Judge says ‘no’ to tests

A grieving husband, whose wife has still not been laid to rest nearly four years after her death, failed to convince a High Court judge yesterday that more medical examinations should be carried out on her body.

Jeffrey Heseltine’s wife, Jean, died in June, 2005, aged 66.

She had been admitted to Manchester’s Royal Infirmary in January of that year and had spent three months in the Royal Oldham Hospital before that.

London’s High Court heard that an inquest into Jean’s death has been opened and adjourned and some of the medical evidence already been heard.

However, Mr Heseltine, who represented himself before Mr Justice Wyn Williams, said that his request for a bone biopsy to be carried out had been refused by Greater Manchester Coroner, Nigel Meadows, in September last year.

He said if the procedure had been allowed to go ahead, it might have shown that his wife died from aluminium poisoning.

Mr Heseltine (67), of Green Meadows, Westhoughton, Bolton, argued the coroner’s refusal was unlawful and asked the judge to order a new inquest, with a different coroner, along with a fresh post-mortem.

Giving his judgement, Mr Justice Wyn Williams said medical evidence in the inquest so far suggested Jean had died from a form of cancer.

But, he added: “There has always been a difficulty in accepting what the medical evidence so far has revealed about the death of [Mr Heseltine’s] wife.

“The suggestion is that a particular test performed on the wife would resolve this issue, but the coroner refused to allow that test to take place.”

Refusing to open the way for Mr Heseltine to mount a full High Court challenge to the coroner’s ruling, the judge said: “It seems to me very much that it is the inquest which is the proper forum for debating the true cause of his wife’s death.”