Daughter ‘forced’ dying mother’s hand to sign £700,000 estate to her

An electrician has won a battle with his sister over a £700,000 estate after a video showed his sibling “propelling” their mother’s hand to sign a deathbed will.

Margaret Baverstock was so ill that she could “barely flicker an eyelid” when, in 2021, aged 76, she signed a will that gave her entire estate to her daughter, Lisa.

A judge was told that the will left the woman’s son, John Baverstock, with no inheritance when she died eight days later.

The son, 61, launched a legal challenge to the will, arguing that a video of the signing showed it was “not the independent act of the deceased”.

He claimed in court that his mother was “effectively forced by the physical actions of Lisa into participating in a pantomime of due execution of a document she did not comprehend”.

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After seeing the video images of the sister guiding and manipulating her mother’s hand, a judge has now declared the will invalid and ruled that the son is entitled to half the estate.

John Baverstock said his mother was forced into a “pantomime of due execution” of the will

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Sitting at Central London county court, the judge, Jane Evans-Gordon, was satisfied that the dying woman “had no idea what was going on” at the time the will was signed.

The mother was found to have been suffering from dementia since 2014 as well as arthritis and suspected lung congestion, and was therefore not in a position to sign her name or even understand what she was being asked to sign, the judge said.

Her son, an electrical compliance manager, told the court that before his mother’s death, his sister had grown resentful, effectively excluding him from their mother’s house. After learning that he had been disinherited, the son challenged the will on the grounds that his mother had been too mentally frail to understand what she was doing or signing.

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Videos of the signing — produced in evidence by the sister herself — showed that the mother, a former care worker, could only signal her assent to the most basic questions by saying “yeah” or by simply grunting.

Mark Jones, a barrister representing the son in court, described the daughter as “repeatedly attempting to place a pen into her mother’s right hand”. The lawyer added that “by force and motion of her own left hand”, the daughter “propelled” her mother’s writing hand to mark the will.

The judge was told that the will itself was a homemade document printed from an online template and drafted by the daughter, which named her as executor and sole beneficiary.

Ruling that the will was not properly executed, the judge said that the daughter had “physically manhandled the pen into her hand” and that the mother’s eventual signature “bore no resemblance” to an example from 2017.

The judge said that “the deceased had no idea what was going on” and that she was “unable to act independently and … looked completely blank during the reading of the will”.

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In addition to ruling that the will had not been properly executed, the judge found that the mother had lacked the necessary “testamentary capacity” and therefore did not “know and approve” the contents of the will.

As there was no other known will in existence, the judge ruled that the mother died intestate, resulting in the brother and sister, as next of kin, splitting her £700,000 assets in half.

However, the sister was ordered to pay her brother’s legal fees, which were estimated at about £80,000.