A former private school head girl has been accused of faking the will of her headmistress in an attempt to claim her £4.2 million estate.
Leigh Voysey, 42, told the High Court that Maureen Renny, who was head of the Barn School, left her a £1.65 million house to save it from being sold to developers. The seven-bedroom home is on the site of the now-defunct school in Much Hadham, Hertfordshire.
Voysey started attending as an eight-year-old in 1987. She said that Renny had “always favoured her”, awarding her the best parts in class plays , and that she had “reconnected” with the former headmistress by chance three years before her death after visiting her as a carer.
Voysey, a mother of one, told the court that Renny asked her to draft a will and organise for a friend to sign it on her behalf in 2019. Renny died four months later.
Relatives accuse Voysey of faking the revised document. An earlier version from 2016 had divided the estate between her cousins Gillian Ayre, Angela Eastwood and Susan Vickers, and the children of her stepson, Thomas and Katherine Renny
In court papers describing their relationship, Voysey said that Renny had “remembered exactly who I was, even though it was 25 years since I’d left her school . . . She’d been asking about me during the years since I had left her school”.
Voysey said that on a subsequent visit Renny had asked her what she thought of the schoolhouse, adding: “I hope it never gets built on.”
Addressing how the new will was drafted, Voysey said that Renny “dictated to me what she wanted to be written on it” and that “a blank will was lying on the table in the lounge”.
Kate Selway QC, for the relatives, said it was impossible for the blank will to have been on the table when Voysey arrived because Renny was so frail that she was unable to get out of her chair or even hold a telephone.
Selway raised an alternative defence to the claim, telling the court that even if the 2019 will was not a fake Renny lacked the testamentary capacity to execute the document and did not know or approve of its contents.
A date for a full hearing has yet to be set.
THE TIMES – 01.04.22