The first Jill Langley knew about her 94-year-old father, Robert, marrying for a second time was when a handwritten note came through the letterbox one morning in early March 2020.
She hadn’t spoken to her dad, a retired butcher and businessman with an estate in Norfolk worth £1 million, for two years, following the death of her mother, Eileen.
At that point, the newly widowed Robert Harrington, a difficult man who found his grief hard to handle, had lashed out angrily at Jill, his only child, in a series of distressing phone calls and letters.
Not wanting to inflame the situation, she had withdrawn from him and the pair had broken contact.
Despite this, the news of his nuptials came as a shock.
“I opened the note and it said: ‘Just to let you know you [sic] dad married again last year —Chelsea’ and that was it,” said Jill, 70, a former antiques dealer from Denver, Norfolk.
“At first my husband Mitchell and I thought it was some sort of prank. But then alarm bells started to ring.
“I knew what Dad was like. He was always bragging about his money so if this was real, I knew immediately someone had targeted him for it.
“What kind of woman marries a man in his 90s if it’s not about money?”
Jill’s fears were to prove correct.
Not long after receiving the note, her father died —another huge shock to her, of which more later— and shortly after that, Jill discovered he had made a new will after the marriage.
Shockingly, he had left everything he owned to his mysterious new wife, whom Jill had never met and who was 39 years his junior.
Believing her father was the victim of what’s-termed a ‘predatory marriage’, where a wealthy widow or widower is targeted purely for their money, Jill now sought the verdict of the law.
Earlier this month, at Central London County Court, a judge ruled that ‘significant impropriety’ had taken place in the writing of Mr Harrington’s new will.
His new wife ‘Chelsea’, whose real name is Guixang Qin, was said to have had ‘undue influence’ on her nonagenarian husband.
“We heard she had withdrawn at least £300,000 of my dad’s money over the months she’d known him, sometimes just cash withdrawals of a few hundred pounds, but other times she was transferring up to £40,000 a time into her bank,” says Jill, sharing the details of her ordeal for the first time.
“She even withdrew money on the day he died.”
The court felt Mr Harrington did not have the mental capacity to understand the complexities of a new will, which he had made only a month before his death.
Indeed, it emerged at that point Mr Harrington believed he was a retired Army major who had been estranged from Jill for 30 years.
While he was never diagnosed with any mental incapacity, the court heard he may have suffered it after a stroke in the months leading up to his death.
Predatory marriage is a growing scam.
Thanks to rising house prices and more valuable estates, it’s thought to affect hundreds, possibly thousands, of families every year in the UK.
“Predatory marriages are sinister because they are so simplistic and cunning,” says Andrew Bishop, of Rothley Law solicitors, who helped Jill with her case and is campaigning for a change in the law to make them a criminal offence.
“The Wills Act 1837 means that in nearly all circumstances, any new marriage immediately revokes a previous will, in which maybe the deceased wished to leave money to children.
“The safeguarding around marriage is minimal. No one really wants to question people’s personal arrangements if they say they’re ‘in love’, even if they’ve only known them for two weeks.”
“What that means is if the estate is worth less than £322,000 [the amount the spouse receives automatically from the deceased partner’s estate if they have died intestate], it all comes straight to the new spouse, and people can’t challenge it.
“What is unusual about Jill’s case is that the estate was worth far more, so the defendant [‘Chelsea’] took the step of not only marrying Mr Harrington, but getting him to change his will so that she would inherit £1 million.”
For Jill, who has two grown-up sons, the court case was ‘never about the money’ but about justice for herself and her family.
“It’s theft by the back door and not only is it happening to me but to others, so I felt I had to contest it purely because I know right from wrong,” she says.
“I could have simply thrown the will in the bin and forgotten about it.
But a stranger had walked into Dad’s life when he was vulnerable and took, everything my family had worked for over the years.
I couldn’t let her get away with that.”
Born in the 1950s in Billericay, Jill says her childhood in Essex living with her parents and grandparents was a happy one and she was close to both her mother and father.
“We didn’t really have much money, but Dad had a mobile butcher’s shop and Mum would go out working with him,” she says.
“I had my own pony and, being an only child, I got on ever so well with my mum and dad.
“Then Mum’s diabetes got worse, and she couldn’t do as much, so Dad came to rely on me more and more.
“I went to work for him in the butchery business and managed shops for him, which were very successful.
“Within a year I’d more than quadrupled the takings.”
The family moved to Norwich when Jill was 23 and as the arrival of supermarkets put an end to the butchery, the family opened new ventures, first a nightclub and later a leather jacket business.
Yet, as the years passed, and Jill took on more and more for the family business, she began to see how controlling her father was.
“We did really well. I sold at lots of markets and was organising fashion shows all the time,’ says Jill.
“I worked really hard — as hard as any son. I could be digging out snow at 3 am when we had a winter market on.
“Most of the time the businesses thrived because of my ideas but I didn’t do it for the money, I did it for love.
“In fact, one Christmas, I remember we took £10,000 in takings.
“But still Dad didn’t give me a penny, not even in wages.”
At the time I remember thinking: ”This is a bit much”, but I suspect Dad’s thinking was that if he controlled the money, he could control me and Mum as well.
“If he didn’t get his own way, he’d fly off the handle.”
Jill moved away from her parent’s house when she married Mitchell, now 83 and a retired farmer.
They had two sons — Ben and Simon — but her relationship with her parents was still close.
“I didn’t need to work, but I wasn’t the sort of person to sit around so I’d spend half my time helping Mitchell on the farm and half my time helping Mum and Dad,” she says.
“They’d come and babysit for us, and they’d come to us for Christmas dinner and we’d pop in and see them.
“We were in and out of their lives all the time.”
Around 2012, however, Jill’s mum was diagnosed with dementia and relations with her father began to feel strained.
“When Mum was really ill we went over there too ffer help, but Dad refused.I remember saying to him: “The trouble with you, Dad is that it is always your way or not way at all”.’
When Eileen died in 2018, things really began to sour between father and daughter.‘Mum’s death hit Dad hard,’admits Jill.
“He had already been having “delusions” that people were trying to steal from him and had had a 7ft wall built around his house so it was like Fort Knox.”
After Mum’s death he was ringing me and writing to me telling me to apologise for stealing some horses — which wasn’t true.
“He also blamed me for Mum’s death — he blamed everyone but himself for everything — so I thought it best not to respond because he was clearly very angry and it was so upsetting.”
Shortly after receiving the note with news of the marriage, the world went into lockdown so Jill and Mitchell were unable to visit Robert to get to the bottom of it.
She has since discovered that the couple were married in June 2019 and believes her father’s new wife sent her the note to warn her off trying to inherit any fortune.
“I’m absolutely sure she was trying to send me a message that they were now married so everything was going to her,” says Jill.
But it wasn’t just the wedding Jill was to discover after the event.
A much greater shock was in store four months later when she visited her mother’s grave at a cemetery in Kings Lynn in July 2020.
“As I was wandering along, I saw a cheap wooden cross covered in weeds and it had my father’s name on it,” says Jill.
Robert Harrington was dead.
Indeed, he had died only ten months after marrying ‘Chelsea’.
“I couldn’t believe it. Dad had died on May 26, 2020 at the age of 94 but no one — not even his new“wife” — had told me, not a letter, not a phone call, nothing.
“I felt completely numbed by it.
“It was such a shock. He had always intended to be buried with my mum in the double plot, but instead he had been dumped in a grave by himself.
“It was obvious no one had been to attend it.”
Later, that woman would say she was too “emotional” to tidy it up, but the house where she was living was only five minutes away.
It was very upsetting.
In a state of some panic, Jill raced to her parents’ former home— a large four-bedroom house with several reception rooms, two garages and one-third of an acre of land — to find it locked up with no sign of life.
She phoned the police who advised her to write to Robert’s ‘new wife’ for answers, but all she got in response was a letter saying if she wanted a copy of the will, she should contact the solicitors.
Months later, Jill finally got hold of it to see that everything — her father’s entire estate worth more than £1 million — had been left to Qin and her son.
The will had been made only weeks before Robert’s death from sepsis.
“I knew straight away that my dad had not made this will in good faith.
“He was in his 90s, he was unwell after his stroke and he couldn’t do things like go onto the internet and Google to find out who people really were.
“Besides, there’s no way he would have given that money away.”
Jill decided to contest the will and was horrified by what she discovered.
“The day I saw Qin in court she was sitting there with these long dangly earrings and nice red check coat and I turned to my son and said: “Mum’s pension has paid for those.”
“Nothing about what she said made any sense at all.
“At one point, she said her “son” was a solicitor, but then he was a student in Ireland studying engineering.
“She said she’d met my father when. He’d placed an advert in one of the local papers asking people to come for a free Christmas lunch at his house.
“But there was no evidence of that advert and it didn’t sound like Dad at all.
“One of the excuses she gave for withdrawing so much of his money was to pay for her “lavish wedding” but they married at a register office in June 2019 with two witnesses that weren’t even friends — it was the man who had built the wall around Dad’s house and his wife.
“Several times I gasped at what I was hearing and had to leave the courtroom to get some air.
‘The whole thing has taken me to some very dark places.
“I wish I could have stood up to him more when he was alive and I really feel if I’d been a man, things would have been different.
“But he abused both me and Mum financially and emotionally.
“If I’d lost, the case would have cost me £150,000 in costs.
“But we won on every count — that my father didn’t have the mental capacity, that he was unable to read the will and understand it and that she had a guiding hand and undue influence on him given his vulnerability.
“It’s been an incredibly stressful four years, and it does feel like a victory, but it’s going to be a rocky road ahead to retrieve any money.”
Indeed, Qin still has the money and also now owes court costs.
“She may have to be evicted but she’s still entitled to a share of the estate so we have to try to get Jill appointed as administrator of the will,’ says Jill’s other solicitor Caoimhe Turner.
“And the fact is, at some point,even when Jill has the money back, she will end up having to write a cheque to Qin because Qin is legally entitled to some of that money.
“The law is a complete mess.”
A Law Commission consultation on predatory marriage closed in December last year and it’s hoped that, as a result, the law may be reformed to prevent this kind of abuse happening in the future.
“This case demonstrates the devastating effects that a predatory marriage can have,’ says MP Fabian Hamilton, who has been involved with the consultation.
“As part of our campaign, we believe the law needs to be reformed so that marriage no longer revokes a will and there force removes any incentive to use marriage for financial gain.”
Jill agrees.
“My mum and I — and all my family — helped my dad build up his fortune, and that was all my family’s hard work being taken from them. Most people don’t have the strength, the money or the time to go through this. So I hope my case sets a precedent.’