I don't know where to start or what to do but here is 30 years all condensed into one post and making it as brief as I can!
My mum and dad were very happily married for nearly 30 years. My mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer when I was 14, in the 1990's, this was just a few years after my brother had been killed in an accident. My mum ended up with a hospice nurse for her last few months and she died when I was 16. She had trusted her beloved husband that he would take care of her wishes including the 2nd home she had purchased out of her fathers inheritance so she knew I would have security when she died.
A few weeks the married mother of 2 hospice nurse started a relationship with my dad, 3 months later she arrived at our home and moved in. She had walked out on her young kids and left them. This is all within the same year as my mum dying. Within 11 months of her death the deeds to my mums 2nd home had been transferred into her name. At 16, and before the internet, I had no idea of my rights or that I should have contested any of this. My amazing father was a broken man.
Within the time she moved in there was often mention of a couple of other of her patients who she befriended. Little old men who liked her company. They were very generous to her when they died with their wills being changed shortly before their death to include her.
Roll on a number of years and the stepmother had managed to cut me off from my father along with many of his lifelong friends. I thought it was very harsh but just life for a while before I started rebuilding my relationship with my father. I was always a daddy's girl. My dad retired from farming, sold his farming estate and moved into my mothers property (that unknown to anyone had been placed in the stepmothers name).
She sent me a number of horrendous letters over time. They would include the line "this letter is written by me but it is your fathers words"
Dad died approx 12 years after my mum. He spent his last few days in hospital with me, not with her. He apologised and apologised about the mess he had made and what was about to come. It was so sad to see but he knew he had been manipulated. As thought, his will had been changed, everything to her and she proceeded to walk around wearing my grandmothers jewellery, my mothers engagement ring and act like the grieving widow.
But for only 7 weeks - then she announced she was in a relationship with a friend of my fathers, the same friend she refused to call to tell him about my fathers death stating he was 'slimey'. But he had money.
She moved him in to what was my mothers house and married him in the same church she buried my father within 7 months.
I asked her to give to me the money that my mother had bought the house with originally. Her own daughter asked her to move out as it was too painful to see her move on so quickly. I got a load of letters telling me my father never loved me anyway and that the whole village hated me and her daughter got a new house bought for her out of her new husbands money!
15 years have passed and I get contacted out of the blue on a monthly basis of the families she has destroyed, the wills she has managed to get changed by coersion and the the families she has pulled apart with the exact same behaviour and letters she sent to me.
Her husband she went on to marry after my father had 3 children, one sadly died when she was young and two sons. She managed to destroy their relationship with their father telling them their father wanted nothing to do with them. She manipulated their partners so the threat of not being able to see their children became greater than their relationship with their father. We all have matching letters - "this letter may be written by me but these are your fathers words..."
Even the local vicar wrote to me a few years ago saying she that her letter was the saddest one she had ever had to write and that the stepmother, although remarried, had bought the double burial plot that my father lay in and that even though she had remarried she will be buried with him. Nothing I can do - her name is on the receipt! So the village buriel plot will have my mum, brother, grandparents and her all next to each other - sick isn't the word!
She has now moved her husband into a home, she will be in her 60's now, and she didn't even tell his own children when she moved him to a different part of the country months ago. She has moved another man into my mothers home - the cycle continues.
It is almost unbelievable what she does. She has torn families apart, wrecked marriages and use 'sex' to get what she wants financially. If anyone announces they have cancer in the village I grew up in she is the first one there and the first one to benefit from a will change.
What can I do. Legally I was meant to know to contest my mums will/estate within 6 months of her death. Please tell me a 16 year old that would have known to do that.
The other families involved are so tired and battered that they feel there is nothing they can do. They have lost their dad.
My dad knew he had been duped - he knew she had got him and taken everything. She literally retired from work the day after dad died and hasn't worked a day since.
Legally I don't have the money to fight her. I tried speaking to the police, I have the evidence, but the older policeman just looked at me like I was mad - he had no idea about coercive control.
What would you do - she never seems to go away. People come to me from here to australia sharing their stories of what she does next. I even have my doubts about how my father died - she was a hospice nurse and she talked him out of treatment. 8 Weeks from diagnosis to death, all in her hands!