High-flying executive gets £200,000 payout from wife's will despite beating her to death
20 December 2022, 12:57
A former BT executive is set to get £200,000 from his wife's estate, even though he beat her to death himself.
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Les Winnister, a former BT treasurer, killed his wife Suzanne at their home in a leafy south-east London suburb in September 2020.
Winnister, who was suffering from mental illness, was convinced that his wife was having an affair, and also trying to poison him.
He was sentenced last year to an indefinite hospital order, having admitted manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
In most cases Winnister would not be entitled to money from his wife's estate, because the law prevents people from profiting from their crimes. But the Forfeiture Act 1982 has an exemption in exceptional circumstances.
Normally, her £2.5 million estate would have been split between her 'default' heirs, which include her mother and other relatives.
But a judge has agreed with a defence lawyer that the circumstances of this case are "exceptional", because of what the lawyer described as Winnister's low level of guilt. That means he will get at least £200,000 of her £2.5 million fortune.
Winnister, who is living at the Bracton Centre in Dartford in Kent, was "suffering from severe depression with psychotic features", a psychiatrist for the defence said at his trial. He was not found to be legally insane.
Ms Winnister's body was found dead at the couple's gated home in Bexley on September 8 2020, with the probably murder weapon, a marble chopping board, close by.
The court heard during the original hearing that Winnister went to the pub after killing his wife.
The couple's relationship had begun to deteriorate before the pandemic, before lockdown accelerated Winnister's paranoia.
They were childless and Winnister stood to inherit his wife's estate, valued at between £2 million and £2.5 million.
Read more: Woman, 44, charged with murder of children aged five and two in East London
Owen Curry, Winnister's defence lawyer, said that his client's "offending was wholly or almost wholly attributable to his mental disorder".
High Court judge Karen Shuman ruled that Winnister can inherit an agreed amount of his wife's estate, expected to be more than £200,000. The rest will go to her family.
