A man who died in a Liverpool care home was found to be the missing estranged husband of a wealthy woman and was using an alias, a court ruled.
Elizabeth Grosvenor, from Wallasey, died without making a will in Scotland in 2016, aged 91, having lived with dementia for some years. As the process of executing her estate, and her "substantial" interest in a decades-old trust fund, was being unravelled by her family and the trustees of that fund, a problem became clear.
Investigators found there was no evidence she had officially divorced her third husband, Joseph Grosvenor, when they separated in 1993 after marrying in Wallasey, in 1991, when Elizabeth was 66. But a court was asked to make an strange decision - was Mr Grosvenor the same person as a Marc Lawrence, who died aged 85 in Liverpool in 2020, also in the grip of advanced dementia?
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Under Scottish law, if Mr Grosvenor was still alive after Elizabeth's death, his next of kin or estate would have been entitled to a share in her estate and a share in the trust fund set up by her first husband, Jan Tomola, who died in 1983. However if it was found Mr Grosvenor had died before Elizabeth, there would be no such entitlement. Although it is unclear whether he had any other family, Elizabeth's next of kin and lawyers for the trustees petitioned the Court of Session in Scotland to make a ruling on the matter.
According to a written judgment from the case, Mr Grosvenor had tried to claim money from Elizabeth several times via solicitors between 1994 and 2003. However, that year the contact suddenly stopped.
When lawyers for the trustees of the trust fund tried to find Mr Grosvenor in 2012, they hit a brick wall. However, efforts were made again after Elizabeth's death and they appointed a new professional firm of investigators, Title Research, to get to the truth.
According to the judgment, written by judge Lord Colin Tyre, it emerged Mr Grosvenor used a raft of different names throughout his life, and was in fact born as Sidney Collins in Birkenhead in 1934. The court heard Mr Collins/Grosvenor then used a number of other names, including Joseph Gray, Charles Lloyd, Charles Rae and Joseph Rothschild.
The investigators started with the last correspondence to Elizabeth's lawyers from Mr Grosvenor, which contained a return address of 1A Jane Street in Peterhead, Scotland. It quickly became apparent that no such address existed, seemingly putting their investigation on ice.
However, they noticed that the postcode, AB42 1DR, contained a very similar sounding address, 1A James Street in Peterhead. In 2018, the investigators managed to find out that a man called Marc Lawrence had been living at that address in 2003, at the time the last letters were sent to Elizabeth's representatives from Mr Grosvenor - and that Mr Lawrence had the same date of birth as Mr Grosvenor
As Lord Tyre describes: "Mr Lawrence was traced, via a care home in Aberdeen and an address in Arbroath, to a care home in Liverpool operated by Liverpool City Council. The care home had no information as to whether he had any family."
Despite the inability to question Mr Lawrence, and his death in April 2020, another break-through came in the form of an old local news article published on the BBC News website, in a section serving North East Scotland on March 11, 2011. The article contained a missing appeal for a then 76-year-old man called Marc Lawrence who had disappeared in Aberdeen, and crucially also contained a photograph which bore a resemblance to photos of Mr Grosvenor taken in the early 1990s.
Lawyers for the petitioners argued that the evidence showing the two men were one and the same was "limited and circumstantial" and that the lack of contact after 2003 suggested Mr Grosvenor had died around that time - well before Elizabeth in 2016.
However Lord Tyre wrote: "In our opinion the evidence placed before the Court amounts to a compelling case that Marc Lawrence was indeed Mr Grosvenor. The difference in name is of little significance given the number of names used by Mr Grosvenor during his lifetime.
"On the other hand: Marc Lawrence had the same date and place of birth as Sidney Collins alias Mr Grosvenor, and both had connections with the Liverpool/Wirral area. The letter written by Mr Grosvenor in 2003 from 1A Jane Street, Peterhead AB42 1DR was written at a time when the only resident of 1A James Street, Peterhead AB42 1DR was Marc Lawrence; The photograph of Marc Lawrence at the time of his disappearance in 2011 bears what appears to us to be a striking resemblance to the two photographs of Mr Grosvenor as a younger man.
"We do not regard the absence of continuing contact between Mr Grosvenor/Marc Lawrence and the trustees after 2003 as carrying significant weight, especially when it is recalled that Marc Lawrence suffered from dementia for an unknown period prior to his death."
The court ruled the execution of Elizabeth's estate proceed on the basis that the two men were the same.
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