McMurrich/Overbury Heir Hunters

Today, a house in a high-value estate goes under the hammer...

Can I say a million pounds?

..as the search for heirs spirals out of control...

What if they all have eight children?

Then you've got hundreds and hundreds of people.

..whilst a tragic tale...

The fact that he was predeceased

by both his wives and both his sons and his brother.

..uncovers the story of a musical legend.

Brian Epstein offered him the Beatles and he turned them down.

It's all in a day's work for the Heir Hunters.

£24,000. Can I say 24?

Of course I can.

In Central London, Andrew Fraser, from heir hunting firm

Fraser and Fraser, is attending a property auction.

Shall we say 25? Anyone else?

Today, a high-value house,

forming part of the estate of Douglas McMurrich,

is going under the hammer.

Today's another key day in the administration

of Mr McMurrich's estate.

270 here...

To sell the property today at auction would allow the major asset

to be sold and realised into liquid funds.

The property has a guide price in excess of £1 million,

making this an extremely valuable case for the team.

Everybody's nervous

because ultimately we all have quite a lot riding on the outcome.

Douglas McMurrich passed away on 21st December 2015,

having lived in the same house in West London his whole life.

Douglas was a very private man but his neighbour of 30 years, Andrew,

got to know him well.

Most of the conversations that

Douglas and I used to have were, in fact, across this fence.

But that was the character he was.

Once he got to know you a little bit better,

he didn't ignore you and it was a pleasure, actually.

Andrew and Douglas's conversations in passing blossomed

and, over the years, they became firm friends.

My wife and I miss him very much and my sons do as well,

because he was kind of a feature of the street.

Here it is.

Salutation.

Douglas worked as an engineer...

Nearly asleep at the drawing board.

..and is fondly remembered by colleagues David and Mark.

He was a nice bloke. I really got on well with him.

I liked his sense of humour. It was quite cutting, quite cynical.

He got a lot out of the industry and he was keen to put something back.

He trained a few young engineers.

Douglas spent many years working on commercial properties...

Douglas was a public health engineer.

Public health engineer is someone who designs the plumbing.

..and never let his age get the better of him.

And was keen to develop his skills.

He wasn't one of these guys who was stuck in the ways of '50s or '60s...

He was forward thinking, really.

And was a font of knowledge.

But whether Douglas had any surviving family remained a mystery,

as only David, Mark and neighbour Andrew attended his funeral.

Andrew organised the cremation at Malt Lake,

because somebody had to do it,

rather than having someone from the council look after him.

Although they had a good working relationship,

Douglas was guarded about his personal life.

His work life and his home life were very separate.

Yeah.

He didn't like to mix the two.

It was just Douglas and Douglas was by himself.

So far we have signed four people, four of his cousins.

As Douglas didn't leave a will,

the heir hunters got straight to work

and, for case manager Ben Cornish and his team,

the case would prove a tough challenge.

When we're looking into these cases,

we first have to establish when the deceased was born.

He was born in 1930 in Shepherd's Bush in London.

So we conducted a marriage search of the deceased

and there were no records

and, from that, we soon surmised that there were no children.

With no children to inherit Douglas's sizeable estate,

Ben needed to find out if he had any siblings.

We then would look for his parents.

We discovered that they were

Alexander McMurrich and Grace Hawthorn Green.

They married in 1926 in London. From that point,

we would look to see if there were any other children.

OK. Thank you. Bye.

But Ben was about to make a tragic discovery.

There was one other son, a Laurence, born in 1927,

but sadly passed away

from TB in 1933.

Although infant deaths were still common in the 1920s,

Laurence's death would have been a devastating blow for the family.

Even though Douglas was only three when Laurence passed away,

no doubt it must have had a massive impact on his mother and father.

With no close relatives,

Ben now had to extend their search to aunts and uncles,

in the hope of finding cousins who may still be alive

and he recruited the help of research manager Isha Adams.

Here's the McMurrich file

with the certs in if you want to look at that.

Isha began working up the maternal side of the family.

There was a Grace H Green married an Alexander McMurrich.

So we found the marriage,

in 1926 in Hammersmith,

so it was all in the area.

We then found the deaths of parents.

Then we had an age and a round about date of birth.

But Isha soon ran into a problem.

Then we found the mum was born in Fulham

but there was no birth for the dad.

With no record of his father's birth,

the team wouldn't be able to research his side of the family.

Although no records of him had shown up in London, Isha had a plan.

With a name like McMurrich, it doesn't sound very English as such,

so we got our Scottish agent to have a look

and he was actually born in Glasgow.

That's the one.

With the father's side of the family in Glasgow,

this case had now mushroomed

and the team had staff in England and Scotland

working flat-out to find heirs.

But the Scottish side of the research

was to become even more intriguing.

It was going quite well initially.

Only two siblings of the father, of the deceased.

And then the tree just seemed to grow and grow.

Douglas's father had two sisters,

Maggie and Mary,

and whilst Mary had four children,

the stem of Maggie

would turn out to be even larger.

We got on to Maggie

and we know she has an illegitimate daughter with a John Hunter.

There's no marriage, but Margaret Junior is called Margaret Hunter.

So we know that's the mum, that's the dad.

That's one. Maggie did get married to

a John Volance Orr...

..and they had nine children.

Douglas's fast-growing family tree was a worry for the team.

It does send you into a bit of a panic, because you think,

what if they all have eight children?

Then you've got hundreds and hundreds of people

that you've got to look for.

All right. Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye.

The Scottish team now faced a monumental challenge

in their search for Douglas's cousins.

Ben feared the worst.

In any estate, it's a danger of missing beneficiaries.

But especially when you have a high-value case,

because it could be hundreds of thousands of pounds

going in the wrong direction,

so we had to be extra careful on the case of McMurrich.

We had to buy multiple certificates

and we had to make sure we had all records that we can find.

But in the middle of this frantic research,

the team had started to learn more about Douglas,

including the fascinating story of how his parents first met.

So we know that the deceased's father was Alexander McMurrich

and he was born on 22nd July, 1897, in Glasgow.

He came down to London in World War I.

He was a driver in the Army.

And then after the conflict finished,

he got a job in the laundry business.

Alexander took a job with a company called Snowflake Laundry,

where his skills as a driver were suddenly in demand.

Most people who become responsible for

a motorised vehicle in the 1920s,

the chances are they've learnt how to drive

during the First World War.

After decades of horse-drawn vehicles, by the 1920s,

the company had joined the motorised revolution.

Motor vans are becoming cheaper to buy

and they're certainly less trouble to run,

because you haven't got to mess around with a horse.

Alexander's work at the laundry would have involved deliveries

all over London.

He actually was quite proudly going around and showing

what their company was doing with the lettering on the side

and knowing he was a part of business,

a crucial part of the business,

and no doubt felt very proud to be doing it.

For a small laundry business, using a motor vehicle

would have given them an edge over their competitors.

Because the van was faster at getting around,

no doubt it expanded their area of operation.

They were probably delivering to some of the smart hotels

and places like that as well.

So it would have all looked, I think, quite prestigious

and he would have felt and no doubt was quite well placed really.

Snowflake Laundry was owned by Charles Edward Green

and, in the office, the team were about to make a surprise connection.

So when we looked up Douglas's birth, Douglas and McMurrich,

we saw that his mother's maiden name was Green,

and the daughter of Charles Edward Green, a laundry proprietor.

But for the team,

Grace's surname of Green was proving to be the thorn in their side.

Green is a bit tricky to research,

just because it's a very popular surname.

With a big Scottish family on one side and a tricky name on the other,

would the team find heirs

to the £1 million estate of Douglas McMurrich?

The sheer volume of the case

and it's obviously, because it's got a good value,

it's panic, panic, panic!

I'm struggling to find contact details for this guy.

Sometimes when you're working a case, it doesn't happen very often,

but you can come across somebody on your family tree

that is either famous or infamous for whatever reason.

In January 2016,

heir hunting firm Finders in Central London

took on the case of Percival Overbury.

But little did they know the search for his heirs would

reveal the story of a legendary British record producer.

Percival Overbury died in December 2015

in a nursing home in Stroud in Gloucestershire.

Although there are no known photographs of Percival,

he had spent the majority of his life

living in the tight-knit village of Whitminster,

and was a well known local figure.

I remember him as a kind man.

Always immaculately dressed.

I can never remember seeing him without a collar and tie.

I can never remember seeing him without a suit.

When neighbour Honour Jones was a little girl,

she lived just a stone's throw from Percival's home.

He kept an immaculate house

and I can remember, as a child, going to their house.

The garden was always...

It was beautiful. They had fruit trees.

It was always immaculately kept.

You try and trace them through and speak to them and find out

whether they're related or not.

Percival had owned his own home but hadn't left a will

so his valuable £325,000 estate was advertised by the Treasury,

meaning other heir hunting firms may already be on the case.

So given there was a relatively high value to this estate

and we had picked up on the case

but we didn't know whether there was going to be any competition on it.

The pressure was on for case managers Ryan Gregory and Amy Cox

to find the heirs first.

The case of Percival Overbury came to us from a private referral.

The only things we knew when we were referred the case

were his name, date of death

and that it had recently been passed to the Treasury solicitor.

To save us coming across competition,

we try and work these cases as urgently and as quickly as we can.

Thanks very much for doing the job.

All right. Cheers then. Take care. Bye-bye.

With no time to waste,

the team began by searching for any close relatives...

..and quickly made an important discovery.

We found out quite early on

that Percival Joseph Overbury was married.

Obviously this is important for us because any children of the marriage

would be beneficiaries of his estate.

Likewise if there is a spouse that's surviving him,

they would be entitled to inherit.

But Ryan was unaware he was about to uncover a trail of tragedy.

Now the sad thing is with this family as we're working through it

is that we actually found out

that Percival was not only predeceased by his first wife,

he was predeceased by his second wife as well.

Although Percival and his second wife, Doris, had two children,

Nigel and Nicholas, as Amy started delving a little deeper,

it seems the tragedy in Percival's life came thick and fast.

We found a death record for Percival Overbury's son

that had been living with him and so what we did is went back to

the records to see if there was any further issue from this marriage.

We found another record

for another son, that he had already passed away as an infant.

And his second son, Nicholas, died just a few months before Perceval

in 2015.

It's a sad situation really, given that both wives

had passed away and both sons had passed away just by a matter

of months really so Percival was, in terms of close family members,

kind of on his own in the later stages of his life.

Ryan's next port of call was to look for siblings.

Percival had an older brother called Leonard.

But Ryan was about to uncover yet more misfortune.

He was killed in action in World War II.

He was predeceased by both his wives and both his sons and his brother,

who was killed in action. I mean,

you can't truly begin to think how anybody would deal with that.

Yeah, that would be good actually, get a few possible addresses.

Having ruled out close kin on this valuable estate,

the team faced an uphill struggle

as they started looking into the wider family.

Concerned rival firms may crack the case first,

they decided to divide and conquer to speed things up.

While Ryan took the maternal side,

Amy worked the paternal side,

and immediately hit a snag.

We thought it was going to be quite a good surname to research

but then it turned out, in the Gloucestershire area,

it was actually quite common so we had to order quite a lot of births

to establish how many aunts and uncles there were to Percival.

But that wasn't all.

The aunts and uncles moved out of area,

so originally it had been all based in Gloucestershire

but they had started to move around

so that made searching the records a little bit trickier.

Despite this, they were able to make fairly quick progress.

The team discovered that

on the paternal side,

Percival's grandparents,

Joseph Overbury and Mary Smart,

had seven children...

..giving Percival six aunts and uncles.

And once we then decided to look into it a little bit deeper,

we realised that there were only issue on the uncle,

James William Overbury.

So any of the heirs that were going to come from Overbury side

of the family were going to come from this one uncle.

With only one of the six stems to investigate,

Amy quickly uncovered 25 potential heirs...

Hello. It's Ryan Gregory from London.

We're a firm of heir hunters.

..and the team was quietly confident they had

the paternal side wrapped up.

So for us, the paternal side of the family,

the Overbury family, wasn't too much of a difficult search to find

beneficiaries but it was really when

we got into the maternal side of the family when things got interesting.

And it would reveal that the family had one of Britain's

most influential record producers in their midst.

You know, that was his first big breakthrough really.

Margaret Thatcher's favourite record as well.

Every year in Britain,

thousands of people get a surprise knock on the door from heir hunters.

I found that amazing that I had that side of the family

that I didn't know existed.

As well as handing over life-changing sums of money,

the heir hunters can bring long-lost relatives back together.

I'm so lucky... because I've met up with all of you.

But thousands of estates have eluded the heir hunters

and remain unsolved.

Today, we've got details of two estates yet to be claimed.

Could you be the person the heir hunters are looking for

or know someone that is?

The first case is Helen Miller.

Records suggests she was born

in North London on the 13th of January in either 1910 or 1915...

..and died on the 28th of September 1994 in Tottenham in North London.

She was married to a Mr Miller, whom she outlived,

but his forename is unknown.

Is there a chance you could be related

or know someone that could be?

The next case is Clarence Middlebrook,

who was born on 7th September 1912 in Skipton in North Yorkshire...

..and died on 28th February 1988 in Bradford.

He never married but did have an older sister called Martha

and a younger brother called Herbert.

Do you know a Miller or a Middlebrook?

If so, you could be in line for a surprise windfall.

All right. Thank you very much for your time. Take care. Bye-bye.

The heir hunters at firm Fraser and Fraser

have their work cut out finding heirs to the million-pound estate

of Douglas McMurrich.

It's a very large estate

and it's one of the largest I've ever worked with.

With research stretching

both the teams London and Edinburgh offices...

..a large Scottish family and the nightmare surname of Green

have pushed the heir hunters to the limit.

It was going quite well initially

and then the tree just seemed to grow and grow.

The case has now reached a critical stage.

Shall we say 25 anywhere else?

Andrew Fraser is at a property auction in Central London

where Douglas's home is about to go under the hammer.

Mr McMurrich's home is lot number five and it's just about to start.

I'm very nervous about today's sale.

It's a vacant three-bedroom mid-terrace house.

It's an executor sale.

Ladies and gentlemen, good location, nice looking house.

With the reserve price in excess of £1 million,

it's going to be an anxious few minutes for Andrew.

Guide on this is a million pounds. Who'd like to start me off?

Can I say a million pounds?

Million five?

Yes? Million ten?

15.

Million 15. Million 20.

25.

We're not quite where we need to be on that one, I'm afraid.

Disappointing.

Didn't get to the reserve price.

It's not the result Andrew hoped for

and will mean Douglas's home will now be put on the market.

Douglas had lived in this house for most of his life

and although heir hunters knew he'd never married or had children,

it turned out he did have one lifelong companion.

Quite a friendly little creature.

76 years old and going strong and mischievous.

Just like his owner.

Joey the tortoise was bought as a pet for Douglas

when he was eight years old...

and, over the next 75 years, they formed an inseparable bond.

I think of Joey as being a part of Douglas,

cos it's his lifelong companion, really is his lifelong companion.

Whilst clearing Douglas's house, a scrapbook was discovered.

Douglas had used it to document Joey's life in great detail.

The file records what Joey's health was like in 1998

and what he likes to eat.

What Douglas has meticulously recorded is Joey's weight.

Last one, interestingly enough, is in October 2015,

so several months before his death.

The records are a fascinating insight

into Douglas's diligent nature.

It also reveals some interesting history about Joey.

The file also confirms that Joey was bought at Woolworths in 1938

for six old pence money.

Thousands of tortoises just like Joey would have been bought

over the counter in high street shops up and down the country.

The tortoise trade started in the 1890s and it continued,

with the exception of the war years,

until the 1940...

late '40s.

Tortoises may have quickly gained popularity

but they were sold with very little information

about how to look after them.

No care sheets given.

They were actually selling them with the message,

they would eat insects in your yard.

Douglas's tortoise Joey is still going strong at the age of 76,

which says a lot about his owner.

I think he probably was quite a caring and observant person

because you wouldn't keep a tortoise alive for over 70 years

if you weren't.

It was probably a little boy that spent a lot of time looking at it,

having a go at finding a little house,

coming back from school, making sure it was out of the rain

and, you know, once they get adjusted

and they get fed,

that is it.

Before Douglas passed away he asked his neighbour Andrew if he would

take care of Joey after he was gone.

We're glad we could kind of complete our promise to his owner

that we would look after him.

As Joey was settling into his new home,

the team's search for Douglas's relatives

was turning into a mammoth task.

What is going on here?

The team in Scotland was looking for heirs on the paternal side

but, having discovered Douglas's aunt Maggie had nine children,

they faced an uphill struggle working through a whopping 14 stems.

We have the paternal McMurrich,

which is...

..a very large tree, as you can see.

Too large for me to spread out all at once.

The Scottish team had narrowed down the search to five stems

and, after months of research,

at last they had leads on potential heirs.

Oh, God, this is exciting.

Meanwhile in London, Isha and Ben were working the paternal side.

But with the common surname Green proving difficult,

the team were hoping for a small family.

Green, as a name, is a bit trickier to research.

But Isha discovered one common thread that would

help her build the family tree.

So we've also got Jennie Winifred Green,

another maternal aunt of the deceased

and on her death certificate it says she was a spinster

and a laundry manager

and daughter of Charles Edward Green, laundry proprietor, deceased.

So once again, they all seem to be running the same business

and it makes it easier when we do look at the certificate,

it's got a lot more information cos we can link it in.

By focusing on the Greens who worked in the laundry trade,

the team were able to narrow down their search and soon established

that only two of Douglas's maternal aunts and uncles had children.

One of the uncles was William Charles Edward Green

who married Ada Kersey in 1911.

They went on to have two children,

Sydney Charles William Green and Constance Grace Green.

Constance was born in 1915, Sydney in 1913.

Sydney and Constance were Douglas cousins and, although both had died,

records show that Constance married and had two children.

The team was closing in on their first heirs.

What we would then do is use our various tracing resources

to locate them up-to-date and speak to them about the family.

For Constance's daughter Carole, a first cousin once removed,

the news would come as a bolt out of the blue.

This is Douglas outside Gransden Road.

I'm not sure how old he is but I would presume perhaps he looks about

seven at the most.

Carole also grew up in London

and has fond childhood memories of the time she spent with Douglas

and his family.

That is my aunt and uncle and Douglas.

He looks as if he's a teenager there.

It must be these cars that he loved so much,

so he started early there.

Douglas was...

He was always very kind and very generous and he was good to be with.

You always felt entertained by him.

From the age of seven, Carole spent the school holidays helping out

in Douglas's father's laundry business.

The steam and that was awful.

And I didn't want to be there.

I'm sure I would much rather have been somewhere else but...

I suppose, looking back, it was what happened in them days.

That was the sort of thing - families helped out families.

But in recent years, they drifted apart

and Carole had no idea

that Douglas's health had taken a turn for the worse.

I was just so sad

that none of us had been there.

That was the only thing that really did upset me for a little while.

I thought it was sad that he was on his own.

Somehow that didn't seem right.

After months of hard work, the team have located 26 potential heirs,

and Andrew has another reason to smile,

as there's also been a development with Douglas's property.

Following the auction sale,

it was very disappointing the house didn't sell,

but we've offered it on the market

through a number of local estate agents

and we've now accepted an offer

and each of the beneficiaries will receive a nice sum of money.

But there's one final chapter to the case.

As Douglas passed away months before his heirs were found,

none of his family could attend his funeral.

But today, Andrew has arranged for Douglas's ashes to be interred,

and it's an opportunity for his friends and family

to pay their final respects.

Although they might not have been in touch the last 30-plus years,

they've all got memories and want to show their own respects.

Some of us on his mother's side of the family that will be here,

and then also on his father's side.

It's...

quite surreal, to be honest with you,

to think that we didn't know till after the event, if you like.

Douglas was an intensely private, unassuming,

independent person.

Douglas's ashes are being placed in his family grave.

Very appropriate that we come here today,

to this grave, where his parents, Alexandra and Grace, are buried,

together with his brother Laurence, who died aged just five in 1933.

Sad, obviously, but

-it's sort of finalised everything.

-Yeah.

Nice to think that they're all together now.

Today has turned out to be, I think, a very good occasion.

I'm sure Douglas, in his heart, would have been pleased as to

how today has gone.

In London, the heir-hunting team at firm Finders were desperately trying

to find beneficiaries to the estate of Percival Overbury...

The only things that we knew when we were referred the case

were his name and date of death.

..and unravel the mystery of his forgotten family.

With an estate worth £325,000 waiting to be claimed...

..Ryan and the team were determined

to pip their rival firms to the post...

We had a few of us in the office working on

the different stems of the family tree.

..and be the first to find Percival Overbury's heirs.

With no immediate family to inherit,

the team was forced to delve a little deeper.

Amy's search into Percival's paternal side

had been relatively easy,

uncovering 25 potential heirs.

But Ryan and the team were now tackling the maternal side,

which would prove to be far tougher than they originally imagined.

The indexes told us that Percival's mother was Louise or Louisa Blanche.

Birt was her maiden name,

Birt spelt B-I-R-T.

Again, we're thinking that that surname is not going to

cause us too many problems.

However, when Ryan began researching it further,

he discovered that Louise Birt was one of eight children.

Ryan's workload had just got a whole lot heavier

and, with the clock ticking, Amy was called in to lend a hand

and soon made an unusual discovery.

When we started looking at the stem of the maternal aunt, Caroline Birt,

we saw that she married and she had four children

and when we looked at the name of her eldest daughter,

we realised it was the same person who had married Percival Overbury,

so it looks as though Percival married one of his maternal cousins.

Discovering Percival had married his cousin

wouldn't be the only surprise.

Ryan was now looking into the stem of Percival's maternal aunt, Evelyn,

and had established she had married Alfred Meek.

The couple had four children, Arthur, Robert, Eric and Pamela.

The last born of the four was Pamela Edith Rose Meek.

She married a Richard Williams and they had two children,

who are also entitled to inherit.

Ryan was close to finding his first heirs.

I'm still coming to terms with the shock of it all, really.

One of them is Pamela Meek's daughter, Sandra.

This is Joan, this is Percy's wife.

That's Joan's mother, so she's Nanny's sister,

so that's the closest to the two that we've got.

Despite losing touch with Percival and Joan in her adult life,

the news of their passing has triggered fond memories of childhood

meetings with her uncle and aunt.

I can remember Percy and Joan and Nicholas

coming over for afternoon tea on Sundays.

And Auntie Joan, she always dressed absolutely immaculate.

She always had lovely hair.

Very, very smart lady, very attractive.

All right, thank you. Bye-bye.

At Finders HQ, Ryan was continuing research into the Meek stem.

Little did he know he was on the verge

of making a remarkable discovery.

On the line of Eric Charles Meek,

we found out that he married Marlene Williams

and they had three children together,

one of whom was Robert Meek.

I got a call from Heir Hunters

telling me that one of my relatives died,

Percival Overbury, who was, would be my great uncle, I think,

but I never actually really knew him, so it was all news to me.

Robert is another beneficiary to Percival's sizeable estate,

but it was what he revealed about his uncle, also called Robert Meek,

that left Ryan and the team stunned.

The key bit of information that we wouldn't necessarily know unless

we spoke to him - his uncle was also known as Joe Meek.

His uncle, Joe Meek, was actually a famous record producer,

so he was big in the '60s.

From his humble, rural upbringing,

Joe Meek rose to stardom to become one of the most influential

record producers of the last century.

Since he was a boy, Joe was always interested in electronics.

When he was young, he was always tinkering with stuff.

He would take radios apart and put them back together.

He was supposedly the one that made one of the first televisions

in Newent, which people used to come and watch, back in the '50s.

He was a very clever man.

When he grew up, Joe left Gloucestershire and moved to London,

where he worked at IBC Studios as a sound engineer.

Hope you don't mind me wearing my glasses to do this,

cos I can't see otherwise.

That's it.

In 1954, Adrian Kerridge started working as Joe's assistant

and, over the years, they became firm friends.

We travelled to record radio shows and this was taken in March 1956.

Adrian was about to witness Joe

change the landscape of popular music forever.

It's indisputable, that guy's talent.

He was the guy that started some of the modern recording techniques,

close-miking techniques,

doing unusual things with microphones.

There were wires everywhere.

Nobody knew what went to where and what he hung on what,

but he got results.

In 1962, Joe had his biggest success to date as his composing skills

combined with his pioneering recording techniques

came together to produce a record called Telstar.

MUSIC: Telstar by The Tornados

Joe's record saw huge international success

as the second UK single to

hit number one in the United States charts.

Telstar, with its box-like drum sound,

was all pumping and it all reverbed and it was in your face

and that's Joe.

You know, that was his first big breakthrough, really.

Margaret Thatcher's favourite record, as well.

It was just when I heard it, I thought, "Wow, that's Joe."

It was his audio signature.

By the mid-60s, Joe was at the height of his career

and was one of the most in demand producers in London.

Because of what he was doing, the techniques he used,

people requested Joe.

He worked with Petula Clark, Shirley Bassey, Winifred Atwell,

Mr Joe "Piano" Henderson, Frankie Vaughan,

Edmund Hockridge and so on.

Worked with all of these people.

Brian Epstein offered him The Beatles, and he turned them down.

Despite his growing popularity,

he didn't forget about his family back home.

I've got memories of him coming down from London,

and he'd always come down with loads of presents.

And he used to like Toffee Crisps,

so he went into the shop and he actually bought the whole box,

which, in those days, it was just incredible.

But, unbeknownst to his family,

Joe's world was soon going to come crashing down.

No-one really knew what was going on in Joe's head back home.

Obviously things were pretty dark in London...

..and well, it all ended on... when it did on the 5th of February.

On that date in 1967,

five years after the release of his hit record Telstar,

Joe tragically murdered his neighbour, who was a close friend,

before taking his own life.

Nobody will actually know what was going on in that flat, in that day.

We can all speculate, but...

Joe was taken away before his time and it was very, very sad.

I was saddened, Dennis Preston was saddened.

It shouldn't have happened...

but volatility rules.

Joe had no children, so there are no further beneficiaries from his stem.

With the case now wrapped up,

all of Ryan and the team's efforts have paid off.

It's always really satisfying to manage to crack a large family tree,

especially as quickly as we managed to do in this case.

And, we managed to avoid any competition,

which is always a really great success for us.

There's certain cases that we pick up over the years

and they kind of become kind of dinner party conversation topics,

if you like. We don't go into too much details

of exactly what really happened,

but there's key stories that may jump out.

That's what happened in this case with the connection

between Percival and Joe Meek.

Percival's £325,000 estate will be divided up between 46 heirs,

including Sandra and Rob,

who's spending his share on landscaping his garden

in honour of Percival.

I'm going to call it the Percival Overbury Garden,

cos I couldn't have afforded to get it done without it.

Just going to put the plaque over there

and call it the Perceval Overbury Garden.

A nice few flowers around it

and hopefully it'll be a fitting tribute to the man.