Isolated and confused: How a granddad 'vanished' from his family

BBC News

29-03-2025

David remembers the moment he found his elderly stepfather, John, unkempt and suffering from dementia, living alone in an unclean hotel room."I didn't think you'd leave an animal in the state that room was in," he says. " There was no care at all. You would not leave a vulnerable old man like that."Months earlier, John had vanished. His eldest granddaughter, Amy, had taken control of his welfare and his finances, and stopped any contact between John and the rest of his family, including Barbara, his wife of many years.With Amy's help, John had changed his will, making her the sole beneficiary, and had then been left to live by himself in a single room, confused and isolated.John's family was one of hundreds who contacted the BBC after hearing The Willpower Detectives last year. The series revealed how a partner at an Essex-based law firm was using what's known as Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA) to take over the finances of vulnerable clients.In June, Parliament will debate a private member's bill to provide extra safeguards to LPA. The bill - introduced by the MP Fabian Hamilton - has cross-party support, and is shaped in part by the BBC's investigations and the huge public response to the cases raised.
The story of John Wilcox demonstrates how, in handing over responsibility for their financial assets, vulnerable people can sometimes be put at risk by members of their own family.After many years of running a successful office-furnishing business in Leeds, John and Barbara Wilcox had retired and were living comfortably in mid-Wales.Both had been married before. John had no children of his own, but he loved Barbara's son and daughter as his own, as well as her three grandchildren. To each of these, he had given enough money to buy their first homes.However, everything changed in 2020 when John was diagnosed with dementia.The condition caused a personality change, and John became delusional and paranoid. He started to accuse Barbara and his own brother Desmond of plotting against him.Following a collapse at home John was taken to hospital, where - because of Covid restrictions - nobody was allowed to visit.This isolation fed John's feelings of paranoia, and the suspicion that he had been abandoned by his family.It was during this time that John's eldest granddaughter, Amy - the one person he still seemed to trust - began to take charge of his life.At first, no-one in the family was suspicious. John had always been close to Amy.Unknown to them, John had requested and signed a form banning contact between anyone involved in his care and anyone in his family, apart from Amy.Even though his medical notes describe him as paranoid and delusional, John was declared as having "mental capacity" - this was significant because it meant he could legally grant someone lasting power of attorney over his finances.Barbara says her efforts to raise concerns with social services were blanked: "They just didn't want to know. They weren't interested in the letters that we wrote."
After three months in hospital, John was discharged into Amy's care. She suggested he could recuperate at a care home at Paignton in Devon, near where she lived, while she readied her house for him to stay there.At this stage, the other family members thought this was just a temporary arrangement in everyone's best interests. Amy said that it was what John wanted, and it would be a respite for Barbara.However, Barbara recalls: "As soon as she got him down there, the vitriol started." Amy told the rest of the family they no longer had any say about John's welfare, and they were not to try to contact him.In response to their pleas, it was agreed that a niece of John's would call him once a week to check that he was alright.But six weeks after he was admitted to the care home, the niece made her regular call, only to be told that John had left.The family was devastated - John had disappeared.They went to the police but were told he had signed a form in hospital instructing that no information should be shared with them. They were only told that John was not living with Amy.The family discovered that John had signed an LPA document giving Amy power of attorney over all his property and finances.Meanwhile, a solicitor in Devon contacted Barbara asking about their home and joint assets. Barbara later found out about John's new will, which named Amy as the sole beneficiary.This development had immediate and stressful consequences. The solicitor asked Barbara to begin the process of selling the home she had shared with John, in order to release his share of their assets.
John's brother, Desmond, took the lead in trying to find out where John now was. It took him several weeks.He says he rang 50 care homes, trying to track John down. He and Barbara also wrote to Amy asking her to at least tell them how her grandfather was, but they say they never received a reply.Eventually, Amy's aunt confronted her in person, and found out that John was in a hotel in Torquay.Desmond knew that in the past, John had lent £100,000 to a friend who owned several hotels in south-west England.It appeared that John had been put up at one of these hotels. The owner had made a deal to offset John's bill (a nightly rate of £265) against his outstanding debt.Amy's father, David, drove to the hotel. He was horrified by what he found: "The conditions he was living in were appalling. I was absolutely astounded."John was renting the room only - with no cleaning services or food. There was a fridge and a microwave oven - in which he would heat ready meals supplied by Amy.For David, it was the ultimate betrayal of a vulnerable man. He says that John was dishevelled and confused: "He was just abandoned. He hardly went out of that room and it was in a terrible state."
Having found John, his family decided they needed to tread carefully. They say they wanted him to understand the truth about what had been done to him, and they were also worried that Amy might try to move him again.At first, John refused to see Barbara, claiming she had tried to kill him, and that she had never come to see him in hospital.And then one day, Barbara drove to John's hotel with her son David and his partner Julie. She stayed outside in the car but gave David a tin of flapjacks to take to John in his room.The touch and smell of a faded everyday item - an old cake tin with some homemade flapjacks inside - seemed to have an effect on him."I know what's in there," he said to his stepson."Do you know who made them?" David remembers asking John. John replied: "Yes I do."David then offered to bring Barbara into the hotel room and John agreed.Barbara says she was heartbroken by her husband's physical and mental deterioration. He weighed only seven-and-a-half stone, and he was so weak that she thinks he would have died if he had been left much longer.
It was a "very, very emotional" reunion, she remembers. Before long, they were holding hands and John had agreed to come home with her.The next day, Barbara and her brother Mike came back to the hotel to pick John up. Mike says it felt like they were "planning a heist". He recalls that "as we drove away and started to get out of Torquay, I said: 'Oh gosh, we got away with that.'"Back in Wales, Barbara was able to see John's bank accounts, and discovered that Amy had taken more than £5,000 - there was just 16p left in his account.But John's story had a happy ending of sorts. He managed to get the power of attorney and the new will cast aside, and lived for nine months with Barbara in Wales, before dying peacefully at home.His tale highlights the difficulties involved when it comes to deciding who has control of what's often seen as "family money", and who will inherit it.Issues of mental capacity have to be considered in situations like these, according to James Warner, a consultant in old-age psychiatry."Dementia makes people susceptible to manipulation and those involved with overseeing important changes need to be extra-vigilant," he says.The elderly and vulnerable can quickly find themselves in situations where they are extremely vulnerable, he says, and more needs to be done to protect them.The Office of the Public Guardian (OPG) holds power of attorney records for more than eight million people in England and Wales, but last year it investigated less than 1% of the cases brought to its attention.Labour MP Fabian Hamilton says the OPG can be "toothless" for vulnerable elderly people and their families.Mr Hamilton says changes are needed to provide greater safeguards, and his private member's bill on attorney powers is due for its second reading in June.The bill - which has cross-party support - would compel banks and regulators to check for issues such as cognitive decline, and greater scrutiny over whether an attorney is abusing their LPA powers.Barbara thinks that the proposed legislation could have helped in her situation. "In cases like John's, where you have this kind of paranoia, solicitors involved with a power of attorney should be making enquiries of the family and verifying," she says.
Meanwhile, John's family have had no contact with Amy, unable to forgive the hurt she caused them and what she put her grandfather through.They say they still do not understand why Amy acted in the way she did. She (along with John's other grandchildren) had already been given money enough to buy a house each, and she stood to inherit more eventually.In May 2024, Amy accepted a police caution for fraud - which in law is an admission of guilt - specifically because she had taken money from John's account after he had returned to Wales, and was no longer in her care.When I wrote to Amy about this, she replied that she had only accepted the caution to lift the stress from herself and her family, and didn't regard it as just.She told me that there were two sides to every story and that all of John's decisions were made by him in the company of his solicitor. She added that the decision not to tell John's family anything was at his request.