Kenneth Glad
A woman’s death at a Danish holiday home was initially treated as an accident. Nine years later, a British coroner has concluded that her husband killed her.
Paula Leeson, a 47-year-old British woman who stood to inherit her family’s successful skip and plant hire business in Greater Manchester, drowned in the swimming pool of a holiday home near Houstrup, Denmark, on 6 June 2017. Danish authorities initially investigated her death as suspicious but ultimately concluded that it was an accident.
Years of legal proceedings later produced a very different finding. A British coroner has now concluded that Leeson’s husband, Donald McPherson, a British man who was later charged with her murder, compressed her neck until she lost consciousness before she entered the pool and drowned, according to the BBC and TV 2.
McPherson has denied murdering his wife. Greater Manchester Police began a new investigation into Leeson’s death in 2018.
Investigators also examined insurance arrangements made before she died. TV 2 reports that McPherson had taken out 14 life insurance policies providing a combined GBP 3.5 million in coverage, along with three travel policies.
The coroner also heard that McPherson was heavily in debt and stood to benefit financially from his wife’s death.
The courts reached different conclusions
McPherson was charged with murder in 2020 after British investigators reopened the case, but the criminal prosecution ended the following year. During the 2021 trial, the judge ruled that there was no case to answer and directed the jury to acquit him, meaning the murder charge did not proceed to a full jury decision on guilt.
Leeson’s family later pursued McPherson through the civil courts, where a different legal standard applied. A criminal conviction requires guilt to be proved beyond reasonable doubt, while the High Court was asked to determine the case on the balance of probabilities, meaning whether it was more likely than not that McPherson had unlawfully killed Leeson.
The family’s civil case produced a different result. On 6 September 2024, the High Court found that McPherson had unlawfully killed Leeson and ruled that he was not entitled to inherit from her estate.
The judgment also found that financial gain provided a motive and examined evidence concerning McPherson’s conduct before and after Leeson’s death. It addressed material suggesting that he had concealed or deleted information connected with the circumstances surrounding the case.
Early police work questioned
The latest finding has brought renewed attention to the way the original Danish investigation was handled. Leeson’s relatives have criticised how the holiday home was secured after her death and the decision not to seize phones and computers belonging to the couple, TV 2 writes.
South and Southern Jutland Police has said officers initially treated the death as suspicious. The investigation was later closed after the medical examination and autopsy pointed to an accident, but the force has since acknowledged that more details could probably have been checked at the time.
The family’s criticism has focused on whether potentially useful evidence was lost during those early stages. Danish police have also said that national procedures for investigating possible homicides have since been strengthened.
Former Copenhagen homicide chief Jens Møller has taken a more cautious view of the original police response. He told the Danish broadcaster that investigators would have had limited grounds to pursue a murder case if neither the scene nor the first medical findings suggested that a crime had taken place.
Sources: TV 2, BBC
