After her brother mysteriously died, this woman uncovered clues that unmasked his killer. Just weeks earlier, her brother Phil Nesbitt had passed away, seemingly having taken his own life. But then Leanne noticed something was wrong, and with her startling realization came another shock: not only was Phil murdered, but the culprit was there with her in the room. Leanne, the youngest of four, spent her childhood in the suburbs of Christchurch, New Zealand, with her brothers Andrew, Roger, and Phil, the oldest of the bunch. Phil was also known as the least rebellious member of the family. “He didn’t go to a pub until he was 21,” she told the BBC in August 2018.
Leanne even recalls Phil using his motorbike to take her to the Girls Brigade when she was little. When the rest of the family eventually decided to move to Australia, Phil opted to remain in New Zealand. There, he married a woman named Karen, and the couple had a son named Ben.
Meanwhile, Leanne grew up and started a life of her own, ultimately having four kids. Yet although Phil was hundreds of miles away, the siblings maintained a close relationship. Then, in 2004, something changed. That year, Phil got himself a new partner, a woman named Helen Milner.
From their very first encounter, Leanne was unsure about Helen. “I initially met her in 2004 and she just seemed like your average housewife type person,” she explained to the BBC. “But the next time I met her, I sort of realized that she wasn’t totally stable.” In fact, Helen appeared to be suicidal. During one of Leanne’s trips to see her brother, she arrived at the couple’s house to find Phil in a state of panic. It seemed that Helen had taken an intentional overdose of insulin with the aim of killing herself. When Leanne then tried to speak to her sister-in-law, Helen apparently told her that she might as well die. Concerned, Leanne began to suspect that Helen may have threatened suicide before.
Then, in 2006, the situation grew more troubling. At the time, Leanne’s son Lance was in New Zealand staying with his uncle and his wife. One day, he called his mother with an unsettling story to tell. According to Lance, he and Phil had been chatting in a bar when his uncle made a strange request: could Lance make arrangements to have his first wife killed? “Phil actually asked Lance if he could find a hitman to take out Karen,” Leanne claimed. “Something like a house fire so it looked like an accident.” Distressed, Lance called his mother to tell her about the conversation, but at the time, Leanne seems to have found the threat too extreme to take seriously. Instead, she advised her son to ignore the conversation.
That same year, however, Helen apparently got upset with Lance while he was staying in the couple’s home. Helen reportedly contacted Leanne in protest, only for the two women to start arguing themselves. Sadly, too, it was the start of a rift that would force a wedge between Leanne and her brother, and for three years, the once close pair didn’t see each other at all.
Eventually, in 2009, Leanne was reunited with Phil when he came to Australia for a family visit. However, any hope that she may have had of fully reconciling with her brother was cut short that May when she answered the phone to take a heartbreaking call. It was Leanne’s father ringing to tell her that Phil had been found dead. At the time, the 47-year-old Phil had been living in Christchurch, where he was working as a truck driver. According to the first phone call, he’d been found inside the vehicle, having apparently taken his own life. Devastated, Leanne found herself having to share the news with one of her brothers. “I broke the news to Andrew, and that was the worst,” Leanne recalled. “When I finally got hold of him and told him to make sure that his son was in another room, he just shrieked.”
But although she was heartbroken, Leanne was also left wondering what might have led her brother to take his own life. “It was so strange,” she explained. “I hadn’t had anything to do with Phil for a couple of years, so I didn’t really know what was going on in his life, and I was just thinking, ‘What the heck’s happened?'” Yet after an autopsy revealed Phenergan, a substance that Phil was allergic to, in his system, she adjusted to the idea that he really had committed suicide. Still trying to come to terms with the loss, Leanne arrived in New Zealand for Phil’s funeral, but there she found herself confronted with the very woman who had effectively kept her brother away from her over the years. What’s more, Leanne claims that Helen prevented her from having any time alone with Phil’s body. “It’s really hard to say goodbye when you’ve got these things you really want to say because we lost those couple of years, and the woman who’d caused the rift between us is standing there,” Leanne explained.
Yet despite the tension between the two women, she maintained a relationship with Helen after her brother’s death. Then, during one conversation, Helen let slip a very confusing piece of information. Apparently, she told Leanne that Phil’s body had been found at home, not inside his vehicle. And soon afterward, Helen claimed that she discovered a suicide note—a note that contained some shocking notions about his son Ben. According to Helen, the note explained that Ben was not, in fact, Phil’s biological son, and having learned this truth, the note apparently claimed the truck driver had felt unable to cope with the situation.
It seems that these were not idle claims either. Helen told Leanne that a DNA sample extracted from Phil’s body had confirmed the truth. Not long after Helen’s disclosures, Leanne returned to New Zealand, where Lance was set to host a party for his 21st birthday. During her visit, she spent the night at Helen’s home, which gave her the opportunity to view Phil’s purported suicide note. As soon as Leanne saw it, though, she knew that something was terribly wrong. “I opened the note and it was typed,” Leanne recalled. “So that’s my next shock, and I don’t overly read it, but I look to the bottom and there’s Phil’s signature, and it wasn’t Phil’s handwriting.” Suddenly, she found herself overwhelmed with the conviction that Helen had murdered Phil and the realization that she was now trapped in the killer’s home.
According to Leanne, Phil’s handwriting was noticeably firm, whereas the signature on the note had been written in soft, light strokes. But even though she was sure that her brother had not written the note, Leanne couldn’t let on. Apparently, Helen was eyeing her carefully, and she had to be sure to hide her suspicions. “I was just screaming on the inside and sort of paralyzed as well, thinking, ‘I can’t let her see that I know,'” Leanne exclaimed. “I’m just sitting there going, ‘What do I do? What do I do?'”
So afraid that she was in danger, Leanne then apparently shut herself in the bedroom and wedged a suitcase in front of the door. Luckily, the night passed without incident, but the next day Leanne was forced to continue as normal, even taking Helen to Lance’s birthday party. “I felt like I was betraying my son by taking her there,” she confessed. “He had always been so close to Phil growing up, and I took his uncle’s murderer to his 21st. But I could not [do anything else].”
Somehow, Leanne managed to keep up the pretense, and shortly afterward, she had the opportunity to speak to the police about her suspicions. However, even though the officer present agreed that the notion of a typed suicide note was unlikely, nothing came of the encounter. Instead, Leanne had to return to Australia, convinced that Helen was guilty. Leanne began a one-woman campaign to see Helen brought to justice for her crime. First, she contacted the funeral director who’d been responsible for Phil’s body and asked him about the DNA sample that Helen had mentioned. He denied that any such tests had taken place. Next, Leanne shelled out for a proper DNA analysis, and using samples taken from her parents, she was able to confirm that Ben was Phil’s biological son after all.
Then the story took another strange turn. Apparently, Leanne reached out to Helen’s colleagues, who told her all about the nickname that her sister-in-law had earned at work. “They’d call her the Black Widow behind her back,” Leanne explained. “She’d asked them about rat poison. She said to one who’d done some work around the house, ‘Don’t worry about Phil, he won’t be around for long.'” But in spite of her ever-growing suspicions, Leanne seemingly managed to remain on polite terms with the woman she believed had killed her brother.
Then, however, something in Leanne snapped. Overwhelmed, she sent a text message to Helen, blaming her for Phil’s death. So Helen then apparently responded by contacting the police, who gave Leanne a warning. “She thought she was playing me and I was her little gopher,” Leanne told the New Zealand Herald in 2017.
Meanwhile, another bizarre story began playing out back in New Zealand. In April 2010, Helen contacted the police to tell them that her son Adam Kearns had been sending her death threats. Not only this, but she claimed that he had done the same to his ex-partner, Casey Woodstock. Police initially took Adam into custody. However, after two weeks, they discovered that Helen had sent the abusive messages to herself in an apparent attempt to frame her son. Outraged, Adam decided to take legal action against his mother, accusing her of having caused him both emotional and financial harm.
Meanwhile, back in Australia, Leanne had gathered enough evidence against Helen to go to the police. But frustratingly, they took no official steps against her. Eventually, though, Leanne realized that she could ask the coroner’s office to hold an inquest. When Helen showed up with a different version of the suicide note, this time without a signature, Leanne was able to question her in a formal setting. For six months, Leanne and her family were subsequently in limbo. Then, in May 2011, the coroner finally issued a report. “I considered that on the facts as established by the evidence before me, I’m unable to reach the threshold required for a finding of suicide,” it read. And with that, the case was reopened.
Again, Leanne approached the police with her evidence, and this time they acted upon it. In October, officers arrested Helen on suspicion of murder. They also charged her with two separate counts of attempted murder, believing that she’d tried unsuccessfully to take Phil’s life on previous occasions. Then, before Helen had even gone on trial for Phil’s murder, she was dealt another blow. In August 2012, she was sentenced to two years and eight months behind bars—punishment for her earlier attempt to frame her own son.
At the end of 2013, Leanne finally got to see her sister-in-law stand trial. By this time, the story had become a media circus, and Leanne faced several cross-examinations while in the dock. However, justice ultimately prevailed, and Helen was deemed guilty of murder. In addition, she was pronounced guilty on one count of attempted murder. While Leanne cried, her son Lance celebrated the verdict in a different way. Taking out his phone, he played a track that had been a favorite of Phil’s: the Meatloaf classic “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad.” “It was just such a relief that after such a long fight we got what we needed: the truth,” Leanne told the BBC.
Helen was ultimately given a life sentence, although she’d be eligible for parole in 17 years. Apparently, Leanne believes her sister-in-law had Phil’s $250,000 life insurance policy in her sights, prompting her to plan his murder. Had Leanne not been so dogged in her detective work, Helen might have gotten away with it. That said, the financial and emotional cost of the investigation had taken its toll on Leanne and her family. For one thing, constantly flying between Australia and New Zealand caused her to rack up huge debts. The time that she’d spent away from her own children also precipitated a rift that is seemingly still not healed.
Since Helen’s trial, Leanne has at least received compensation from the police, although the officers involved in the initial investigation have yet to issue an apology. Meanwhile, Helen has lodged multiple appeals against her conviction, and she’s currently attempting to secure samples from Phil’s body in an effort to prove that an undetected heart defect was the underlying cause of his death. In 2016, Leanne published a book, “Catching the Black Widow,” about her experiences of investigating her brother’s murder. Then, the following year, the movie adaptation aired on New Zealand television. Today, Leanne is working towards a degree in criminology, hoping to help victims like herself navigate the criminal justice system—hopefully without having to turn detective themselves.
