A ‘wicked and devious’ mother of two who falsely claimed she had terminal cancer to con her wealthy partner out of thousands of pounds to pay for a boob job and spa treatments has avoided jail.
Laura McPherson, 35, told company director Jon Leonard that she had cervical, ovarian, colon, bowel and breast cancer and even led her young daughter to believe she was dying.
Handing her a community order at Derby Crown Court on Wednesday, Judge Jonathan Straw said she had ‘embarked on an elaborate tale of deceit’ over five year.
‘You told those closest to you that you had been diagnosed with and were suffering from terminal forms of cancer,’ he told sobbing McPherson.
‘It is difficult to imagine how an individual could be so calculating and cruel to those that loved and cared for her.
‘It was a deliberate, narcissistic route to attention and money.’
The court heard she tricked Mr Leonard, who runs Ultra Events, a platform for charities, into giving her £24,248.52 for treatments he thought might save her life.
This included a trip to the Mayr Resort on Lake Worthersee in Austria where she enjoyed a holistic, weight loss programme, as well as breast augmentation treatment in Manchester.
In an emotional victim impact statement read to the court, Mr Leonard, 44, said she had stolen eight years of his life and left him with ‘feelings of total despair, wracked by self-doubt and emotionally scarred’.
She was, he said, a compulsive liar who had told friends and even her young daughter that she had cancer.
This involved him taking calls from McPherson’s daughter’s school, because she had broken down worrying her mother was going to die.
‘Even after pleading guilty, she has spent the last three years spreading disgusting lies about me,’ he said, ‘And she has never shown any remorse.’
He said he had been ‘gaslighted’ and described being woken up by her screaming at him for sleeping through when she had been up all night being sick.
At one point he bought her a £30,000 Rolex that she wanted, reasoning that it was wrong to deny it to someone whose life would soon end.
At one point he got in touch with one of Britain’s leading private cancer specialists and arranged an appointment for her but she insisted she would rather stick with her NHS treatment.
He said it even caused him to fall out with his oldest friend who had become deputy head of nursing at a hospital in Swansea.
He told Mr Leonard aspects of McPherson’s treatment did not add up and that you, ‘wouldn’t be going straight to the gym after having chemotherapy’.
‘I was prepared to fall out with my friend,’ he said, ‘I was left completely isolated.’
At the time of her lies, McPherson was working as a marketing director for her boyfriend’s company, Ultra Events, which has helped raise over £39 million for charitable causes.
The court heard McPherson would use her cancer as an excuse to dip out of meetings and even counselled other staff members whose family members had been diagnosed with cancer.
On one occasion she exploded with anger when a member of staff said her father had opted to die with the disease rather than take a course of chemotherapy.
Prosecutor Siward James-Moore said the couple had met in 2011 and that she was very well provided for by her partner whose business was doing well.
In March 2017 she first announced she had cervical cancer and was receiving treatment at the Royal Derby Hospital.
At the time, said Mr James-Moore, she asked her partner if he had medical insurance.
Despite his offers to accompany her to her various appointments, she always insisted on going alone.
‘Between 2018 and 2022 she variously said she had ovarian, colon, bowel and breast cancer,’ said Mr James-Moore.
‘She claimed to have travelled for treatment to the Mayr Clinic in Austria (at Mr Leonard’s expense).’
In 2020 she claimed to have had a hysterectomy.
‘Strangely she was pictured up a mountain two days later,’ said the prosecutor.
The same year she said that she would need a mastectomy but used the opportunity to have breast augmentation surgery in Manchester at Mr Leonard’s expense.
On New Year’s Eve 2021, Mr Leonard dropped her off for treatment to her cervix.
When he asked for a selfie, she told him that she was on a drip and her phone had broken.
In fact, she had taken a taxi to Coventry to celebrate the New Year.
When arrested and questioned over the allegation of fraud in 2022, she denied it and accused her boyfriend of being controlling.
In mitigation, her barrister Laura Pitman, said that she suffered from, ‘depression, anxiety and symptoms of trauma’.
She said she was now supported by her parents and a new partner Alex and had a baby last March.
She called on the judge to spare her jail and instead give her intensive intervention from the probation service to find out why she’d acted as she had.
Ms Pitman said her client has no previous convictions of any kind and ‘accepts her behaviour spans a number of years’ and that she has suffered from anxiety and depression. She said: ‘One perhaps wonders why a young woman behaved in the way that she has.
‘She feels awful for the way she behaved. She has sought outside support to look at her behaviour. There has been no further offending by her. There’s a more constructive way Laura McPherson can be dealt with rather than custody.’
She was handed a community order and will be subject to a 7pm to 6am curfew for five nights of the week after pleading guilty to fraud at an earlier hearing.
The judge also ordered her to spend 30 days with the probation service and warned her that if she broke either then he would send her immediately to prison.
A further hearing date of June 6 was set for a proceeds of crime hearing.