A dying woman successfully completed a deathbed revocation of her will after nodding at her solicitor to ask for her help in tearing up the document.
Solicitor Haffwen Webb’s note of the meeting read: ‘Carry was able to tear around three quarters of the way through and then HW [Haffwen Webb] helped her tear up the rest of it.’
The court heard oral evidence that Webb, seeing her client struggling, asked if she would like help to finish tearing the five-page document. The client, looking directly at Webb, nodded. Webb then helped her complete the task by placing her own hands on her client’s hands.
Under s 20, Wills Act 1837, a will can be revoked by ‘the burning, tearing, or otherwise destroying the same by the testator, or by some person in his presence and by his direction…’.
Consequently, 92-year-old Carry Keats’ £800,000 estate passed by intestacy to her younger sister, Josephine Oakley, rather than five cousins who were the beneficiaries of the will. However, the cousins challenged the revocation on the basis of mental capacity and the assistance to rip up the will.
Delivering his judgment, in Crew and another v Oakley and others [2024] EWHC 2847 (Ch), Deputy Master Linwood said: ‘Behind this simple act of tearing is enmity in the wider family involving allegations of undue influence, greed and bullying, with an unseemly scrabble for the assets of the deceased in the last couple of years of her life and after her death.’
Deputy Master Linwood held Keats, though frail, was in a ‘lucid interval’ and so possessed the necessary mental capacity at the time of revocation. He found the solicitor’s attendance note, despite not recording the client’s nod, was ‘convincing’ and satisfied the Banks v Goodfellow test of the client intending to destroy the will and understanding the consequences of doing so.
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