The devastating verdict from the family of Donald McPherson, who's on the run after a civil court found him guilty of killing his wife in a swimming pool for a £4.4m insurance payout. So will a new TV documentary help to track him down?

Daily Mail​

28-04-2025

When Paula Leeson drowned in the swimming pool of a remote Danish holiday home, the initial assumption was that a tragic accident had taken place.
Her husband of three years claimed he had found her there, fully clothed and unconscious, during their Scandinavian weekend mini-break back in June 2017. Any marks on her body, Donald McPherson said, must have been caused by his desperate attempts to get her out of the pool.
His sketchy account of what happened that weekend was riddled with monstrous lies but they were convincing enough to cause the collapse of McPherson's 2021 murder trial.
Then, a civil case brought by Paula's family last year concluded that the 47-year-old mother-of-one's death was not accidental and that 'serial liar' McPherson had unlawfully killed his wife, hoping to cash in on life insurance policies worth £4.4 million he had secretly taken out.
Now, with an inquest into Paula's death due in June, the Crown Prosecution Service is reviewing 'new and compelling' evidence amid calls from Paula's family for a second prosecution against the 'evil, dangerous fraudster'. McPherson's own family in New Zealand have also called for him to be brought to justice.
'He is a psychopath,' one of his aunts told the Mail. 'It's so obvious he killed Paula and why he did it. Our fear is he will find another victim, take her money and kill again.'
Certainly McPherson, who began internet dating within days of Paula's death, already has a new partner. He moved with her to New Zealand after his trial ended and has since apparently disappeared into thin air.
Tomorrow, a feature-length Channel 5 documentary, The Drowning of Paula Leeson, will shine a forensic light on McPherson's shocking crime and the four decades of fraud and deceit leading up to it.
Told in full for the first time, his story stretches across continents and goes back decades. It features a previous wife who, along with their four-year-old daughter, died in horrific circumstances and a brazen £15 million bank theft, which saw McPherson rub shoulders with British criminal masterminds and spend time in a German jail.
The disturbing truth about this evil fraudster raises serious questions about why he was allowed to walk free from court four years ago.
When McPherson came into the Leeson family's life in 2013, Paula's father Willy and brother Neville instinctively knew there was something not right about the short, stocky man who claimed to be a successful property developer but, in reality, was a con artist and already massively in debt.
The Leesons had their own civil engineering business in Worsley, Greater Manchester, in which Willy, Neville, Paula and Paula's only child from a previous marriage, Ben, all worked.
It was through one of their customers that Paula was first introduced to McPherson, who quickly wormed his way into her affections.
He appeared to have pitched up, as Paula's father has previously told the Mail, 'from nowhere'.
When asked about his past, McPherson spun a story about being abandoned on a doorstep as a baby and raised in foster care when, in reality, he had two loving parents. Above all, he appeared to be physically cold towards their daughter.
Before Paula's mother Betty died in 2022 she told the Mail: 'Paula would become defensive if we said anything against him so we didn't criticise. We put up with him for her sake.'
Paula's tragically misplaced love for McPherson was painfully clear at the couple's fairytale wedding in June 2014 at Peckforton Castle, Cheshire. Newly released video footage shows a beaming Paula, in a white wedding gown, arriving in a vintage car with her father.
McPherson, in a purple shirt and tie to match the bride's bouquet, sports a rictus grin throughout.
In one poignant scene, he is filmed unwrapping an expensive watch, a gift from Paula, and saying to the camera: 'Oh my gosh Paula, you shouldn't have.'
A moment later, he is seen reading out loud a love letter from Paula: 'To Don, our day has finally arrived. I'll be so proud to call you my husband. Thank you for all you do for me. I'll love you for ever.' Afterwards, he kisses the letter and appears to wipe away tears.
Paula is also seen reading from McPherson's letter to her: 'And now the journey commences. I love you with all my heart. Now and for ever and ever. Thank you for coming into my life. You make me feel so very special. I love you and I am proud to be your husband. All my love, Don.'
McPherson had no family, or even friends, at the wedding. At the last minute he claimed that his best man, from New Zealand, had to cancel because his wife had died in childbirth. Paula had no idea that the man she had married had reinvented himself several times before under a series of aliases or that he was already plotting his next big crime.
Once they were husband and wife, and without Paula's knowledge, he started paying £460 a month in life insurance premiums, despite his huge debts.
Months after their wedding, he forged a new will and trust documents which would give him control of Paula's finances if she died.
But his name wasn't even really Donald McPherson. He was born Alexander James Lang, the son of electrician Laurence Lang, who emigrated from Manchester to New Zealand in the 1960s where he met his deeply religious wife Pam and had two daughters before their beloved son arrived.
'He has two older sisters but it was Alex who was the golden child to his mum,' his aunt told the Mail. 'For Pam he could do no wrong, but we thought very differently. There was always something truly wrong and mean about him even when he was a small boy.
'My husband called him the 'Poison Dwarf', which sounds cruel but just look at what he went on to do. However many times he changes his name, he's not going to change inside.'
Even McPherson's grandmother describes him as 'creepy'. 'I never liked him as a grandson,' she said in February this year. 'As a child, I knew what he was like.' The last time she saw him was in 1999.
'There was something creepy about him,' she added. 'He was someone I could not take to.'
By all accounts he was a loner who found it hard to make friends, but he was also a talented maths pupil who competed in national competitions. Alex, as he was then, was nine when he wrote to Nasa saying he wanted to be an astronaut and just 14 when he started investing his pocket money in the stock market.
Desperate to get his hands on more cash, the teenager saved up money from gardening jobs he often never completed. He also burnt bags of newspapers he'd been paid to deliver.
In his early 20s, facing financial trouble and credit card debt, he changed his name for the first time to Alan Douglas Atkins.
By the time he was 21 he had clocked up 27 criminal convictions for fraud. It's not known whether he ever spent time in prison in New Zealand for these offences but, in 1996, he changed his name again – to Donald Somers – and moved to London where he lied his way into the banking industry.
'I just put a crock of s*** on my CV,' he admitted years later in a 2005 Australian Federal Police interview. By 2000, and still using his fraudulent CV, McPherson was an agency worker at Commerzbank in Germany's financial centre in Frankfurt.
There he became embroiled in an extraordinary fraud that saw him and two other agency workers from the UK siphon off £12 million from a dormant account into a fictitious company they'd set up.
'The management had no clue in the world,' McPherson later bragged when the police finally caught up with him, adding ominously: 'You could get away with murder basically.'
The boss of an organised crime gang in Britain agreed to launder the money for McPherson and his associates, with much of it ending up in Australia where McPherson moved just two weeks after the funds disappeared from Commerzbank.
Relatives who saw him at the time recall that he showed off his cash by buying expensive bottles of champagne in restaurants.
By then, he also had a Swedish wife, Ira Kulppi, who was observed to be 'very quiet' and 'under his thumb'. In 2002, two years after his audacious bank theft, the couple's daughter Natalie was born but the family were rarely seen by neighbours in the quiet street in Cairns, Queensland, where they lived.
And in 2005, McPherson's fraud caught up with him.
He was extradited to Germany and jailed for three years for embezzlement.
Back in Australia, his wife Ira became increasingly reclusive, taking her daughter out of school and rarely going outside with her.
In July 2006, a neighbour who went to check on her noticed black burn marks around the front door.
When police broke it down with a battering ram, they found the 35-year-old mother and her daughter dead on the lounge floor. An inquest later concluded that 35-year-old Ira, who was cradling Natalie in her arms when they died, had deliberately lit a fire inside the property.
But interviewed in prison, McPherson claimed he had been threatened by someone in the prison courtyard and told he had to pay several million to keep his family safe but that he told them to 'take [your] claim and go somewhere else'.
His response to Ira and Natalie's death was horrifyingly cold.
'Had I the choice of keeping them or keeping the money, I'd have kept the money,' he told police. 'The way I see it, no woman is worth five million, including my daughter.'
Freed to return to New Zealand in 2008, it wasn't long before he was back in court. As he was ordered to carry out community service for obtaining £1,500 worth of electrical equipment by fraud, a judge told him: 'You appear to be someone who lives by your fraudulent and criminal acts.'
Around 2010, and having reinvented himself as property developer Donald McPherson, he met a British builder on holiday in Egypt. Back in Manchester, the builder introduced him to Willy Leeson's civil engineering business and, fatefully, to Paula, who handled invoices.
But none of this was mentioned at McPherson's murder trial in 2021, which meant the jury at Manchester Crown Court were unaware of defendant's past.
The trial collapsed after a Danish pathologist who carried out the post-mortem examination could not rule out the possibility that Paula had fallen into the pool and sustained injuries during rescue efforts.
To the despair of Paula's family, the judge stopped the trial and instructed the jury to enter a not-guilty verdict, even though, he concluded, it was 'clearly more likely' that McPherson had killed her.
The CPS said afterwards that it did not believe 'introducing an unrelated fraud conviction would have made any difference to the outcome'. It later emerged that Danish police, who said they saw nothing to arouse their concern at the scene of Paula's death, had based much of their flawed investigation on false information given to them by McPherson himself.
Last year, the Leeson family successfully blocked the serial liar's bid to inherit Paula's £4.4 million estate by bringing proceedings against him at Manchester Civil Courts of Justice.
While the UK's criminal proceedings require proof that is 'beyond all reasonable doubt', civil courts make decisions based on the 'balance of probabilities'.
The court was played recordings of McPherson's phone calls to a string of insurance companies before Paula's demise, checking he would receive a pay-out in the event of her death.
His account to Danish police that he and Paula had fallen asleep and that when he woke he found her in the pool was also rendered 'highly improbable' by analysis of data from Paula's Fitbit which showed her movements – and heart rate – in the minutes leading up to her death.
A sharp rise in heart rate was consistent with the use of force on Paula and a sharp decline then consistent with unconsciousness and drowning.
Mr Justice Richard Smith ruled that McPherson, who refused to attend court, had unlawfully killed his wife by compressing her neck in an arm lock, then putting her in the swimming pool.
The motive, he said, was clear. Money. He upheld the 'Forfeiture Rule' which prevents a person who unlawfully killed someone from benefiting in any way from their actions, meaning that all of Paula's money would go to her son, Ben, now 37.
Paula's family may have stopped McPherson getting his hands on her fortune, but they will not give up their fight for justice until they get him back in court to face a murder charge, which if convicted would see him put behind bars.
'If McPherson thinks he's going to be rid of us then he's much mistaken,' Paula's brother Neville told the Mail in 2021.
The killer's family share the same hope.
'He is a free man today and our hope is that Manchester police will reopen their investigation, use their resources to trace him and use the new evidence to try him,' says his aunt. 'Surely he can't hide for ever. If enough people are looking, the world can become a small place.'
The feature-length documentary The Drowning of Paula Leeson will air at 8pm tomorrow on Channel 5