Globaleye.com

He wanted them to stay in their £1.5 million house on the edge of Notting Hill. He also intended Taryn to profit from a 45 per cent share in his successful corporate hospitality business. But due to a legal technicality, Mark’s last wishes have not been honoured. A will needs to be witnessed by two people, but Mark’s was signed by only one.

As a result, he was declared to have died intestate, forcing 42-year-old Taryn into a legal nightmare. She has been advised that the only way in which she can stay in the family home and give her children the upbringing she and her late husband planned is, in effect, to sue them for their inheritance.

Due to an oversight, the marital home was only in Mark’s name, and also because, as a stay-at-home mother, she has no independent source of income.

Although when Mark died, in September 2007, aged 44, he left an estate worth £2.2 million, most of it was tied up in his company. “As a result,” Taryn explained, “there is no liquid cash or life insurance. We had a £600,000 mortgage on our house and until it’s sold there is no money in the pot. But if it is sold, property prices are such that I will have no chance of buying another home for my children.”

These are cautionary tales and ones that Taryn hopes others will note. The stark truth is that writing a will is rarely a priority at any age, and particularly among the young. Some mistakenly assume all their assets will automatically go to a partner. Others are superstitious that doing so is a portend of disaster.

As a result, a staggering 70 per cent of the population in England and Wales fail to make a proper will and are subsequently hit, when they feel at their most vulnerable, by the draconian and inflexible rules of intestacy.

As the law stands, Taryn, as the deceased spouse, should inherit the first £125,000 of Mark’s estate (since February, the amount for a spouse has been increased to £250,000).

The remainder is then divided in two. Taryn is entitled to live off the interest of one half of the capital held in trust for her children. The remaining half of the estate will be given to the children when they reach the age of 18.

To make matters worse, the fact that Mark’s children are now the main beneficiaries of his estate means that they will have to pay 40 per cent inheritance tax. If Taryn had inherited – as Mark intended – then she, as a spouse, would have been tax exempt.

Taryn’s case against her children is based on the Inheritance Act of 1975 which, in some circumstances, allows the surviving spouse to take money out of the children’s estate. The amount has to be agreed by both parties’ lawyers and then ratified by a judge. This stage has not yet been reached.

Part of the complex procedure involves her going through an ''imaginary divorce’’ – a heavy-handed way of assessing what she could be entitled to from his estate.

Not surprisingly, Taryn finds the prospect of ''divorcing’’ her much loved dead husband agonising. “It makes me feel as if I am losing him all over again,” she says, breaking down into body-shuddering sobs. “It equally breaks my heart to see official papers stating that Mrs Taryn Butler is suing Molly Butler and Max Butler. I feel as if I am stealing from my own children.

“But out of my £125,000 inheritance, I have to pay lawyers’ fees and other debts, which will leave me almost nothing to buy a home for us. So it looks like I shall be living on a widow’s pension of £59 a week and child benefit of £120 a month.”

Her plight exposes a glaring injustice in intestate law and in her calmer moments Taryn is campaigning to get the law changed. “Intestate law is barbaric as it stands,” she insists.

“In Mark’s case, it is absolutely clear that he wanted to leave his money to me, both in his Will and in a minuted meeting with his accountant. He died thinking he had done everything correctly.

Her case – which has been dragging on for nearly two years – has become a parallel agony to the grief of bereavement. She is also having to adapt to a radically different lifestyle from the comfortable one she and Mark anticipated.