The trial took place over three weeks, and involved no fewer than 49 witnesses.
There's a brief summary here - https://todayswillsandprobate.co.uk/jud ... r-service/ - but aspects of the judgment itself read like something penned by Dickens.
A couple of excerpts to whet the appetite:
There was one thing upon which both sides' witnesses were agreed: the deceased was the toughest, hardest man in business that you were ever likely to meet.
He could be quite brutal to anyone, including family members, and he was not frightened of telling that to someone's face. His language was rough and, like the rest of the family, laden with expletives, particularly using the c-word incessantly and indiscriminately to describe any person, whether in or outside of the family.
The deceased disapproved of the people the Claimant was mixing and going out with, in particular her relationship with a Mr Stephen McCarthy who was part of a well-known crime family in Southampton. The Claimant suffered an horrific injury during this period by being glassed in a pub by another woman in a random attack but the deceased responded to this by using the memorable but highly disturbing phrase "lay with dogs and you get fleas".
Some of the witnesses were from the same mould:
[The Claimant] constantly referred to such suggestions as being lies and "ridiculous" and she had a tendency to look intently towards me with a knowing, sarcastic smile, as though to say it was perfectly obvious that everything that was being said by the Defendants' witnesses was untruthful.
[Also about the Claimant] One particularly egregious case concerned a frail, poor and downtrodden man, Mr Mick Ward, who managed to give evidence despite being in a visibly terrified state. Mr Ward lived in a caravan on the deceased's land. After his death and through her enforcer, Mr James Hicks (another witness for the Claimant) she got him to leave the land. Mr Hicks sent Mr Ward some incredibly abusive texts. Mr Ward recalled the Claimant telling him to: "Pack your sh*t and get off my f***ing land". The Claimant arranged for the caravan to be burnt down without giving Mr Ward notice that she was doing so and when he had left some personal possessions in there.
And what must be a candidate for understatement of the year ...
Those sorts of actions do not reflect well on the Claimant
And the solicitor who prepared the Will, one Daniel Curnock, didn't emerge with an exactly enhanced reputation. The judge clearly took the view that he had been seduced by the dubious charms of the Claimant:
There is, in my view, far more to the relationship between the Claimant and Mr Curnock than either of them are letting on. The emails in December 2013, the number of text messages between them, and the evidence from Mr Riley that not only was the Claimant at the meeting on 23 December 2013 but also that there was a "familiarity" between the Claimant and Mr Curnock leads me to the conclusion that Mr Curnock has not been telling the truth about this.
This is not what the average solicitor wants to hear a High Court judge say about him! And worse ...
Mr Curnock had an annoying habit of buying time in the witness box by insisting on reading the whole of every document he was taken to. He also persistently tried to avoid answering the question by asking questions back either to counsel or the Court. He was a most unsatisfactory witness whose evidence cannot be tested by reference to his own attendance notes because those attendance notes are themselves under challenge. It is actually quite distressing to say that I cannot safely rely on the evidence from an officer of the court but I do not think he was giving truthful evidence about how he took instructions, prepared the 2014 will and the relationship between him and the Claimant.
The eldest son, Mark, doesn't seem to have created a great impression, either:
He chose late on to support his sister, the Claimant, and he came over from Colombia to give evidence in person. That meant he was giving evidence against his own children, Ryan and Ria, and he made it perfectly clear that, like their grandmother, he hated them. He drafted his own witness statements and they give a fair reflection of how he seemed in the witness box: aggressive; unpleasant; and completely unremorseful about saying horrible things about his children and others.
Other members of the dramatis personae include Mr Barry Malizia:
Mr Malizia was a chartered accountant and a partner at Deloittes in the 1970s and 1980s. He understandably took great exception to the Claimant's evidence that the deceased had described him as "an old crook, an old has-been crook".
Ideal fireside reading for the Christmas holiday, I commend it to the House!
https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2022/159.html