The cleaner of a wealthy heiress who drowned in a swimming pool on holiday found Viagra and her husband’s wedding ring in the bathroom of the family home shortly after her suspicious death, a court heard.

Karen Mairs said that on the same day she found two empty champagne glasses and bottles, and suspected that Donald McPherson, 50, later acquitted of murdering his wife Paula Leeson, 47, had been sleeping with someone at the marital home.

Convicted fraudster McPherson was ordered found not guilty of the 2017 murder of his wife Paula, from Sale, at a judge’s direction to the jury midway through his trial in 2021 due to insufficient evidence.

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Although she was acquitted of the murder charge, Ms Leeson’s family have launched legal proceedings against McPherson at Manchester Civil Courts of Justice, asking a judge to rule that he unlawfully killed her by drowning her in a swimming pool while on holiday in Denmark. , so he loses any legal right to his late will and his wife’s estate, valued at £4.4 million.

The court has heard McPherson was described as a “Walter Mitty” who had changed his name several times, had 32 convictions over 15 years in three countries and whose previous wife and son died in a house fire.

McPherson, who denied murder, had taken out “secret” life insurance policies for Mrs Leeson worth £3.5 million.

Mrs Mairs said she cleaned the couple’s family home in Sale, Greater Manchester, and found the open packet of Viagra, empty champagne bottles and bedding stuffed behind a headboard, “to prevent the headboard from hitting the wall.” “.

Mrs Mairs also told the court that McPherson was “cold” and showed no emotion, and began clearing the house of all his late wife’s possessions shortly after her death.

After McPherson joined a bereavement group, Widowed And Young, which she called “Tinder for Widows”, Mrs Mairs said she began dating in Manchester and London.

Her husband, Frank, once received a photo message from McPherson at 2 a.m. showing “a fancy champagne bucket with a nice bottle of champagne in it,” which McPherson later said he had sent to the “wrong Frank.” .

Born Alexander James Lang and originally from New Zealand, McPherson met Leeson in 2013, using a “cover story” of being an orphan to hide his past after serving prison time for an £11m bank fraud in Germany, he heard the court.

Danish authorities initially treated his death as a tragic accident, although he had suffered 13 separate external injuries, but McPherson was later arrested in the United Kingdom while police investigated his financial background.

But his murder trial at Manchester Crown Court was dramatically interrupted in March 2021 by Judge Goose, ruling that there was insufficient evidence for jurors to safely convict him as a death could not be ruled out. accidental.

After being acquitted, in a statement through his lawyers, McPherson denied any involvement in his wife’s death, saying it was a “tragic accident.”

He is not present at the hearing and is believed to live in the South Pacific.

Leeson married McPherson in a no-expense-spared ceremony at a Cheshire castle in 2014 after a “whirlwind romance”.

He claimed to be a property developer and she oversaw the jumper hire part of her family’s successful earth-working business which her father Willy, 80, had built in Sale after emigrating from County Wicklow, Ireland, in the 1960s.

Mrs Leeson and her brother Neville would inherit the business.

McPherson told police he woke up to find Leeson face down in the shallow pool of a holiday home in remote western Denmark that he had booked for the couple on June 6, 2017.

Mrs Leeson, who was 5ft 5ins tall, drowned in the pool which was less than 4ft deep, although she knew how to swim and was an otherwise healthy mother of one.

Lawyers for the Leeson family argue that to save themselves from drowning they could have simply stood up, so they must have been asphyxiated before being thrown into the water unconscious.

Neville Leeson said he received the call from McPherson, saying his sister had been in an “accident”.

He told the court: “I said ‘What do you mean?’ Then she told me very calmly that ‘she has passed away, she has passed away’. She wasn’t crying. I was struck by how calm he was, it was like he was telling me the time.”

“I remember he then told me three versions of what had happened. While the rest of my family was sitting near me in the room, they heard what was happening and I remember my dad shouting ‘he killed her.’”

The hearing continues on Friday.