A Falmouth bus driver accused of plundering the bank accounts of an elderly couple he had befriended and forging their wills has told a court they wanted him to have their money.
Percival John Harris told Truro Crown court that he first met one of the couple Desmond Moyle in May 2012 when he would pick him up in his bus.
Harris, aged 59, of Turnaware Road, Falmouth is charged with two charges of conspiracy to make a false instrument by forging two wills, perverting the course of justice and fraud.
A charge of theft has been dropped.
Co-defendant Davies-Patrick, aged 38, of no fixed abode, is facing two charges of making a false instrument and one of perverting the course of justice.
Both men deny the charges.
Harris said Mr Moyle was a passenger on his bus and he would get on at the top of Killigrew Street to visit his wife Kathleen who was in Trevern Care Home having been diagnosed with dementia in 2003.
He said they became firm friends and once, when Des was charged £15 for a taxi to get back home from the care home, Harris said he offered to start picking Mr Moyle up and taking home.
He said they became firm friends as Mr Moyle had once been a bus driver himself and they had a lot in common. He said he also became friends with Kath and would see her regularly depending on how well she was.
He said by 2013 he was doing everything for them and was having to organise helping Des and Kath around his shifts with OTS which had changed and his own family. He said they said he was like a son to them.
He said he would pick Kath up and take her home and take the couple for fish and chips at the Penmere chippy.
He said he used to take Des down to Trago Mills to pick up pieces for the models he made of buildings and buses which had been featured in the Packet after Harris has contacted the paper.
Harris said the subject of him being given power of attorney (POA) for Kath came up when her first cousin Les Merton, a Cornish Bard and poet, was sent to prison for 13 years in 2015 for sexual offences against children. He was supposed to have power of attorney for Kath.
He said Des and Kath were upset and angry and asked him (Harris) to take it over.
“I asked ‘why me?’ ” Harris told the court. “ ’Why not Kath’s brother?’ and Des said ‘No bloody fear, they would have the lot’ and Kath said ‘Yes, that’s what will happen”.
He said he knew nothing about administering a POA and it was never explained to him by the solicitor.
He said he was told by Des that being given POA for Kath was good for her in case anything happened to him.
He denied it was him taking £6,000 in cash from Kath’s account on February 2015 and presumed it must have been Des.
“It was nothing to do with me, had to be Des,” he said. “It was at time when Les Murton was in court.”
He said Des and Kath were “delighted” to include him in their 2015 wills as he did so much for him. He said they said he was “like a son” to them.
In Kath’s new will he was the beneficiary of 25% of her estate and in Des’s will 45%.
“They were delighted,” he said. “They wanted it to go to me because if I was doing all the running around and doing everything for them then I was going to benefit from the will,” he said.
“I enjoyed Des and Kath’s company,” he added. “They were good people.”
He said when Des became ill in 2016 he would take Des to hospital appointments and when he was in hospital was visiting him every day. Des eventually died in Falmouth Hospital but before that spent time in Helston Hospital.
It was here, said Harris, that new handwritten wills were drawn up by Des and Kath, who he’d brought to visit him after and witnessed by two Big Issue sellers Davies-Patrick and Tim Cullen, who has since died who, he said, knew both Kath and Des.
He said he went to WH Smith to purchase the legal pro-forma and wrote down what Des and Kath dictated giving him 95% of their estate.
He said it came about after “the family” had been coming into the hospital and “harassing” Des about money that he and Kath had received in two separate payments from an “Auntie Sylvia” amounting to £62,500 each sent to their home.
Harris said that Des sent him to pick up the cheques one made out to Des and one to Kath from their home and Harris said when he returned with them Des said to him with a wink: “What’s yours is yours”.
Harris claimed that Des said he was being harassed by Kath’s brother Ivor Jenkin and his wife Rosemary.
“He told me to take the cheques that come into Kath’s account get that money out and put it into your account because they will find a way of getting it into Ivor’s bank account,” Harris told the court.
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After Des died in 2018, Harris said he sold the house as he had been instructed by Des with £100,000 ‘ringfenced’ for Kath with the rest going into his account. He said that’s what Des had told him to do.
He said the Moyles wanted the family written out of their wills and all the money go to him. However he claimed that he lost the handwritten ones and Kath told him to write them again, despite Des now being dead.
He said he wrote them again from memory but refused to sign them as he told Kath this would be fraud, but when he returned they were both all signed.
He then says he got Cullen and Patrick-Davis to re-witness the wills in the back of his car in a multi-storey car park in Truro with Kath in the front seat.
He then handed them into the solicitors handling the estate.
When concerns were raised by the family, the police started an investigation.
The trial continues
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