Wilkinson/Osborne Heir Hunters

Today, local knowledge pays off

on the hunt for heirs to a £500,000 estate...

I know back routes to get to places.

That can be good in getting to an heir ahead of the competition.

..and past scandals are uncovered.

She didn't realise that the child that she was bringing up

was actually her husband's love child.

On another case, surnames are a struggle.

It's an Osborne tree, so it's already horrendous.

But the search leads to a notorious criminal.

He eventually became probably one of the most famous criminals of his generation.

It's all in a day's work for the heir hunters.

In Cheshire, heir hunter Saul is on his way to visit a relative

on a case he's working, and he's got surprising news for her.

So I'm going to show her the tree and explain the exact relationships.

For Saul, this is just the latest stage in a case that has tested him to the limit.

She's going to be in for a little bit of a shock.

We trace the next of kin of people who have died intestate.

Saul works for Celtic Research,

a firm with individual case managers based around the UK.

Saul runs the north-west office and recently, he found himself

competing against some of the UK's largest firms in the race to crack

the valuable case of Charles Wilkinson.

The case of Charles Wilkinson was released at the end of a Friday

afternoon by the Treasury Solicitor's Department.

He actually owned his property,

and the fact he owned his property meant there was going to be a lot of

heavy competition on this case from other companies.

And I really thought, "This is going to be vital,"

time was of the essence, "Let's get it on."

Charles Wilkinson passed away on the 1st of April 2014

in Tarporley in Cheshire, aged 78.

Although there are no known photographs of Charles,

his neighbour Bill, who knew him as Charlie,

remembers he looked rather distinctive.

He was often seen in his boiler suit.

His hair was always sort of slicked back, boiler suit.

And I think, when he wasn't wearing a boiler suit,

he wore dark blue clothes, so it looked like his boiler suit.

Although they were neighbours for many years,

Bill recalls that Charles always kept himself to himself.

And he was always just a friendly sort of guy who you said hello to,

but he wasn't one to hold a conversation.

He just said hello, was pleasant, and that was it.

However, Charles did have one rather unusual companion.

He had a little car.

I guess it was something like an Austin 7 from the 1930s,

and he kept it in a shed, or a small garage at the bottom of his garden,

and he had a wide path to the garage.

And he would...

He would back the car out, and you'd see it parked on the drive,

all gleaming - and he'd obviously cleaned it and polished it -

and then he'd put it back in the garage. It never went on the road.

Having owned his own home,

Charles had left behind an estate estimated to be worth £500,000,

and Saul needed to get a head start on the competition if he was going

to stand any chance of beating his rivals.

The first thing I had to do with this case was establish whether the

deceased had married and had children.

I did have a look, and there didn't seem to be any obvious marriage

listings that would appear to apply to him,

and not really any children either.

Saul's next port of call was to find out if Charles had any brothers or

sisters, as siblings would be the first in line to inherit.

I discovered that the deceased had a brother named Joseph Wilkinson,

and their parents were Joseph Wilkinson, again, and Sarah Dodd.

Wilkinson and Dodd are very common names,

especially Cheshire and North Wales.

Saul was quickly able to rule out children from Joseph.

Thanks very much. Bye.

PHONE CHIMES

Desperate to get ahead of the competition and crack this high-value case,

Saul gave up his entire weekend to painstakingly build a family tree

showing Charles's aunts and uncles.

Now, the deceased's father was one of 11 children,

and his mother was one of eight children.

So these were incredibly big families, potentially.

And I knew that, come Monday morning,

when the competition were going to be getting involved full swing

on a high-value case,

we were going to have potentially lots and lots of cousins.

It was going to be an incredibly busy week.

I'm going to have to re-research this, just to check it.

But as he compared the names on the paternal side of Charles's family

with those on the maternal side,

he was about to make a surprising discovery.

Now, I noticed that Charles's father, Joseph,

had a sister named Maggie Wilkinson,

and she'd married a gentleman called Charles Dodd.

Now, Dodd was the deceased's mother's maiden name.

So I wondered whether Charles Dodd and Sarah Ellen Dodd were brother and sister.

Although rare nowadays, in times gone by,

sets of brothers and sisters from one family marrying sets of brothers

and sisters from another family was common in rural communities.

So I checked it, and there they are on the Dodd family tree.

And they were brother and sister.

So you had a sister and a brother who married a brother and a sister.

It's a discovery that had a huge bearing on Saul's search.

So they inherit twice over, so they actually get twice as much money as they would have done

had their parents only been related once over.

Saul decided to focus on finding descendants of Charles's Aunt Maggie,

who would be in line to inherit twice.

But it was a monumental challenge.

Maggie and Charles had 11 children.

OK, two of them died in infancy, but there were another whole set of

branches here which I had to go through all over again.

If they'd have had one child, that would have been wonderful.

But, no, they had 11, and there were all sorts of grandchildren

and even great-grandchildren of that marriage

who I had to go out and find.

The workload was spiralling out of control.

With other firms up and down the country nipping at his heels,

Saul drafted in his colleagues to help research Charles's ten other

paternal aunts and uncles.

Hi, this is Hector Birchwood, I'm returning your call.

Having quickly ruled out five who had no children,

and with Saul already making progress with the Maggie Wilkinson stem,

they had four further aunts and uncles to research.

The deceased's last uncle on this side was Alfred Wilkinson,

and I found out he moved from Picton,

which is just south of Chester, over to the Wirral,

which is north of Chester.

Which made sense, cos his occupation was a railway platelayer.

With the offer of higher wages and privileged travel for workers and their families,

many farm labourers like Alfred decided to leave the land

and take up work as railway platelayers, maintaining the tracks.

You'd have to be a manual worker and someone that was quite tough.

It was not a glamorous job.

It was very hard. Long hours.

They would sometimes be up at the crack of dawn

and work until nightfall,

so you could talk about nine or ten hours.

And it's hard graft work, manual work,

with wheelbarrows and picks and shovels.

By the 1930s, there were around 30,000 platelayers in Britain,

but it was one of the most dangerous professions in the industry.

There were all sorts of accidents to their hands and legs, limbs.

With using a shovel and a pickaxe,

they could easily damage their legs and their arms.

In tunnels, that was another problem.

When the train went into a tunnel, they had recesses so that they could

take refuge from the trains that were going along.

And with the smoke from the steam trains, steam engines,

then the smoke, the fumes and steam and so on would linger a long time

in the tunnels, and so they had to breathe in this

smoky air because there was no health and safety masks in those days.

Perhaps they put a scarf across their face.

The hours were long and the risks high,

and many workers met an untimely death.

However, it seems Alfred survived his time working on the railways.

Saul discovered he had married and had two sons,

one of whom appeared to have had children of his own.

These children would be heirs

and Saul needed to track them down.

But with difficult surnames and potential beneficiaries related twice over,

Saul's search for paternal heirs was turning into a mighty challenge.

It was so intense,

but that's what you have to do in the face of strong competition.

Saul decided he would head to the area where the family were based,

so he could be ready to visit the heirs as soon as he found them.

And he had an advantage.

Working a case in an area that I know well,

I know where the roads are and I know back routes to get to places.

So if the traffic's all blocked up on this road,

I know I can go down another road to get there.

So that can be good in getting to an heir ahead of the competition.

Saul's research was about to uncover a family past steeped in scandal.

The child she was bringing up was actually her husband's love child.

And with a £500,000 estate at stake,

the competition was about to get fierce.

These are my streets, they're going to be MY heirs.

If you could both have a look at those stems,

and I'll carry on with some on the other side.

When the heir hunters take on a case,

they never know what they're going to come across in the family tree.

You might come across somebody famous,

or even somebody infamous on a family tree.

It might be a living heir or it might be somebody perhaps a few

generations back, but there's always something quite interesting when it happens.

And when they took on a case of Maud Osborne, their research led them to

one of the most audacious and famous crimes of the 20th century.

He didn't mess about and he was a big guy.

He knew how to frighten people and part of it was intimidation.

That's how they got their money.

Maud Helen Osborne died at the age of 87 in January 2016

at a nursing home just a few miles from where she'd been born

in Canning Town, London.

As a lifelong East-Ender,

Maud would have seen huge changes in the Newham area.

It's changed a lot in that time.

It's getting very... What's the word for it?

Poshified? It was very shabby.

It's much nicer-looking now.

Since the Olympics, it's great.

I think the East End is the new West End.

-Wow.

-No dates, no area.

When she passed away,

retired civil servant Maud had no known family members.

As she'd made no will, the council referred her estate

to probate research firm Finders International,

and it was picked up by case manager Amy Moyes.

They gave us certain details from the beginning.

They confirmed Maud's date of birth as the 2nd of December 1928,

and they mentioned that she had a probable brother by the name of Colin.

The council were also quite certain that Maud had never married or had

any children, but, of course, as part of our initial research,

we would have to...

have to have ruled this out to be absolutely sure.

All right, thank you. Bye-bye.

Although the case was worth £25,000, taking it on was still a gamble.

If you imagine a case where we have a very large family tree with...

tens of beneficiaries involved,

then with the amount of certificates we need to spend money on,

we'll end up struggling to break even on an estate of this size.

You can look into him and then, Holly,

there's another stem that's really inconsistent.

Deciding to take the plunge, Amy started with the basics.

Maud had never been married.

We also did a search of the birth indexes to look for any potentially

illegitimate children she may have had. That also came up blank.

So, at that stage, we knew it was important to look for this potential brother.

To find Maud's brother,

Amy first found her parents on her birth certificate.

We knew that her mother's maiden name was Sales.

So we looked through the marriage indexes

for an Osborne/Sales marriage

and we found a record that matched,

and that was for a Charles Osborne to a Maud Elizabeth Sales.

There are five stems to look into.

Having been given a tip-off from the council that Maud's brother was

called Colin, Amy was hopeful for a quick result.

The only correct record we could find was for a John Osborne.

The John they'd found had died as a bachelor

and there was no sign of a brother called Colin.

At this stage, we had no way of knowing through research

whether or not John and Colin were one and the same,

or whether we still had a sibling named Colin to find.

So we were left with no choice but to look at the maternal

and paternal family trees.

We could end up in a situation where we do

large amounts of research into the maternal and paternal families,

only to find that we wasted our time -

to be told that Colin is in fact

another sibling and he may well still be living,

which means a lot of time wasted.

With the possibility a brother called Colin may still be found,

any research the team did into the wider family would be a gamble.

But they had no choice but to take that chance.

Starting with the easier surname on the maternal side,

Amy looked into Maud's mum, who was also called Maud.

And Amy discovered she was the daughter of Joseph William Sales

and Lucy Packard.

The maternal grandparents were married in 1907,

so we used a combination of checking the birth indexes,

as well as checking the 1911 census record

to establish how many siblings there were to Maud's mother,

Maud Elizabeth.

Overall, we established that there were seven maternal stems.

With seven potentially complicated stems to research,

Amy would have her work cut out to successfully uncover any beneficiaries.

Could you have a quick check as well for post-1911 for me,

so we know exactly what we're looking at?

But five's not too bad.

-Yeah, that's fine.

-Thank you.

Undeterred, she continued to look into Maud's aunts and uncles,

and quickly ruled out two who had died in infancy.

Albert Edward and Lucy May.

Now, although they survived infancy,

they both passed away without having any children,

so no living heirs for us.

At this point, we've dealt with over half of the maternal family tree,

and we haven't found any living descendants.

So we were starting to wonder whether we were going to locate

anybody at all on this side of the family.

Can I get you to take a look at a couple of stems for me?

When a parent of the deceased is one of several children -

so, for instance, they have maybe seven or eight siblings of their own -

you can begin by being quite sure of yourself that you're going to find heirs.

But there are occasions when you're completely surprised,

and maybe four or five of those siblings either die in infancy,

or they pass away without having married or had children.

And so you're suddenly faced with a situation where you might have worked

an entire family tree that has the potential to be the rather large,

and you could find one, two or maybe, on occasion, no heirs at all.

-This address here.

-Yeah, OK.

But, fortunately, Amy's luck was turning.

We then focused on a maternal uncle, Joseph William...

..and we found a marriage for him.

He married an Edith Caroline Bagnall in 1938, and he did have children.

We were able to identify five living heirs on this stem.

We then looked at Arthur William Sales.

He married as well and had two children,

both of whom are still alive, and they are potential heirs.

The final stem to look at was that of Rosetta Jane Sales.

She married an Alfred Oxley and had three children herself.

Forest... Do you have the file?

After a tricky start,

Amy had now broken the back of the maternal side.

But they still had the paternal Osborne side to crack.

It's not uncommon for research to be really simple,

really straightforward and really rather fast on one side

of the family,

usually because the surname is really good to work with,

and then the other side might be a Smith or an Osborne or a Johnson,

and you know it's going to be a nightmare.

And the Osborne side of the family lived up to expectations.

Holly, James, can I get you to have a look,

a double-check at some bits and pieces?

It's an Osborne tree, so it's already horrendous.

And as she battles inconsistency...

He changes his name all over the place, reverses it.

..after inconsistency...

Her mother's maiden name is completely different.

..Amy uncovers family members caught up in one of the most

infamous crimes of the last century.

Also a reputation for being pretty violent.

You know, when occasion called for it.

Heir hunters trace thousands of rightful beneficiaries every year.

I think the most satisfying bit about my job

is putting people in touch with the rest of their family.

But not all cases can be cracked and many remain unsolved.

Today, we're focusing on two Scottish cases that have been

advertised by the Queen and Lord Treasurer's Remembrancer.

The first is Vincent Tinney,

who died on the 19th of January 2015 in Greenock, aged 72.

Vincent was born in Ireland on the 22nd of October 1942,

but at some point moved to Greenock.

Vincent's estate is thought to be worth over £20,000.

Did you know Vincent?

Could you be the person the heir hunters are looking for?

The next case is Mary McIntyre, who died on the 18th of September 2007,

aged 99 at her home in Glasgow.

McIntyre is believed to be Mary's married name,

as she was born Mary Murray in Clydebank on the 11th of July 1908.

Mary's estate is worth just over £9,500.

Could you be entitled to a share of that estate?

Could the heir hunters be looking for you?

What we'd like to do is send you a form...

to allow us to put your claim forward to the estate.

Case manager Saul Marks, from Celtic Research,

has been frantically trying to find beneficiaries to the

£500,000 estate of Charles Wilkinson,

whilst fending off stiff competition from larger firms.

It was a high-value case.

The deceased lived in a village called Kelsall,

which is really beautiful, and I know from local knowledge,

property around there is going to go for quite a lot of money.

So we knew it was high-value and we knew, obviously,

there'd be competition attached to that.

The search had led Saul to Charles' cousins and their descendants...

but with a total of 18 aunts and uncles to research,

Saul had his work cut out.

When you're working a large family, you have to prioritise, really,

which branches you're going to work on first.

And you have to look at it and say,

"Well, some branches have very few heirs on,

"maybe only one heir on that particular branch."

In that case,

that person's signature is going to be much more valuable to us,

because that person is going to be inheriting a lot more money.

Right, OK...

Under pressure to beat his rivals, Saul had to make

calculated decisions in his research and had focused on the descendants

of Charles' Aunt Maggie.

She was the sister of Charles' dad,

but was also married to the brother of Charles' mum.

This meant any children they had would be related on both the maternal and paternal side,

and would therefore inherit twice.

He had already established that out of Maggie's 11 children,

seven had children of their own, and as Charles' cousins once removed,

they would be heirs.

Charles and Maggie had two sets of twins.

One of the twins was a lady named Winifred,

who married Arthur Cram.

And they had one child,

a daughter named Beryl.

After days of nonstop research, was Saul finally closing in

on an heir or had the competition pipped him to the post?

I managed to find that Beryl actually also lived just outside

the village where I grew up,

so I got in the car and I dashed down to see her,

to hopefully sign her up.

When he knocked on the door, I was quite shocked, really.

Because, you know, nothing ever happens to people like us.

Beryl is Charles' first cousin once removed

through her grandfather, Charles Dodd, on the maternal side,

and on the paternal side, through her grandmother, Maggie.

This is the picture of my nan, Maggie, and this is my cousin, Joan,

who unfortunately has passed away.

And this one is my mum, Maggie's daughter, on our wedding day.

But despite being close to her nan,

there was never any mention of her distant cousin Charles.

It's a shame to think he's died on his own,

because obviously I don't think he knew any of us.

Having found Beryl, Saul's work was far from over.

He still had a number of potential heirs from Charles' Aunt Maggie to track down.

But he ran into a problem.

I met quite a few of the heirs on this branch,

and several people mentioned an Aunt Emily,

who I didn't seem to have on my tree and I couldn't understand why she wasn't on the tree.

Saul went back to his tree to see if he'd missed something,

but nothing was immediately jumping out.

Hi, my name's Saul Marks.

But as he chatted to more potential beneficiaries,

he made a shocking discovery of a hidden family scandal.

Emily was in fact Maggie's illegitimate daughter,

who was the product of a brief affair she'd had with her brother-in-law, John Jones.

Maggie had a daughter, Emily,

with her sister Annie's husband, John Jones.

She then went on to marry Charles Dodd and have a further 11 children.

It was really bizarre with this,

because Emily was known as a Dodd but she was born as a Wilkinson.

And on the census, she was a Jones.

And all these names get jumbled in together,

and it's amazing to actually think that in the midst of all this,

we can work out who people were and which branches they go into.

Having spent the first day signing up paternal Wilkinson heirs,

Saul had no time to lose in finalising his research and

finding heirs on the maternal side, before his rivals got to them first.

He quickly established that Charles' maternal grandparents,

Charles Dodd and Sarah Ackerley, had eight children,

including Charles' mother, Sarah.

Again, a massive family, there are eight branches here to work through.

Saul spent the entire second day contacting cousins on the maternal side,

but he was greeted with bad news.

Unfortunately, what I found as I was contacting some of these people

was that they'd already been found by our competitors, the other firms.

After days of hard work, it was the last thing Saul wanted to hear.

So what I ended up with at the end of the day

was a really nice-looking family tree with lots of heirs on it,

none of whom we'd signed.

It was exactly the news Saul had been dreading.

But faced with tough competition and a huge family,

the case turned out well for Saul,

and he managed to sign 12 of Charles' 71 heirs -

all of whom will share his estate.

It's been a big family to research and it's always nice to end up with

some nice-looking family trees at the end, and I'm pretty happy with the whole thing.

Today, Saul is paying heir Beryl a visit.

DOORBELL CHIMES

-Hi.

-Hello, Saul, come in.

-Thank you.

Come on in, Saul.

Thank you. Oh, you've had it done up in here.

Armed with the completed family trees,

he's keen to help fill in some of the blanks about her family history.

Right, I have...

a very large tree to show you here.

So that's how they're connected.

So Charles was first cousin of your late mum.

But it's not just the family tree that Saul is keen to share with Beryl.

You see here, all your mum's brothers and sisters?

-Yeah.

-There's an extra one at the top there, Emily Wilkinson.

-Right.

-Now, she was your nan's illegitimate child.

So, I think what's happened is Maggie's got pregnant,

Annie has taken Maggie's child in to bring her up,

because she's got a family of her own, but she hasn't realised...

Annie, I don't think, ever realised her sister's child was actually...

The biological father of the child was her own husband.

Oh, she didn't have a clue?

I don't think so, because they went on and had two more children afterwards.

She may have done, but it's my personal theory

that she didn't realise that the child that

-she was bringing up was actually her husband's love child.

-Oh.

-That's a shock.

-It is.

I don't know, words fail me.

Really, really shocked.

-VOICEOVER:

-It was nice to see Beryl again.

It was particularly nice to show her the finished product.

When I first came to see her, it was half worked,

in the process of being researched, it wasn't the finished product.

What I was able to do tonight is come along and show her and say,

"This is your family."

If I can get you on the road as soon as possible...

In London, heir hunters Finders International had made headway

tracing cousins of Maud Osborne...

It's an Osborne tree, so it's already horrendous.

..but were struggling to trace a potential brother, Colin,

who they'd been told about by the council.

At this point, as we had no way of knowing whether or not Colin was

in fact another brother,

we had no option but to look at the maternal and paternal trees.

Having identified maternal heirs to Maud's estate, Amy had started to

work the more difficult paternal surname of Osborne,

and she went to a specific resource to find Maud's father,

Charles Osborne.

I went back to the 1911 census,

because I knew that Charles should feature on there,

having been born in 1908.

I came across a positive match, and I could then see that...

Charles was on the 1911 census with his father, John,

and it names his mother as Emma.

Having Maud's paternal grandparents' names meant Amy could now

do a search for all of their children,

cross checking for any variations to the surname.

Osborne can be spelt with or without an E,

it can also be spelt with or without a U,

and all of these variations were found whilst researching this particular family tree.

But her hard work paid off.

All in all, we then had nine children to John and Emma.

With eight aunts and uncles to now descend, Amy quickly discovered

a difficult surname was the least of her worries.

That really is strange. I'm not convinced that these are correct.

It's random.

-That's random as well.

-Yeah.

This first marriage says his dad's a George... That's weird.

With all hands on deck,

Amy finally ruled out an Aunt May who had died in infancy,

and she had leads on three other stems.

Helen Catherine Osborne married a Robert Ladlow

and had three children.

Uncle Alfred Daniel Osborne had two children,

and Arthur Robert Osborne married a Lillian Elvin

and they had three children themselves.

Amy was on a roll...

until she hit a snag with Maud's uncle, John Osborne.

Paternal uncle here, John George Charles.

He'd married three times and each time had used a different variation of his name.

It meant the research was painstakingly slow.

Across all of those three marriages, we just have one child

having been born to John from his second marriage,

a child named Helen Irene.

Unfortunately, she passed away in infancy.

So, after all of that time-consuming research,

we were left with a stem that dies out completely,

with no potential for any living heirs.

But another uncle proved more promising.

Paternal uncle, William Michael Osborne,

married a Mary Ann Farrell in 1933,

and together they had two children.

When we were researching those children,

we came across some particularly interesting information

with reference to the eldest daughter, Patricia.

We located a marriage for her to a Charles Wilson,

and when we looked into that marriage and their history together,

we identified that Charles was in fact Charlie Wilson of the Great Train Robbery.

Charlie Wilson, an extraordinary guy, really.

Greengrocer's son, very humble beginnings, lived in Battersea,

his parents had a greengrocer's in Penge, apparently.

That was his destiny, really.

But, in fact, he went in a completely different direction

and became an extraordinary criminal,

probably one of the most famous criminals of his generation.

After previous brushes with the law,

it was in August 1963 that Charlie Wilson's criminal career peaked.

He and his gang were tipped off about an overnight mail train

from Glasgow to Euston, carrying bags of used banknotes.

And, you know, it was a gift really.

There were no guards on the train, no communication on the train,

it was completely kind of isolated in a way.

In the middle of the night, no mobile phones or anything like that,

so it was really easy pickings in a way.

The thing was kind of just travelling down through dark, deserted countryside.

All they had to do was stop it.

The wheels were set in motion.

They rented a farmhouse nearby as their hideout and ambushed the train.

Wilson was one of the first guys into the high-value package cage,

where this money was kept.

They were wielding iron bars, they were yelling at these guys,

they had stocking masks on, one guy had an axe in his hand.

I mean, it was absolutely terrifying,

and these were big guys and they didn't mess about.

They basically quashed and herded all these workmen, poor workmen,

down to the other end of the carriage,

then unloaded 100-odd mailbags.

And, yeah, within 45 minutes,

they'd actually emptied the thing and they were on

their way back to their hideout.

Having stolen £2.6 million, around £40 million in today's money,

the crime was soon front-page news.

Despite going their separate ways,

Charlie and his cronies were quickly under suspicion.

When they left this farmhouse,

which they did in a hurry because the police were searching the

countryside, they left a lot of evidence behind them,

including fingerprints.

In April 1964,

Charlie Wilson and six others were jailed for 30 years each.

He was facing spending most of the rest of his adult life,

and certainly his children's childhood, behind bars.

So he obviously had a long time to think about that.

But four months into his sentence, Wilson disappeared from his cell.

There hasn't really been a convincing account of exactly what happened to Charlie Wilson

once he went over the wall of the Winston Green prison.

I mean, clearly, he laid low and he was smuggled out of the country

by one means or another.

What we do know is that he ended up in Canada,

in northern Quebec, where he was joined with Pat and his girls.

The family settled into a respectable neighbourhood,

but the hunt for the escaped train robber was not over,

and in 1968, the net closed in.

Charlie was just going to take his girls to school, a normal routine,

there was a ring on the doorbell, he went to the front door,

opened the door and there standing on his doorstep was head of the Flying Squad, Tommy Butler.

And behind him was 50 members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,

and there was no getting away from it.

Charlie was extradited to the UK to serve out the remainder of his sentence.

He was released in 1978, and this time, moved with his family to Spain.

But he was soon involved in the murky world of drug trafficking.

And it wasn't long before his past caught up with him.

He was outside preparing the barbecue,

a guy turned up on a yellow bicycle and rang the doorbell,

said he had a message for Charlie.

Pat let him in.

And then there was a shot...

and that was the end of Charlie Wilson,

lying dead by his swimming pool.

Sort of a very sad and poignant image of the end of an extraordinary

sort of meteoric criminal career for this Battersea boy with

the sparkling blue eyes.

Charlie made one final trip to England,

this time for his own funeral.

Of course, it was devastating for the family, but, I think, you know,

Pat and the girls would have been well taken care of and Charlie would

have made sure that there was money in the bank and they weren't going to go hungry.

With Charlie dead,

Amy was struggling to find out what happened to his wife and children.

We had to do a little bit more digging and once we had,

we finally discovered that the three children had in fact changed their surnames.

And once we had established that,

we were able to successfully locate them and speak with them.

It turned out that Patricia had actually passed away a couple of years ago,

and so the three children

turned out to be potential heirs to the estate.

For Amy, the case was coming together

and there was just one more stem to research.

So we could tell that Thomas Patrick married a lady named Rose Warner

in 1920, and from a search of the birth indexes, we could see

two sons to Thomas and Rose -

a Sydney William Osborne and a further son, Dennis Patrick.

When looking into the stem of Dennis Patrick Osborne,

we successfully identified that he had four children.

One of those was a daughter named Susan Bodle,

and we were able to make contact with her fairly quickly

and confirm that she was correct.

And she turned out to be one of the potential heirs to this estate.

Today, travelling rep Howard is on his way to visit Susan and her mum, Jean.

The pair are looking forward to learning more.

The man'll be here in a minute, like, coming to see me,

so it's quite exciting, isn't it?

Yeah, it is exciting!

-Hi.

-Hello.

-Susan Bodle?

-Yes.

-Howard.

-Oh, hello.

-I hope they contacted you, told you I was coming.

Yes, they did.

-Pleased to meet you.

-Thank you.

-That's your father, and there's Jean.

-We found you as well, Jean.

-Right, so your husband's parents...

-Parents, yes.

-Thomas Patrick...

-That's right.

..who's the sibling of - and we come all the way along here to Charles -

-who is the father of Maud.

-Oh!

-Who's the deceased.

I remember a Charlie, yes.

So that's how it connects.

It's not long before Jean spots a familiar name.

Any of the family that you recognise names of?

Well, that's Pat Osborne, which was my husband's cousin.

-Right.

-And she was married to, erm...

What's his name? Charlie Wilson.

THE Charlie Wilson?

THE Charlie Wilson, one of the Great Train Robbers.

Oh, dear!

Yes, because I remember seeing him once at a family funeral.

He was sitting next to me and I didn't know who he was.

My husband's nudging me, "Look who that is."

I said, "No, I don't want..."

It wasn't the big black glasses that gave him away?

No! He had... I mean, he was well-suited, like a businessman.

-He would've been, yeah.

-With, you know, gold and jewellery on.

Having had no knowledge of Maud, the family tree is fascinating.

So she was born the year before Daddy, wasn't she?

-Oh, I don't...

-Because he was born '29.

-Oh, was he?

-Maud, yeah - she was born on the 2nd of December 1928.

Yeah. Well, my husband was born in May of '29.

-OK.

-She was sort of...

And your brother and sister...

-they both never got married and both never had no children?

-Yeah.

-Very nice to meet you.

-And you.

-Thanks for your hospitality. See you again, all the best.

-Cheers.

News of wider family has given Susan food for thought.

It's been exciting,

and Howard coming today has given us a bit more information.

It's not finished yet, obviously, but, erm, yeah...

It's just made me more interested to know more about the family

and just to find out more, really.

Especially more about Maud.

Tracing Susan helped tie up the loose ends for case manager Amy.

We successfully managed to identify around about 30 paternal heirs,

so all in all it's turned out to be quite successful.

It's a case which revealed a fascinating insight into the criminal underworld.

It's always quite interesting when we come across somebody famous

within a family tree.

It creates a bit of excitement around the office.

We all delve a little bit deeper and see what we can find out about this person.

It also makes the particular family tree a little bit more

personal to us, as we learn a bit more about the family history.

And having concluded that the brother Colin was a red herring,

39 cousins will share Maud's £25,000 estate.

But for heir, Susan,

it's the chance to find out more that is most valuable.

What she did for a living and where she lived...

-Definitely want to find out where she was buried.

-Yeah, that's right.

Because I'd like to go there.

We'll look after her. She won't be forgotten.

-No.

-Not now.

No. I'd like to find her grave and put some flowers on it.

-Definitely, definitely.

-She's got someone.

-She's got someone in her family somewhere along the line, that's right.

-Yeah.