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Police Scotland admitted they failed to carry out sufficient enquiries to identify Gerard McNulty’s next-of-kin. Now Stacey Pickles, the daughter of the deceased veteran, has hit out at the police force for their failure to inform his family.

Stacey, living in Lancashire, received a letter in February informing her someone had made a claim against Mr McNulty’s pension after he had passed away.

Mr McNulty, 55, suffered from PTSD and alcohol dependency issues after his time in the armed forces and was known to lose contact with his family for periods of time.

However after Stacey received the letter, the family made enquires and discovered Mr McNulty died at his Wishaw home in September 2020.

Police Scotland had told someone not known to the family of Mr McNulty’s death, after they had been wrongly identified as his next-of-kin.

According to the Daily Record, the woman also failed to inform his family and had Mr McNulty cremated before leaving the funeral bill unpaid.

Mr McNulty’s family were therefore not entitled to collect his ashes, which sat at the funeral directors due to the outstanding funeral balance.

Stacey, 35, told the outlet her family’s contact details were already registered on the Police Scotland system as they had previously requested a welfare check in February 2020.

She then said: “The registrar said that because it had been a sudden death, it had gone to the Procurator Fiscal’s office who would come back to them when they had an official cause of death because they were still waiting for toxicology results…

“The Procurator Fiscal came back to us and said that it was Police Scotland who had given the next of kin details to them and that they’d need to verify my ID as being dad’s next of kin before they could speak to me…

“I submitted a complaint but it took Police Scotland a month to come back to me.

“As far as we’re concerned, she should never have been identified as his next of kin, his body shouldn’t have been released to her and the officers should have looked for one of us.”

Speaking to the Daily Record, Stacey then said Police Scotland had attempt to contact her uncle “but that they could not find him, which we strongly disbelieve”.

She then said: “They could have contacted us but they didn’t. They chose to take this woman’s word as gospel instead.”

The family continued to make their own enquiries into the circumstances surrounding the Royal Corps of Transport veteran’s death and were forced to get most of the information from a post mortem report.

They then found that a new bank card in his name had been requested three days after he died before almost £1000 was taken from his account.

Stacey added: “This would not have happened if Police Scotland had contacted us because the person who gained access to his house wouldn’t have been able to do so.

“Because of their actions, we’ve lost all of his personal effects, there’s an ongoing investigation into the bank account, we’ve paid for a funeral that we didn’t get to attend or even know about.

“And to make matters worse, this woman has decided she wanted to keep part of my dad’s ashes so there’s a bit of him missing now and we’ll never know where it is.”

Stacey also claimed Police Scotland offered £1,000 in compensation, which she said was “disgraceful”.

She said: “When he went to Scotland, he stopped working after the stress of divorce kind of got on top of him at that point.

“To top it all off, Police Scotland then sent me a text the other day asking me to rate their service.”

In a letter to the family, Chief Inspector Gillian Norrie confirmed they had failed to inform the correct next-of-kin

They said: “Taking the aforementioned information into consideration, I have concluded that Police Scotland did in fact hold contact details of a family member next of kin and further enquiry should have been carried out by the reporting officer to trace that person.

“As such your complaint is upheld.”

A second complaint about the lack of communication from the force with Stacey and her family was also upheld after an investigation.

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