BBC licence fee: Pensioners ‘concerned’ over axe says expert

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A frail pensioner has been sent back to prison – for her second attempt at swindling a dead partner’s estate. Anne Kermode-Hutchinson, 74, hobbled off to jail with a walking frame after she admitted forging a will so she could get her hands on her late-boyfriend’s property and shares, worth more than £400,000. The judge said the case was just like an earlier crime – when she was jailed for faking documents to claim a former partner had given her his home.

The court heard she committed her latest crime after being in a “loving and affectionate” relationship with George Hayes since 2011.

He had drawn up a will leaving his £185,000 bungalow and shares worth £238,271 to his two sisters. So Kermode-Hutchinson used computer software to fake a new one.

Five days after Mr Hayes died of a stroke in October 2019, she took the forged document to solicitors in his home town of Mildenhall, Suffolk. But the lawyers refused to accept it.

And she was shown the door again when she returned with more fake papers.

She then approached a second firm of solicitors in Newmarket, who alerted police.

Kermode-Hutchinson pleaded guilty to false representation and was jailed for three years and nine months at Ipswich Crown Court. 

Judge David Pugh dismissed a plea to spare her jail. He said she appeared to show no remorse for the “sophisticated” fraud, which bore “remarkable similarities” to her earlier crime.

That was committed in September 2013 when Kermode-Hutchinson’s ex, David Hutchinson, died – and she claimed he had given her his bungalow in Red Lodge, Suffolk.

She presented a solicitor with a fake tenancy agreement, which she said showed her former partner had been renting the bungalow from her.

But, again, the swindle failed because the lawyer was suspicious and alerted police.

Kermode-Hutchinson denied fraud, but was found guilty and jailed for 18 months in 2015. The judge described her as “manipulative and deeply dishonest”.

Jurors heard Mr Hutchinson had once drawn up a will leaving his home to Kermode-Hutchinson and his two sons.

But he cut her out of it when their relationship ended in 2011 – the year she took up with Mr Hayes.

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