Three brothers are locked in a battle over their mother’s £1.8 million estate after the one who stayed home to care for her claimed a bigger share.
Dominic and Jeremy Heath left their parents’ £1.5 million London house as young men to forge careers in medicine that have taken them to the top of their profession, a court heard.
Their brother, Timothy, 62, a “self-employed creative”, stayed at home and looked after their mother, Rachel, who had dementia for many years.
When she died aged 93 in October 2015, she left a will splitting her estate equally between the three brothers and appointing them all executors.
Timothy claims that he deserves a bigger share because he acted as her primary carer for many years while his brothers “took none of the burden” and “left him to do it”.
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Dominic, 53, and Jeremy, 65, applied to have Timothy removed as an executor. They said he was “over-egging the pudding” and should leave the family home so that the wealth can be shared out fairly.
Mr Justice Carr, at the High Court in London, heard that the brothers’ parents bought their grade II listed home in Corringham Road, Hampstead, in 1965, and the three boys grew up there. Dominic and Jeremy achieved distinguished careers in medicine, their barrister, Mark Baxter, said. Dominic, a father of four, is a consultant ophthalmologist who lives in Hertfordshire while Jeremy, who has also reached the “top of his field”, lives in Wales. Timothy is a mathematics graduate and a qualified barrister but “was never employed”, Mr Baxter said. He stayed in the family home, where he has lived since the age of ten. He devotes his time to creative projects and helping to run a society devoted to William Blake.
He said that he was in effect an unpaid live-in carer for his mother for the last eight years of her life, when she had dementia, alongside two paid live-in careers. “I have been looking after mother for many years, a difficult person to look after. I was her principal carer for many years,” he said. Dominic, he claimed, “visited about once a month and stayed for an hour,” while “Jeremy visited about twice a year”.
He said: “The presence of myself in the house has made our mother’s final years richer and allowed her to die in her own home, rather than in the secure mental unit my brothers wanted to send her to.” He told Dominic: “You are a wealthy man. You offered no financial support. You didn’t visit often enough for it to manifest any form of care. I’ve looked after her almost single-handedly. I don’t own a house and I don’t have a pension or a steady income.” He added: “There was an implicit contract. You cannot have three people (carers) living in a house with two earning £45,000 a year and one getting nothing. I think the estate should honour its debts.”
Dominic disputed Timothy’s claim to have acted as a full time carer for their mother and told him: “It’s not your house, it’s mum’s house.”
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Mr Baxter claimed that Timothy had been “wilfully obstructive to the administration of the estate by failing to comply with reasonable requests”. He asked the judge to remove Timothy as an executor due to an “inherent conflict between his duties and his personal interests”.
The judge accepted that Timothy was “acting as one of three full-time carers” for his mother. “I am not satisfied that Timothy has acted in any way improperly . . . nor do I accept that he has acted deliberately in any attempt to frustrate probate,” he went on. However, he ruled that there was an “irreconcilable conflict between Timothy having a claim on the estate, on one hand, and being an executor on the other”. He ordered Timothy to step down, to be replaced by an independent solicitor, but ordered the doctors to pay £25,000 costs of bringing the application to remove their brother.