Predatory Marriage – A Hidden Crime
- Daphne Franks
- Apr 9
- 6 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
This heartfelt opinion piece is written by a daughter still grappling with grief, injustice, and disbelief. It tells the extraordinary true story of how her much‑loved mother, living with advanced dementia and terminal illness, was secretly married to a stranger who exploited gaps in the law to take everything she had. Blending lived experience with quiet outrage, the author, Daphne Franks, reflects on professional failure, legal blind spots, and the devastating personal cost of predatory marriage. Above all, it is a loving tribute to a remarkable woman — and a powerful call to recognise and stop a hidden crime that continues to destroy families in silence.
Two days after my mother’s death, the phone rang. It was my mother’s GP. He sounded worried. “Daphne,” he said, “did you know your mother was married?”
My mother, Joan Blass, was a widow, and was almost 92 years old in March 2016. She had terminal cancer and a five-year history of worsening vascular dementia after several strokes, with the dementia mentioned repeatedly throughout her medical records. She could no longer name family members and often could barely speak. I had registered power of attorney. We lived next door – thirty yards from her house - and saw her several times a day. How could she possibly have had the mental capacity to get married? How could anyone have allowed it? Surely there must be some mistake?
There was, as it turned out, no mistake. A much-younger man (67 at the time of the marriage in October 2015) had walked past the garden gate and met my mother, four years earlier. Very quickly he moved into her house. She never knew his name, or even that he was living there. We were, of course, very suspicious of this random stranger who was extremely secretive about his background.
We had sought help from my mother’s GP, from social services, from the family solicitor, from the police. The man was charming to all of them. He explained that our family didn’t care about poor Joan. We hardly ever saw her, he said. He was the only one who cared. All authorities either concluded that there was no threat, or didn’t know what to do about it. The man was, clearly, far more believable than we were. “People will say that you just don’t like him,” was one comment. I felt totally crushed. “You don’t care about your Mum, and everyone knows it,” said the man - “When she dies you will cry crocodile tears.”
Nobody, at that time, had heard of predatory marriage. We learned much later that my mother had been unable to answer most of the questions at the wedding but the man explained that my mother was very old, very forgetful, very deaf, terminally ill, had had strokes. All true, but he never mentioned the dementia and indeed, so convincing was he that when I actually met the registrars who had conducted the wedding, one was quite adamant that “She didn’t have dementia. There was nothing wrong with her at all.”
If they had only thought to ask my mother a simple question like “What is the man’s name?”- but they didn’t. Even so, one registrar did wonder whether Mum was fit to marry - but hey!, Mum was smiling so the other registrar assumed she understood and just waved it all through.
Mum never knew she was married. She was still wearing the wedding ring that my Dad had given her when she died: the predator didn’t even give her a new one. He told nobody about the wedding until two days after her death when he turned up at her doctor’s surgery with a marriage certificate, demanding control of everything.
I don’t blame all the professions involved: they had not had sufficient training in either assessing mental capacity nor in dementia or understanding the aspects of “grooming”, “undue influence” and “coercive control. These were not well known terms at the time. I blame the predator.
Marriage revokes a will in England and Wales, and has done since the 1837 Wills Act, so my mother’s will from 2004 was completely gone! The man inherited her entire estate including everything in her house - my wedding dress, my Grandad’s letters from the trenches in the Great War. Nothing intrinsically valuable, except to us, and I’d guess it all went in a skip. He now had complete rights to her funeral and didn’t have any obligation to invite us, or to tell us when it was, so he didn’t, and we could not attend. Her grave is unmarked – he hasn’t put up a headstone and we are not allowed to, as he owns the grave plot.
The Crown Prosection Service determine that Forced Marriage is committed by causing someone who lacks the mental capacity to consent to marry - to get married (whether they are pressured to or not). (Anti-Social Crime and Policing Act, 2014 – punishable by up to seven years in prison.) The Police presented the case to the Crown Prosecution Service. However it failed due a lack of evidence. It was argued by the CPS that there was no evidence to indicate my mother lacked the mental capacity at the moment that she said “I do.” Guess what! - there was no evidence routinely kept at this marriage -no video recordings, no audio recordings. With no proof that my mother was not of sound mind to consent there could be no prosecution.
A big win for predatory marriage. Once you’ve got that marriage certificate, it’s all yours. Keep the marriage secret until the person dies and there is nothing at all that the family can do about it. Solicitors call this “The Predatory Marriage Trap”*.
We set up a website www.predatorymarriage.uk and heard from many other cases. We went to our MP, Fabian Hamilton where he he raised our case in Parliament, and heard about very, very many more similar cases. How many cases in total? Well, no evidence is kept at marriage, so no prosecutions, so no statistics. Hundreds of cases? Probably thousands.
The case we researched tend to follow a similar pattern. The predator (male or female) appears from nowhere, typically much younger than the victim. There will be a phase of “love-bombing” with presents, cards etc. The predator is initially over-friendly to the family. The plan is then to move in swiftly, convince everyone how wonderful you are and then gradually isolate the victim and start acting/speaking on their behalf. Remarks such as “Your Mum’s too tired to see you.” or “Unfortunately I have accidentally disconnected the phone.” Then take the victim away and marry them with just a couple of random people as witnesses.
In my mother’s case, the witnesses were the man’s son and a lady from the pub. The wedding was five months to the day before her death.
We have been campaigning against predatory marriage for ten years. If you’d like to know more, please "Google" Daphne Franks, Joan Blass or Predatory Marriage, as well as visiting our website.
Register offices are beginning to improve their procedures. The Law Commission has had a comprehensive review of the law on wills and has proposed to change the law so that marriage will no longer revoke a will, and so that undue influence will be easier to prove. They have prepared a Bill for Parliament* and the Government is due to report back on it in May 2026.
Every day I am grateful that my lovely mother knew nothing about all this. My mother was a warm, caring, kind, highly intelligent lady who had won a scholarship to university, was a superb swimmer, captain of the university hockey team, then worked as a journalist and then a teacher. I still feel that I have let down my equally lovely father, who died in 2008, by failing to protect my mother. Predatory marriage is still a hidden crime, and it must be stopped.
Occasional Contributor: Daphne Franks.
In 2025 Daphne Franks was awarded a Churchill Fellowship. This charity, set up in memory of Winston Churchill, funds research overseas with the aim of bringing about legislative improvements in the UK.
Daphne is currently researching marriage laws and procedures in the USA, Canada and the Netherlands.
*The Wills Bill: https://lawcom.gov.uk/project/wills/
Our website: www.predatorymarriage.uk
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