A woman helped her partner with dementia change his will so it was in her favour.

“What do you want me to do? Have you seen your lawyer? Do you want me to call a lawyer? Rosborough said he asked his friend.

– I have to go, Gloria is coming. Gotta go, talk to you later bro,” he said,” Mathers replied.

The conversation was so strange that Rosborough wrote down everything he could remember on a piece of paper and hid it.

Two years later, Mathers died, and after his funeral, Rosborough asked his wife to type up notes of the conversation and write a letter to Mathers’ three daughters, telling them of conversations he had had with their father.

Rosborough’s report then prompted an intervention by the three women’s lawyers to stop the division of Mathers’ estate until they could find out whether Mathers’ partner Gloria Kingsford had pressured him to make a new will as his health deteriorated.

They alleged that Kingsford, their father’s partner for more than 20 years, had undue influence over Mathers, who was later found to have dementia, and persuaded him to change his will to one that favored her and her children.

Kingsford, who was also the executor of Mathers’ estate, filed a claim in the Tauranga High Court late last year to prove the 2020 will as it stands.

However, a recently released court decision found that Mathers was suffering from cognitive decline when he signed the new will and did not have the “testamentary capacity” to fully understand what he was agreeing to.

Mathers estate

According to the ruling, Mathers had three daughters: Jacqueline Mathers, Jocelyn Mathers and Diane Weissenborn with his first wife, whom he divorced in the late 1980s.

Mathers married and divorced again before meeting Kingsford in 2002. She had three adult children of her own and was financially independent.

Over the next two decades, they lived in their own homes and kept their assets and finances separate until they bought several plots of land together in Vanuatu. They later sold the land in 2018 to finance the purchase of property in Waihi.

By 2017, Mathers began to have health problems, and by 2019, he needed care from a home health nurse as he suffered from complications of diabetes.

By 2020, he had to have his toe amputated, and in August of that year he forgot to call his daughter Jacqueline on her birthday for the first time. Two days later, he failed the cognitive test required to obtain medical clearance to retain his driver’s license, scoring 32 out of 100 on the assessment.

Further testing revealed he had cognitive impairment and he did not obtain a driving license at the time, although he later received one from a new doctor, raising questions from the New Zealand Transport Agency.

In October 2020, Kingsford was granted an Enduring Power of Attorney for Mathers’ care and welfare, meaning she could make decisions about his medical care if he was unable to do so.

Two months later, handwritten notes were delivered to accountants at Giles and Associates with instructions to draw up a new will for Mathers.

Although Kingsford was a client of the firm, Mathers had never contacted them before they drafted his new will. On December 18, 2020, he signed his will.

According to the decision, the meeting, which took no more than 15 minutes, involved the accountants showing Mathers a draft document, explaining it, getting him to sign an acknowledgment that he was not seeking any independent legal advice and getting him to sign it.

The decision said there was no longer any record of the handwritten notes Kingsford provided to the firm, nor any official record of the meeting.

It was after signing the will that Mathers called Rosborough and claimed that Kingsford had deprived him of his property and left nothing to his three daughters.

“Please help me,” Rosborough recalls his friend saying during one such call.

Nearly a year later, Mathers was hospitalized for “increasing confusion” and his health deteriorated significantly in early 2022, leading to the amputation of his leg.

His discharge notes say Kingsford told hospital staff about Mathers’ gradual decline in cognitive function over the past several years.

While he was in the hospital, his two daughters tried to contact him, but either they were unable to talk to him or he acted senseless when they did capture him.

In a March 2022 assessment of his capacity, it was noted that Mathers had no understanding of his medical condition, medications or care needs, “did not have problem solving ability, did not have an understanding of assets/income, and was unable to assess the consequences of returning.” house”.

On March 9, 2022, Kingsford requested a copy of Mathers’ will from accountants, which they emailed to her. Five days later, Mathers died in hospital.

Following his funeral, Mathers’ friend Rosborough wrote to Jacqueline Mathers, recounting conversations he had with him following the 2020 changes.

Lawyers for Mathers’ daughters then wrote to Kingsford’s lawyer challenging the validity of the will.

Does he have the mental capacity to sign this?

With the 2020 will now in dispute, Kingsford, as executor of Mathers’ estate, had to prove it in court.

At a hearing this year, two medical experts said they believed Mathers suffered from some kind of mild cognitive impairment.

Both of these experts said that while he likely understood the nature of the making of the will, there was insufficient documentation to show that he understood the disposition of his property and assets, or that he understood the key changes between the 2011 and 2020 wills.

However, two experts, one represented by Kingsford and the other by Mathers’ daughters, disagreed on whether Mathers had the mental capacity to sign the 2020 will.

However, in her decision, Judge Laura Anne O’Gorman found that on the balance of probabilities, Mathers was not in a position to sign the will because he was suffering from cognitive decline, later diagnosed as dementia.

“The ability to make a will also requires the relative preservation of autobiographical memory necessary to store and consider facts and recall autobiographical events to be able to use and weigh issues to make the right decision,” Judge O. “Gorman found, noting that Mathers did not meet these criteria.

Judge O’Gorman said it was difficult to understand why Mathers was taken to Kingsford accountants to draw up a new will when he had a long history with the Tauranga law firm that had drawn up his previous wills.

One of those accountants testified at the hearing and admitted that she had little skill in understanding the effect of the will, which she said was effectively a plug-and-play template in which Mathers simply filled in the blanks.

“Given his age and obvious health problems, they should at least have retained evidence of their instructions and made a record of their conversations with Mr Mathers,” Judge O’Gorman said of the audit firm.

“In the five to 15 minutes spent at the accounting firm, it seems clear that there was no discussion to establish that Mr. Mathers understands and can explain the 2020 will in his own words.”

Judge O’Gorman further found that Mathers lacked testamentary capacity to make the 2020 will and that it was achieved through Kingsford’s undue influence over him.

“Although Ms Kingsford was clearly aware of issues relating to his cognitive abilities, she did not take any steps to review his testamentary capacity as part of the probate process, nor did she alert her accountants to these issues,” Judge O’Gorman found.

Judge O’Gorman found the changes to the will were a “dramatic departure” from Mathers’ previous wills, which had made it clear his assets would be left to his daughters rather than to Kingsford and her children.

Judge O’Gorman invalidated the 2020 will and instead approved Mathers’ 2011 will and removed Kingsford as administrator of the estate.

In a statement provided to NZME, Mathers’ three daughters said they were pleased with the decision, which highlights the need for better protection for older people when making wills.

“We do not believe we would be in this position if lawyers were involved,” their statement said.

“We hope that cases like ours will be taken into account in any future legislation.

“Improved procedures for older adults, enshrined in law, may have protected Dad from the situation he found himself in and protected families like ours from injury and legal costs.”

Kingsford declined to comment.