In search of beneficiaries…

The deceased was an elderly man who died in a nursing home. According to staff, he had mentioned family and even children, but no one had ever come to visit him. His surname being Cullis, we expected to locate heirs quickly. We did not, however, anticipate the reactions of his estranged family.

Initial research went well and we located both his son Patrick and ex-wife Barbara quickly, as they lived together in Kent. Barbara, however, seemed to be fearful on hearing that we were looking for information about her ex-husband. In between sobs and broken sentences, she recounted how, in the course of her 17-year marriage, both she and her children had repeatedly been beaten by her ex-husband, to the extent that she ended up in hospital on a number of occasions. Some of the beatings had been so brutal that she continued to have problems with her health. When he wasn’t beating them, Cullis starved them. In the end, she had run away with her children and filed for divorce.

Barbara and her son also informed us that Cullis had been married three times, and that he had had one child with each of his previous partners. Barbara was his third wife and, besides Patrick, she had also had a daughter with Cullis, whom she and Patrick hadn’t seen for years.

Cullis’s second wife, Christina, had agonised about whether to return our call, having already booked her ticket abroad for the next day in fear of being found by her ex-husband. She had also been hospitalised numerous times after what she described as “beatings and torture”. When she finally found the courage to leave her brutal husband, after a fortnight hiding out in a local doctor’s attic with her children she changed her name repeatedly and moved houses regularly in order to avoid him finding her again. Both her mental and physical health were poor, and she continued to live in fear of her ex-husband locating her.

We had contacted her as we had been unable to locate her son, Daniel. It emerged that, because of the way in which Christina and her children had been treated over the course of the marriage, she had ingrained in her sons that they should never, ever hit a woman. By a bitter twist of fate, Daniel found himself the victim of domestic abuse and one day his girlfriend stabbed him through the heart. Daniel died aged 29 under one of Christina’s assumed names, the reason we had been unable to find the death entry. Christina had campaigned to have the girl locked away, although she was released within a few years – with a vow to avenge herself. As a result, Christina was placed under police protection and begged for her details to remain confidential.

Meanwhile, we had located Cullis’s first wife, who had had a lucky escape from the violence – after only five years and a few hospitalisations – when he had quite simply walked out one day when his first born child, Michael, was only four years old. Michael’s battered mother changed his name to her maiden name, and since then Michael had not had any interest in Cullis.

We had identified three broken families. Christine told me that Cullis’s family were more than aware of the situation, as they had often visited her in hospital, although telling her that it was “just the way it was”, even implying that it was his right to do what he did. The horrific way that each of these women and their children were treated, and the absolute fear and panic that the mention of his name brought on were electric and distressing, even to us.

We even managed to locate the deceased’s youngest daughter, Angela, who was not aware that she had any siblings other than her brother.

Surprisingly, Angela and her brother Patrick had independently attempted to find their father and tracked him some time before his death to the care home in which he died. Both had been told by staff that he was already dead. It came as a shock to find out that they could have seen him after all. They were the only ones to be saddened by the news of Cullis’s death.

Although we had located the heirs of the deceased, and their claims were accepted by the Treasury, our work went further. Angela re-established contact with her mother and brother, and we acted as intermediary between the other children, as well as John, the child Daniel had fathered as a teenager – Cullis’s and Christine’s lost grandchild. Surprisingly, Christine, the second wife who had seemed the most affected by her relationship with Cullis, asked to be put in touch with the other former wives, although for a long time continued to use us as the intermediary in order not to disclose her whereabouts. She even asked for a copy of his death certificate, as if she couldn’t quite believe it. Cullis’s behaviour repeated itself in each relationship: charming at the beginning, a child born out of wedlock, then eventually each woman had been coerced into marriage and the cruelty had begun. By the end of one relationship, he had his next one lined up already.

The gratitude expressed by each person involved was indescribable and they exchanged family photographs before eventually arranging to meet. We ended up reuniting both close and half families – mother and daughter, half siblings, grandmother and grandson and ex-wives, a process therapeutic to each, and just so rewarding for our researchers personally.

Kasia A. Oberc is a relationship manager at Fraser & Fraser. Find who you are looking for: contact us on 020 7832 1430 or e-mail legal@lostkin.co.uk