An actress who left her mother’s body to rot in her family home in order to claim her pension has been jailed for 11 months.
TV extra Hazel Maddock, 61, acknowledged leaving her 95-year old mother Olive’s body rotting at the family home in Wallasey, Merseyside for between two and six months.
While the body lay ‘wedged’ behind a bedroom door in the mouse and rat infested house, Maddock claimed £176.92 of her mother’s state pension and a £34.44 pension credit payment.
Maddock, who has appeared in Hollyoaks and Brookside, admitted unlawfully preventing the burial of her mother and fraudulently claiming benefits, reports the Independent.
A neighbour alerted police to the body last August, who then entered the house Olive shared with her daughter and granddaughter and discovered her rotting body wedged behind her bedroom door.
Judge Gerald Clifton, sentencing Maddock alongside her daughter Jasmine Maddock, 35, told her: “Honour thy father and thy mother, says the book of Exodus, and the act of burial is one of those forms of honour. When that act is not completed, with the intention of gaining money, then the crime is a particularly despicable one.”
Jasmine Maddock, who admitted leaving a corpse unburied, was given a 26 week suspended sentence and a 250 hour community service order.
Sentenced along with her mother at Liverpool Crown Court, Jasmine was told by Judge Clifton that leaving her grandmother’s body to rot at the house was a “gross effrontery to the behaviour of normal people”.
The judge, who acknowledged claims that artist Jasmine was “under the thumb” of her aggressive mother, said to Maddock: “You say that your difficult relationship with your mother prevented you from caring for her in her last days. I do not accept that. Your motivation for preventing the burial of your mother was venal.”
Maddock’s defence lawyer, Sarah Phelan, told the court: “Hazel Maddock was not using the money to buy lavish things, or fancy jewellery.
“The conditions in which she lived would be, to the normal citizen, uninhabitable. But she was thinking about preserving her existence and the one thing which she had always had...the family home.”
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