Thomas Dumont, Radcliffe Chambers
A story of philandering, jealousy and betrayal, one of the tabloids called it. Not in the barristers’ chambers or the solicitors’ firm, I’m glad to say. But in semi-rural Kent.
If you are driving back from the Channel Tunnel along the M20, passing Junction 6 (Maidstone), you can glimpse the house and its barn through the trees on your left. It is not Manderley, but just as extraordinary a tale unfolded there in 2004. It was played out again in the Royal Courts of Justice, Chancery Division, earlier this year under the name Leonard Thomas Supple, deceased. Peter Leaver QC, sitting as a judge of the Chancery Division, ruled Leonard Supple’s Will a forgery. I do not actually know how you mince words, but safe to say that the judge, did not. He said of Lynda, Leonard’s daughter and very nearly the sole beneficiary under the Will: “Her apparent puzzled demeanour could not mask her substantial natural cunning. In the event, I found her evidence to be unbelievable and untrue in respect of important matters.” She was “amoral, selfish” and “vindictive”. The judge elected not to “speculate as to why, when or how the will was forged.” He left that to the DPP, and ordered that the papers be sent to him.
Valuable estate
The background to the forgery was the usual potent mixture of children from different relationships. The successful claimant, Stephen Supple, was Leonard’s only child by his wife. Stephen had been well educated, rode as an amateur jockey (for his father and his uncle, who both kept racehorses) and qualified as a barrister. The defendant, Lynda, was Leonard’s daughter by a brief affair. She had been brought up by Len’s sister, until the sister married, when she went to live with Len. In her mid teens she was taken from school and set to work by her father on the farm. She found some part-time menial employment away from the farm, but apart from that she was tied to it. Relationships with men were discouraged, and she had to climb in and out of the house at night to meet boyfriends. Stephen, on the other hand, had left when he was in his early 20s, and had been able to develop his own life away from the farm.
The judge’s impression of the farm was that “it was a tempestuous place to live”. Len he described as an autocrat, prone to rage and violence. In the words of one witness, who was very fond of him, he was a tyrant who should have lived four or five hundred years ago. There was even a suggestion of an improper relationship between Len and his daughter Lynda, though the judge came to no conclusion about that. The 60-acre farm itself was very valuable, sandwiched as it is between Maidstone and the M20. During a previous property boom, Barratt Homes landed on the farm in its helicopter to make Len a large offer. He sent them packing. For Lynda it was the centre of her life, as well as the main source of income. It had barns and stables that could be let for livery or storage. But when Len died, suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 77 in early 2004, without a Will, the farm clearly needed to be divided between Lynda and Stephen, and that meant selling it.
Subterfuge
The circumstances surrounding the death were significant. Len’s heart attack had come on as he was moving an oil tank, for the delivery of agricultural diesel which he was going to use to heat the house. The oil delivery man had to give the ambulance directions. The paramedics tried and failed to revive Len half a dozen times. But Lynda did not go with him in the ambulance. She said she felt that he was safe in the paramedics’ hands, and instead she waited at the farm for a friend to arrive to stand guard. Over what, never emerged, though it was thought that Len may have kept large amounts of cash there. Then Lynda did something remarkable, which was later to shed light on the validity of the Will. Pressed by the oil man for payment (as she claimed, though it seemed unlikely), she forged her father’s signature on a cheque of his, rather than writing out one of her own. Later that day she lied repeatedly to an old friend of her father’s that he was still alive, in order to recover from the friend a small debt. First thing very next day, her father dead for less than 24 hours, she hastened to see a solicitor. Even there she gilded the lily, misleading her solicitor about family background.
But she could find no will, no matter how hard she looked. Len may, or may not, have said she would inherit the farm, but she certainly wanted to. Over the next few weeks, she found her brother’s presence and involvement more and more irksome. She gave increasingly ludicrous excuses for avoiding him, until some weeks later she finally dropped her bombshell. A will had been found. She had not seen it yet, but their father’s good friend Dr Pender had it, in a case, for safekeeping.
Dr Pender was perhaps the most mysterious figure in the case: he was not much of a friend of Len Supple at all. Certainly none of Len’s family or friends knew him. He claimed to be an old friend of one of Len’s closest chums, now dead, the respected GP Dr Fahey. Dr Fahey’s wife had never heard of him. Even his doctorate was not quite what it seemed. He had obtained it from a US educational establishment, which required the submission of a few essays over a number of years, with a cheque. He claimed that Len had asked him to be his executor, and then asked him to look after a case for him. He claimed he had never looked into the case, and had no idea what was in it until he took it to the solicitors where it was opened. He could not explain how he could have told Stephen the case contained a Will, and the will contained instructions for cremation, days before going into the solicitors.
Forged signature?
The alleged Will itself was an insult to Stephen. He was left “as a gesture of goodwill” £100 every year on his birthday, until he was 70. The farm and everything else - bar a paltry £500 to the British Heart Foundation – was left to Lynda. If the will was genuine, she had inherited an estate worth millions of pounds.
But was the Will genuine? Len’s signature immediately struck Stephen as false. The capital “S” was strikingly different from his usual way of signing, although not that different from his usual way of writing. Dr Pender made some attempts at bringing the family together, but Lynda was having none of it. The Will would have to go before a judge.
Expert evidence
Stephen asked the court to permit the use of expert evidence from a forensic document examiner. Lynda would not agree. She argued that the court’s decision in Fuller v. Strum (The Times 14 February 2001) was authority for the proposition that handwriting and forgery was not a matter for expert evidence, but was simply a question of impression for the judge. The master had little trouble in rejecting that submission, and permitted Stephen to adduce expert evidence. But the submission returned at trial. Dr Audrey Giles, the renowned handwriting expert, expressed the view that Len’s signature was a forgery. Fascinatingly, the most telling aspect for Dr Giles was not the very different “S”, though that was obviously significant. It was the myriad of almost invisible hesitations and lack of fluency, that could only be seen under the microscope. But she could not be conclusive. Nor, she frankly submitted, did her evidence reach the criminal standard of proof, partly at least because there were not enough comparable signatures from around the same time. She could be certain that the only other signature that Lynda had managed to produce with an “S” similar to that on the Will, was a crude forgery. The tracing marks on that were visible even to the naked eye, but clear as crystal under laboratory observation. But the signature on the Will was not quite so obvious.
Conflicting views
That left the conflict which the court will frequently be presented with in cases of this kind. The testator is, of necessity, dead, so he cannot help. The expert witness says the Will is a forgery. The witnesses say they saw the testator sign. All the other evidence only paints the background. Admittedly the painting in this case was with heavy brush strokes and in very strong colours. The judge had already decided he could not believe a word that Lynda or Dr Pender said. But that did not matter, if the Will was genuine. So the crucial issue came to this: could the execution of the alleged will be supported by the evidence of the witnesses?
Unreliable witness
The witnesses made a bad start. One of them had returned to India, though his family remained in Kent. He had refused to sign a witness statement. Attempts were made to adduce his draft, but it was never going to carry any weight. He claimed in the statement, and on the face of the Will, to be an I.T. Consultant. It turned out that he worked as driver and factotum to the other witness, a pharmacist. The pharmacist did come to court to give evidence. He was not impressive. He changed his story at every turn. He was forced to admit trying to mislead the court. He claimed various parts of his witness statements had been included without his knowledge. Most crucially, his evidence about the signing was clearly wrong. He said Len signed only once. Len’s signature – oddly – appears twice. He said the other witness had no problems signing. Dr Giles was able to demonstrate that the other witness had tried signing once with a pen that did not work, and had to start again with a new pen. His descriptions of what Len was wearing changed faster than a chameleon on a kaleidoscope. In the end, his description of Len’s clothing bore resemblance to only one man’s style of dress – his own. To describe the witness as unimpressive almost amounted to a compliment. The judge placed no weight on his evidence at all.
Glorious victory
The end result, therefore, was that there was no credible evidence to support the Will, only a farrago, or tissue if you prefer, of lies. Stephen was justified in his belief that his father would never have treated him so abominably. He established his share to a large inheritance. Lynda will have to make do with half of a very valuable estate, rather than the whole lot. No charges have yet been brought.
Successful forgery cases in the High Court are very rare. There was one a generation ago, when a rich property developer left his wife one shilling and a few nude photos of herself and all the rest to a lawyer friend. On the day that judgment was given by the Vice-Chancellor, the friend/beneficiary was on a flight to Brazil. He had not bought a return ticket. There was rather an odd one in 2004. There Mrs Taylor’s husband had gone to the bother of forging a will for her £300,000 estate. A quick dip into an idiot’s guide to intestacy would have shown him that he would inherit about £250,000 of the estate, without breaking the law, as there were no children. Annie Kay’s £2million will was forged some years back, when the nursing-home proprietor’s mother dressed up to impersonate her. Somewhat carelessly, the forger kept the sheets of A4 on which she had practised writing out “A. Kay”, for the Police to find. That somewhat eased their inquiries. Though forgery can be prohibitively difficult to establish, it is sometimes clearly beyond the ability of the forgers to create a bomb-proof product, backed up by a reliable team of witnesses.
Thomas Dumont is a barrister in practice in Radcliffe Chambers in Lincoln’s Inn. He specialises in advice as well as litigation about trusts, wills and estates. He particularly relishes probate actions and Inheritance Act 1975 claims. He acted for Stephen Supple.
This article first appeared in the autumn 2007 edition of entitlement, the newsletter of Title Research, which can be downloaded at www.titleresearch.com.
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