No threesome, says woman left £3.5m by two female lovers
‘A woman prone to massive crushes’
A WOMAN who inherited up to £3.5million from her two elderly lovers has denied luring them into an unwitting ‘threesome’.
Wendy Cook, 53, was first a lover of pioneering female judge and QC Jean Southworth, who died aged 83 in 2010.
Then in 2007 she became the civil partner of distinguished doctor Jean Weddell, who died at the age of 84 in 2013.
Miss Cook not only benefited from the £1million estate of Miss Weddell, but was also left £2.5million in the will of Miss Southworth, the Daily Mail revealed this month. In the final years of their lives, the two pensioners both left their London homes and wide social circles to live with Miss Cook on the Isle of Wight in the same house.
Miss Southworth’s godson Nicholas Falla spent years contesting her will in the courts. And Miss Weddell’s long-lost son, eminent academic Professor Richard Gosden, told London’s High Court that his mother’s £1million London house had been sold without his knowledge, wiping out his inheritance.
Professor Gosden, director of Oxford University’s Institute of Archaeology, claimed Miss Cook had worked to estrange him from his mother. But speaking publicly about the row for the first time, Miss Cook appeared at the High Court last week to deny acting improperly.
She claimed Professor Gosden was cut out of his mother’s will only after he told her she would be ‘put into a home’. Appearing for the son, lawyer Teresa Peacocke put it to Miss Cook that Miss Weddell had not fully understood what was going on when she left London to live on the Isle of Wight with her and Miss Southworth. She suggested Miss Cook whisked the two pensioners from London ‘so that you and those two elderly women could live away from the prying eyes and all the gossip of all the people that those women had known in their London lives’. Miss Peacocke added: ‘You took them away so the three of you could live together without attracting criticism.
‘Jean Weddell was a woman of somewhat naive emotions, very prone to massive crushes, even at her age. When she decided to ask you to marry her, she wanted to marry you for love.
‘Her naive emotions were such that she thought that you were going to create the traditional relationship of a married couple spending their lives together.
‘It wasn’t just a mechanism to prevent Chris Gosden putting her into a home. Did she know that she was entering into what was effectively a threesome?’
But Miss Cook denied there was a threesome, and said: ‘There was no question of trying to isolate anyone from anyone.’
She said that she had stopped being a lover of Miss Southworth in the 1990s, and by 2006 she had become her ‘adopted Ma and mentor’.
Miss Cook told the court there was ‘no continuing relationship’ on an intimate level with Miss Southworth after she entered into a monogamous civil partnership with Miss Weddell.
She said that after Professor Gosden talked of putting his mother in a home she had suggested to Miss Weddell: ‘Maybe we should get married so you can protect yourself from your son.’