Hunt for friends of woman who faked her death

A woman who staged her death to claim a trust fund went on to live quietly under a false identity for more than 30 years.

Shelagh Warwick‑Illius disappeared in dramatic fashion in 1984, abandoning her car, passport and even her mother's ashes on a cross‑channel ferry, sparking an international police search.

She was presumed to have fallen overboard and declared dead the following year but the truth was far stranger. For decades, she had been living under the name Diana Stoney in the small Wiltshire village of Knook.

The story is explored in a new podcast, Women Overboard, and the author and journalist behind it, Katherine Sutherland, from Glasgow, is searching for people who knew her.

"The lady's whole life was quite a mystery. We don't know where she got the name Diana Stoney from," said Sutherland.

When Warwick-Illius' father died in 1941, he left her £11,000 in a trust fund, around £493,000 in today's money.

But the trust fund only paid out a small amount each month.

She asked for the full sum and was refused, as it would only pay out in full to her descendants in the event of her death.

She ran a hotel near Loch Ness with another woman, Veronica Brown, which went into financial difficulty, and it was then that she hatched a plan to get her hands on the whole trust fund.

"She drove a rented Ford Sierra onto a cross-channel ferry at Dover on 10 February 1984, left her vehicle with her passport and mother's ashes on the back seat, and then stepped off and disappeared," said Sutherland.

After an international police search, it was eventually decided she had fallen overboard, and the trust fund money went to Veronica in 1985 when she was declared dead.

Soon after, the pair resurfaced and rented a house in Knook, Wiltshire, living under assumed identities.

Neighbours were told stories, including that Veronica was Shelagh's aunt.

"She was quite eccentric, and had lots of old cars cluttering her garden," Sutherland said.

Wendy Arbery, her neighbour in Knook said she was "gobsmacked" to learn Stoney's identity when the BBC interviewed her.

"You wouldn't think it of a little old lady who pottered around in the garden," she said.

Veronica died in 2008, and "Diana" died in December 2016 with dementia in a nursing home in Inverness.

"I would love to hear from anyone in Knook who knew the ladies," said Sutherland.

The only woman who knew about the deception at the time was Pat Mackenzie, a friend of the pair.

Two years after moving to Wiltshire, the two women turned up on her doorstep.

"I wasn't angry, I was hurt that they hadn't let me in on it.

"I would have been honour-bound to inform the police that she'd turned up and then they would have got on to her for fraud," Mackenzie said.

Though Warwick-Illius did commit a crime, Sutherland believes it wasn't investigated as there were no apparent victims.

The deception was only discovered when Mackenzie and her daughter travelled to Wiltshire to help social workers make arrangements for "Diana".

"They're calling their friend Diana and the social workers looked at the paperwork in the house and realised something wasn't adding up, but "Diana" had dementia and they just decided to drop the matter," said Sutherland.

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