The family of a wealthy heiress who drowned in a swimming pool are trying to stop her husband from getting her £4.4million fortune after he was cleared of her murder.
Property developer Donald McPherson, 50, denied murdering wife Paula Leeson, 47, from Trafford, Greater Manchester, in a remote area of Denmark in 2017. Four years later a judge ordered the jury to find him not guilty at his trial as there was insufficient evidence for a safe conviction.
Leeson's family now want a judge to rule McPherson killed her so he is denied any legal entitlement from benefitting from her will and other assets worth £4.4 million, Manchester Civil Court of Justice heard. Before her death McPherson, from Sale, also in Greater Manchester, took out "secret" life insurance policies on his "besotted wife" and stood to gain £3.5 million if she died, his 2021 murder trial heard.
McPherson was cleared of his wife's murder (MEN Media)He claimed to be sleeping when she drowned in the pool at the holiday cottage in western Denmark where they had been staying in June 2017. The next day he started to transfer large sums of money from her accounts to clear his debts and a week later joined a group, Windowed and Young that he described as "Tinder for widows."
Ms Leeson's family have since brought a case against him in civil courts, according to The Manchester Evening News. Her father, Willy, an Irish business man, brother Neville and only son, Ben, attended the hearing as their lawyer Lesley Anderson KC, opened their case to the judge, Mr Justice Richard Smith.
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McPherson, who previously said he would attend the hearing, was not present and the case went ahead without him. He is understood to be living in several countries in the South Pacific, including French Polynesia and Fiji.
The court heard McPherson had been convicted of 32 criminal offences of dishonesty or fraud in New Zealand, where he was born, as well as in the UK and Germany where he was caged for involvement in an £11.8 million bank fraud. "The central issue still stands what happened in Denmark?" said Anderson.
"It is not an issue the cause of death was drowning. The only issue is the manner of death. It is the manner of death that causes the death to be unlawful."
Leeson, who was 5ft 5inches tall, drowned in a pool that was under 4ft deep, despite being able to swim and otherwise healthy. Ms Anderson continued: "Essentially our case is that Paula must have been unconscious when she went into the water, otherwise her natural reaction would be to stand up to save herself.
The case is being heard as a civil case in Manchester (ABNM Photography)"Therefore, she must have gone into the water unconscious. We do say it probably was a choke hold or a neck hold." While McPherson walked around with wads of cash and presented himself as a "man of means" he was, in fact, struggling financially. Anderson said at the time of death he was "running out of money" which, "super-charged the financial motive" for him so he "had to do something." She added he had given "inconsistent and dishonest" accounts of what happened in Denmark.
He also deleted data from his wife's phone which might have explained what happened, Anderson said, and was a man who had shown "almost no upset or remorse" over her death. McPherson's murder trial was dramatically stopped in March 2021 by trial judge Mr Justice Goose, ruling insufficient evidence to jurors to safely convict as the prosecution case was based on circumstantial evidence. Crucially, an accidental death could not be ruled out.
He directed the jury to return a not guilty verdict to murder. Pathologists found 13 separate injuries on Ms Leeson's body, which jurors heard may have been sustained while being restrained or in a rescue and resuscitation attempt. But prosecutors claimed while Leeson's death looked like an accident, it was in fact a pre-planned killing by her husband who was born Alexander James Lang. He and Leeson wed following a "whirlwind romance" in a "no expense spared" ceremony at Peckforton Castle, Cheshire, in June 2014.
Leeson had stood to inherit the family business owned by her father, who built up a successful groundwork and skip hire firm in Sale after emigrating from County Wicklow, Ireland, in the 1960s. She oversaw the skip hire business where she met McPherson, who renovated and sold on property. After he was acquitted in a statement through his solicitors, McPherson denied any involvement in his wife's death.
The hearing continues.
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