In a plot which bears similarities to Saltburn, Leigh Voysey forged the £4million will of her former headteacher and almost snatched the lavish country pile in Hertfordshire from the rightful heirs
A money-grabbing con artist who nearly snatched an entire family’s estate after forging her former headteacher’s £4million will has been jailed.
Leigh Voysey, 46, claims she reconnected with her old tutor Mauren Renny when she took a role as at a care agency and became the woman’s carer. She then bought a £15 fake will kit and forged the necessary documents to attempt to steal the pensioner’s lavish country estate.
Voysey even enlisted her pal Amber Collingwood, who was a security guard at Stansted Airport, and drug addict Ben Mayes, to sign as witnesses to the will. The pair later pleaded guilty to forgery. Voysey herself was sentenced to six and a half years in jail after admitting fraud and forgery.
The case echoes a plot in comedy thriller Saltburn, where Oliver, played by Barry Keoghan, manages to swindle the estate from the family of his friend Felix. However, in the film, released last year, Oliver doesn’t seemingly face a comeuppance, unlike scheming Voysey.
Voysey claimed to have been made the sole beneficiary in the will of Ms Renny, 82, who passed away the previous year in Much Hadham, Hertfordshire. Wealthy Ms Renny was Voysey’s tutor at the fee-paying school which the former headmistress founded decades prior.
In one most brazen attempts at probate frauds British courts have seen in years, Voysey and her heartless pals “soured what was a final gift” for Voysey’s family, including step-grandson Tom Renny, 32.
He said yesterday: “Maureen was a very generous lady and incredibly charitable to everyone she met. But by the end she was extremely vulnerable and for someone to have tried to exploit her in this way has been horrific.
“I always believed that it was a lie, but they were unrelenting and brazen… I will never get the four years back that Voysey took away from us. Not only did she attempt to profit from Maureen’s death, she has soured what was a final gift from her and my grandfather.”
Tom and his sister, Emily, had been left money by Ms Renny as she had married their grandpa Murray in the 1970s, The Sun reports. Ms Renny’s real will, from February 2016, left more than £200,000 to the animal lover’s 16 favourite charities, including the RSPCA, The Donkey Sanctuary and Dogs Trust.
Voysey, who was a shelfstacker at Homebase, claimed vulnerable Ms Renny had made a new will while she was bed-bound after a stroke, and was said to have been “talking gibberish” by her regular carers. The will signed by witnesses Collingwood and Mayes was dated September 2019 — two months after the former teacher had her devastating stroke.
The family, from Hertfordshire, eventually reported the claim to fraud police who launched a probe. Voysey’s attack on the rightful inheritors left the grieving relatives in a three-year hell as they fought for their £4.2million.
Following the sentencings, Detective Constable Sian Beames, from Hertfordshire Constabulary’s Serious Fraud and Cyber Unit who lead the case, said: “Voysey had befriended the deceased on only one occasion before she died.”
