A businesswoman has been told she is facing jail after being found guilty of forging her lover's will after he committed suicide.
Victoria Kendrew could not bear the thought of ex policeman Peter Farquharson's entire £180,000 estate going to his estranged wife and devised a plot to seize it for herself.
She persuaded two of his old fishing chums to go along with her scheme and pretend they had acted as witnesses to the will while on a trip to Devon two months before Mr Farquharson died.
Kendrew was facing a race against time to challenge Mr Farquharson's will before his widow Jayne Humphries was granted probate.
She claimed to have found the will in a pocket of a fishing jacket and took it to her solicitor a few weeks before Miss Humphries was due to inherit the estate.
Kendrew had been living with Mr Farquharson for 15 months before he hanged himself at her home in Whimple in March 2008, aged 53.
He had left his wife for him after they had been together for 17 years and told friends he intended to make a will in favour of Kendrew but killed himself before he could do so.
Miss Humphries was due to gain probate in June 2009 but in May she received a letter from Kendrew's solicitors telling her that the new will had been found.
The document appeared to leave everything to Kendrew and when Miss Humphries queried its veracity the so-called witnesses were bullied into making false statements to support it.
Fellow plotters Kevin Dodd and Carl Jensen both signed legally binding documents claiming they had met Mr Farquharson on his fishing boat in Teignmouth in January 2008 and he asked them to witness the will.
Kendrew eventually inherited Mr Farquharson's home in Third Avenue, Teignmouth, his boat, car and other belongings with a total value of £180,000.
Miss Humphries remained suspicious. She is a serving police officer and her persistence led to a fresh inquiry which showed the signature had been forged.
The two witnesses were traced by police in Guildford, where they live and work, and both admitted they had signed a document provided by Kendrew after Mr Farquharson died.
They felt sorry for her because they believed Mr Farquharson had intended her to have his estate and they felt a debt of gratitude to her for letting them store a boat at her farmhouse home.
Kendrew, aged 43, of Lilypond Lane, Whimple, denied fraud and conspiracy to create a false document and to pervert the course of justice but was found guilty on all three counts.
Carl Jensen, aged 49, and Kevin Dodd, aged 57, both admitted the conspiracy charges in January and all three will be sentenced after probation reports are prepared.
Recorder Mr Robin Belben bailed Kendrew and told her:"These are serious offences. You should be under no illusion that a sentence of imprisonment is virtually a certainty in this case."
During the trial Dodd and Jensen told the jury how they were drafted into the plot by Kendrew, who told them she wanted to keep Mr Farquharson's estate out of the hands of Miss Humphries, who she considered 'a money-grabber'.
They had agreed to co-ordinate their stories at her behest but the whole plot unraveled when bank records showed they had used cashpoint machines in Surrey on the day they claimed to be in Teignmouth
She told the jury she did not know how a forged will had come to be in Mr Farquharson's old fishing jacket but insisted she had nothing to do with creating it.
Her barrister Mr Sean Brunton, compared her position to a character in a Hollywood film who is framed and wakes up to find themselves holding a smoking gun next to a dead body.
Kendrew is a former property developer who is now involved with a business making waterless urinals. She met Mr Farquaharson when he went to her farmhouse to help with renovations.
He was a decorated former police officer, originally from Scotland, who had suffered periods of depression. He had also lost his driving licence for drink driving two months before his suicide.
