A woman took her dementia-suffering partner to an accountant before he died to sign a will that instructed more of his estate to go to her and less to his three daughters.

But after Cedric Mathers signed the new will in 2020, he reportedly phoned his friend Graham Rosborough pleading for help.

“This woman has stripped me of all my possessions and got everything I own, not leaving a thing for my three girls,” Rosborough claimed Mathers told him.

“I’ve just signed my life away to that woman.”

“What do you want me to do? Have you gone to your lawyer? Do you want me to phone for a lawyer?” Rosborough said he asked his friend.

“I gotta go, Gloria is coming. Must go, talk later, bro,” he said Mathers responded.

The conversation was so odd that Rosborough wrote what he could remember on a piece of paper and filed it away.

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

Rosborough’s tip-off then sparked an intervention by lawyers for the three women to put a stop to Mathers’ estate being divided up until they could investigate whether Mathers’ partner Gloria Kingsford had pressured him into making a new will as his health declined.

They claimed Kingsford, their father’s partner of more than 20 years, had undue influence over Mathers, who was later found to be suffering from dementia, and convinced him to change his will to one that favoured her and her children.

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

Gloria Kingsford launched a bid at the High Court at Tauranga to prove the 2020 will. Photo / George Novak

However, a recently released ruling from the court found Mathers was suffering from cognitive decline when he signed the new will and would not have had the “testamentary capacity” to be fully aware of what he was agreeing to.

Mathers’ estate

According to the ruling, Mathers had three daughters, Jacqueline Mathers, Jocelyn Mathers and Dianne Weissenborn, to 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 purchased several parcels of land together in Vanuatu. They later sold the land in 2018 to fund the purchase of a property in Waihī.

By 2017, Mathers had started experiencing health problems and by 2019 he needed in-home help from a nurse as he was suffering complications from diabetes.

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

A further test noted he had cognitive impairment and was not granted a driver’s licence at that time, though he was later granted one by a new doctor which raised questions from New Zealand Transport Agency.

In October 2020, Kingsford was granted enduring power of attorney for Mathers’ care and welfare, meaning she could make decisions about his healthcare if he was unable to.

Two months later, handwritten notes were delivered to accountants Giles and Associates setting out instructions for a new will to be drafted for Mathers.

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

According to the decision, the appointment, which took no longer than 15 minutes, included the accountants showing Mathers the draft document, explaining it, having him execute an acknowledgment that he was not seeking any independent legal advice, and having him sign it.

There was no longer any record of the handwritten notes Kingsford provided the firm, nor any formal record of the meeting, the decision stated.

It was following the signing of this will that Mathers called Rosborough and claimed Kingsford was stripping him of his possessions and leaving nothing for his three daughters.

“Get me some help please,” Rosborough recalls his friend saying in one of these calls.

Nearly a year later, Mathers was admitted to the hospital for “increasing confusion” and in early 2022 his health took a significant turn for the worse, culminating in his leg being amputated.

Justice Laura O'Gorman heard the case this year.

His discharge notes said Kingsford told staff at the hospital of Mathers’ gradual cognitive decline in the past several years.

While he was in the hospital, two of his daughters tried to contact him but they were either unable to speak to him, or he was nonsensical when they did get hold of him.

In an assessment of his capacity in March 2022, Mathers was noted to have no insight into his medical conditions, medications, or his care needs, “no ability to problem solve, no idea about assets/income and no ability to appreciate consequences of returning home”.

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

Following his funeral, Mathers’ friend Rosborough wrote to Jacqueline Mathers with an account of the conversations he had with him following the will change in 2020.

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

Did he have the mental capacity to sign it?

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

At a hearing held this year, two medical experts gave evidence that it was their opinion Mathers was suffering from some kind of mild cognitive impairment.

Those experts both said that while he likely understood the nature of making a will there wasn’t sufficient documentation to prove he understood the layout of his estate and assets, nor that he understood the key changes between the 2011 and 2020 wills.

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

Excerpts of Graham (Curly) Rosborough's notes following a conversation with Cedric Mathers after he changed his will in 2020 were presented to the court.

However, in judgment, Justice Laura Anne O’Gorman found that on the balance of probabilities, Mathers did not have the capacity to sign the will because he was suffering from a cognitive decline later diagnosed as dementia.

“For the capacity to make a will, there also needs to be relative preservation of autobiographical memory, needed to hold and consider facts and recall autobiographical events so as to be able to use and weigh the issues to make a sound decision,” Justice O’Gorman found, noting that Mathers did not meet these criteria.

Justice O’Gorman said it was difficult to understand why Mathers was taken to Kingsford’s accountants to draft a new will when he had a long history with a Tauranga-based legal firm that had drafted his previous wills.

One of those accountants gave evidence at the hearing and admitted she had no particular skills in understanding the effect of the will that she said was effectively a “plug and play” template that Mathers merely filled in the gaps for.

“Given his age and evident health issues, at the very least they should have kept evidence of their instructions and taken a file note about their discussions with Mr Mathers,” Justice O’Gorman said of the accounting 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 understood and could explain the 2020 will in his own words.”

Justice O’Gorman went on to find that Mathers lacked the testamentary capacity to make the 2020 will and further that it was procured by Kingsford’s undue influence on him.

“Despite Ms Kingsford being expressly aware of questions concerning his cognitive capacity, she took no steps to have him examined for testamentary capacity as part of the will execution process, nor did she alert her accountants about these issues,” Justice O’Gorman found.

Justice O’Gorman found the changes to the will were a “dramatic departure” from Mathers’ previous wills, which were clear that his assets would be left to his daughters and not to Kingsford and her children.

Justice O’Gorman ruled the 2020 will invalid and instead approved Mathers’ 2011 will, as well as removing Kingsford as administrator of the estate.

A statement from Mathers’ three daughters provided to NZME said they were happy with the ruling which highlighted the need for better protection for the elderly when making wills.

“We do not believe we would have been in this position had lawyers been involved in the process,” their statement reads.

“We hope that cases like ours are taken into consideration in any future law-making.

“Better processes for the elderly, enshrined in law, may have protected Dad from the situation he found himself in and sheltered families like ours from the trauma and expense of litigation.”

Kingsford declined to comment.