ the will and had not proved that her father knew and approved its contents.
As Bill puts it: ‘Louise could have everything she wanted. But she wanted more.’
It means the family must now default to Kevin’s 2012 will, which translates into an estimated £27 million share each for Bill, Louise and their half-sister, and about £10 million each for the two children of Bill’s estranged older brother Mark, 51.
Already a multi-millionaire in his own right, Bill insists that the court case has never been about the money.
‘It was about right and wrong,’ he tells the Mail in this, his only interview. ‘Dad would be turning in his grave at everything that has happened. He hated wasting money, and Louise has seen to it that we have spent millions on lawyers. And he would have hated seeing what has happened to the family.’
The price of justice has certainly been at the expense of family relationships, with a fault line down the middle unlikely ever to be bridged.
As in Succession, this is a large and blended family.
On one side are Bill and the two children of his brother Mark.
Firmly on the other side are his sister Louise, brother Mark, their mother Patricia and 40-year-old Lisa Murray, Kevin’s daughter from a secret affair.
As Bill acknowledges, it is unlikely any of them will speak again.
It is a dramatic turn of events even for a family that Bill admits is no stranger to acrimony.
Father Kevin was a brook-no-fools character who had overcome tough beginnings to become an extraordinarily successful entrepreneur.
The court heard he was orphaned as a boy and raised in a convent before leaving school at just 12.
Through hard work and force of character, he developed a vast property investment business in the Southampton area — where all the extended family except Mark still live today — as well as maintaining a significant portfolio of equities.
After Kevin married Patricia in 1968, sons Mark and Bill came along in the early 1970s.
Although Kevin’s more substantial wealth arrived when the children were older, life was comfortable, and when Bill was ten years old the family moved to a large detached home on several acres of land, known as the White House.
Yet Kevin was otherwise frugal with his money. ‘With his background he wasn’t the kind of guy to have staff or buy expensive things other than as an investment,’ says Bill. ‘He didn’t like to spend money unnecessarily.’
The exception was his beloved white Rolls-Royce, his pride and joy, and the horses he bought to roam on his extensive land.
With only a four-year gap between
When her hugely wealthy father died, Louise produced a secret will that left her astonished brother Bill almost nothing... ...but now, as a judge calls her ‘manipulative’ and grants him £27m, Bill lays bare the greed and violence behind a venomous family feud
them, Mark and Bill were close as children, and Bill would often accompany his brother when he played with friends. ‘As we got older, Mark became more of a nuisance who tested Dad’s patience,’ says Bill. ‘He used to say he didn’t think he’d end up anywhere good.’
Louise came along 11 years after Bill and was described in court by Bill’s barrister, Constance McDonnell, QC, as a ‘Jekyll-and-Hyde character’, although Kevin initially doted on her.
For Bill, the age gap meant they did not grow close until Louise was older. ‘For a long time she was just my annoying little sister,’ he says. ‘But I always had a good relationship with her.’
Yet family life could sometimes be volatile. Kevin’s prolific womanising caused tensions with his wife, and when their marriage finally came to an end after 23 years in 1991, Mark, and Bill, then 16, moved out to live with their father, while five-year-old Louise stayed at home with Patricia.
‘I wonder sometimes if some of what happened goes back to that time,’ Bill says.
Certainly tensions arose between Louise and her father over her prolific spending as she got older. ‘She was always going to Harrods and splashing the cash — Dad would go mad,’ he says. ‘Once she spent £100,000 on a car.’
Further pressure on the family came when it was revealed that the siblings had a half-sister, Lisa, now 40, the product of an affair Kevin had with a family friend.
‘Lisa used to come to the house as a girl but we didn’t know her true identity,’ says Bill.
The truth emerged when Bill was in his late 20s. ‘It didn’t bother me but Louise hated her from day one,’ he recalls. ‘She was jealous. It was kids’ stuff really, but they never got on at all. Lisa was very wary of her.’
A further rift came when Kevin ordered Mark to leave the home he then shared with his wife Adeline and their two young children.
Evidence heard in court revealed that the ‘unpleasant’ Mark had beaten up his wife in front of their children, leaving Kevin, who adored his grandchildren, feeling he had no choice but to intervene.
‘He couldn’t stand by any more and see what was happening,’ says Bill. Mark and his father subsequently went to court to fight over a family business that Kevin had set up for his three children.
‘Dad spent £3million just to get the company back and after that, he and Mark never spoke another word,’ says Bill. ‘It’s why Dad cut him out of the will.’
Their mother Patricia, by then divorced from Kevin, sided with Mark, as did Louise, who at the time worked as a hairdresser.
Bill tried to focus on his own business. With the help of a £40,000 loan from his father, he set up what would become one of the leading commercial van sale and hire sites on the South Coast, as well as developing property interests.
By 2000, Bill’s success had enabled him to buy his own sprawling woodland estate in Hampshire, complete with a 2,000 sq ft self-contained annexe and triple garage.
It was into this annexe that his sister Louise moved with their father Kevin in 2011.
BILL says: ‘Dad’s health had deteriorated and we thought Louise could help look out for him and administer his medication, although it didn’t really work out like that. She wasn’t there that much but she still wanted to make sure she was in charge.’
Nonetheless, everyone rubbed along well enough, or so Bill thought. ‘We were all one big, happy family,’ he says.
A year after they moved into Bill’s annexe, Kevin, then 64, drew up the will in which he allocated an 80 per cent share to be divided equally between Bill, Louise and their half-sister Lisa. The remaining 20 per cent would skip Mark and go straight to his children: Ryan, 25, and 23-year-old Ria.
Bill continued to enjoy a close relationship with his father, holidaying abroad with him and even offering to donate a lung when it was suggested that Kevin’s worsening emphysema might mean he needed a transplant.
Not once during their time together did Kevin mention a new will, and nor did Louise. It was only after Kevin’s death in February 2019, at the age of 71, that Bill receive the bombshell news via email: Louise would get 80 per cent Lisa 20 per cent.
‘We were in shock,’ Bill recalls. ‘And straightaway we knew there was no way that what was in there was right.’
Further drama unfolded as Bill tried to make sense of what had happened: Bill claims that within days of his father’s funeral, Louise — by then living elsewhere — had rounded up Kevin’s beloved horses to be sold for meat, before subsequently sending Bill a letter accusing him of trespassing on her land when he went to visit his father’s grave, on a 40-acre site Kevin had gifted to all his children.
She also evicted Kevin’s grandson from his £160,000 home, which was part of a property portfolio and held in trust. Reluctantly, Bill felt he had no choice but to take his sister to court.
Equally hard to stomach was that Louise was being firmly supported by their mother Patricia.
While upset by his mother’s decision to take his sister’s side, Bill was not surprised and says it lies in ancient battle lines. ‘Mum’s animosity goes back to when she and Dad separated when we were young,’ he says.
‘Since then, she had aligned herself with anyone she felt stood against him — like Mark. And as Louise had fallen out with Dad herself in the past, she saw her as a more natural ally.
‘It has been horrible and upsetting. In court she accused me and her grandkids of lying. The way she talked about the kids was just terrible.’
Mark — who was deemed ‘aggressive and unpleasant’ by the presiding judge — gave evidence against his own children.
Bill’s sentiment about this fact was reflected by the judge, who in his summing up said: ‘[Mark] made it perfectly clear that, like their grandmother, he hated them.’
There was certainly no shortage of accusation and counteraccusation, with Bill claiming his ‘materialistic’ and ‘dominant’ sister had worn their father down into a position where he felt he had no choice but to change the will in her favour.
Central to his case was that his father could not have been aware of the contents of the will, as he was illiterate, couldn’t spell his own address and even struggled to copy letters and words from printed texts.
LOuISE denied this, arguing that in any case the will had also been read aloud to her ‘tough’ father, who had left her the lion’s share of his estate because he saw her as the ‘heir to his empire’.
It was a claim Mr Justice Michael Green did not accept when delivering his judgment at the end of January: while rejecting the notion that Louise had bullied her father, he ruled that she had ‘pulled the wool over his eyes’ so he did not know what was in the will.
He went on: ‘I believe that Louise is a risk-taker, and she can be manipulative. She knows what she wants and she knows how to get it. I believe that she was prepared to take the risk, because the prize was so great, of being found out by the deceased in relation to the 2014 will and she would have taken the consequences.’ He also excoriated Louise’s solicitor Daniel Curnock, calling him ‘reckless and quite possibly dishonest’.
It was the vindication Bill had been waiting for, although he insists his team took little pleasure in the verdict, other than in a sense of justice being restored.
This week, Mayus Karia, solicitoradvocate from London’s LLP Solicitors, who represented Bill, told the Mail he was delighted to have achieved justice in the face of the seemingly impossible.
‘The first thing I said to my clients when I took this case on, and on seeing their predicament, was the words of Nelson Mandela — “it always seems impossible until it’s done”,’ he says.
‘We left no stone unturned in this complex, heavy High Court litigation. We are now taking instructions in relation to instigating contempt of court proceedings against Ms Reeves and her solicitor Mr Daniel Curnock.’
So it seems there may be yet another chapter in this story of family warfare — and greed.