Jessica ThomasTwo sisters whose mother went from being their best friend to stealing their £50,000 inheritance say they have been left feeling anxious and unable to trust anyone.
Katherine Hill, 53, from Alltwen in Pontardawe, Neath Port Talbot, and her 93-year-old father Gerald Hill from Fairwood in Swansea were found guilty of fraud by abuse of power after a trial last year.
They were sentenced to 30 months in prison and a 12-month sentence, suspended for 18 months, respectively. On Monday, Hill was ordered to repay the money, which was left to her daughters Gemma and Jessica Thomas by their grandmother Margaret Hill.
“I’ll never have a relationship with my mother now,” said Jessica.
Swansea Crown Court previously heard, due to inflation, the sum stolen by the “greedy and spiteful” Hills was now worth about £65,000.
Katherine Hill put the money in an instant access Barclays Everyday Saver account, despite being advised not to, and both she and her dad had cards to access it – draining the contents within a year.
Between March 2016 and March 2017, the account where the money was held was emptied in 10 withdrawals, with £35,000 withdrawn in three transactions alone, the court heard.
Gemma and Jessica grew up in Neath Port Talbot with their parents, and said Hill was a “good mother”.
“She was like my best friend”, said Gemma, now 26, adding “no-one saw this coming”.
She said Hill did not have a good relationship with her own mother Margaret Hill – who split from her father when Hill was a teenager – though the girls did not know why.
Family photoMargaret Hill died in 2014, while [Katherine] Hill was divorcing the girls’ father, Chris Thomas.
At the time Jessica was just 12 and not told about the inheritance, but Gemma, who was 15 “understood a little bit more”.
The £50,000 was placed in a trust fund with their mother as a trustee – to be accessed when they were 25.
Following the divorce, the girls stayed living with their mother for about six months, but say she would often leave them alone for long periods of time while she visited her new boyfriend.
“It would start where she was going on dates and stuff. And I think I was at that perfect age of ‘my mother’s going out for the night, I can have friends over’, and I was kind of loving it for a while,” said Gemma.
“But it got to the point where it was happening every weekend and people expected that I wasn’t going to have a parent at home, and I would be like, ‘please will you stay home this one time?’.”
Mr Thomas decided his daughters would be better living with him, so the girls moved out of their family home and with him, while Hill moved in with her current partner, Phillip Lloyd.
Family photoThe sisters said their mum would sometimes take them out on a weekend, to a pub or McDonalds, but the conversation would often centre around their father and her upset that they left.
“I think she just could never get over the fact that we were choosing to live with him over her,” said Gemma.
Jessica said it was “clear from then that we weren’t really a very important thing to her”.
“I remember when she came to see me on my 13th birthday, and took me out for the day, saying she had to leave early because she was going out with [her boyfriend] and his family.
“It wasn’t like she’d spend a lot of money on us… not 50 grand’s worth, anyway.”
Jessica ThomasThey said, looking back, there were signs of extravagance from Hill and her partner, such as building a back garden pub and hot tub, and going on holidays.
But nothing set off alarm bells, as Hill had also received her own money from her late mother.
Now, the girls said, they know it was really them paying for their mum’s lifestyle.
It was when Gemma phoned her mum to ask about accessing the money early, as she planned to buy their childhood home from their dad, that the claims the inheritance never existed began.
She said her mum told her “the money’s not yours” and blocked her number, before later claiming in court it had been posted through the girls’ letterboxes.
Jessica, who is now a nurse, recalled the shock of discovering the money existed, and then immediately that it was gone.
“How can you grieve something you never had? But [also] she’s robbed me of an opportunity not a lot of people get.”
She and her boyfriend currently live with his parents, and she said saving up to move out without her inheritance would take a very long time.
Gemma said she was angry, adding she found it frustrating the more time went on and the more Hill lied.
She said the initial confusion and hurt was hard, given their happy memories of their mum, and the woman she saw in court did not seem like the same person.
“I’d sit there and be like, ‘What if we’re all wrong? What if she hasn’t done it?’
“But I have to accept that she has.”
Gemma said giving evidence in court was stressful, but the relief came more from feeling validated, than from money or the sentences.
“When it actually was the case that she was being sent down… it was like we were being told that we’re not crazy,” she said.
The girls said they saw people on social media claiming they were in prison with their mum and she “was still saying that she was innocent”.
“And people would believe in her… that’s the most shocking thing to me,” said Jessica.
“Even though the relationship had started to break down before this, it could have possibly been fixed, whereas we’re at that point now that we’ll never go back to how we used to be.”
She added their mum had “showed no remorse for anything she did”.
“She would look at me while we were standing up giving evidence, and she was shaking her head as if I was the one telling lies,” she said.
“It’s like she’ll never take responsibility for what she’s done.”
Family photoJessica said she had been going to counselling for many years, to address “massive issues with trust”, while Gemma said she became “very needy in friendships”.
“[I thought] ‘if my mother doesn’t love me, who the hell is going to love me?'”
Now a mother herself to a two-month-old boy, she said she saw the betrayal on a new level.
“I came home [after court] on Monday and I was feeding my son. I was looking at him, and I was like, I could not go 10 days, not even 10 hours really, without knowing how he was or what was going on in his life. Never mind the past 10 years.
“It doesn’t make any sense, she’s missing out on all of that.”
Jessica was still living and working in the same area as her mum brought her anxiety and she lived with a tic, which a doctor told her had been triggered by trauma.
“The whole thing has just had a massive effect on me, mentally and physically.”
She added she did not know how they would have coped without each other, or their father, who supported them emotionally and financially through the long legal process.
Now, with the result they wanted, they hope they will eventually see the money and “let go of this part of our lives”.
They say they want to forget their mother, and the end of court proceedings has brought a kind of closure, allowing them to “finally breathe”.
