Mother And Daughter Died In A Suicide Pact After Woman Duped Them Into Thinking They Faced 20 Years In Jail As Part Of A Bizarre Scam That Turned Their Family Against Them

According to MailOnline, a heartless fraudster was behind bars last night after she admitted conning a terrified mother and daughter, who both died in an apparent suicide pact.

A court heard Linsey Cotton threatened Nicola McDonough and her mother Margaret with a 20-year prison sentence if they did not give her thousands of pounds.

The threat was the culmination of a madcap scheme which saw Cotton pose as 12 different people and included a bogus conspiracy theory that the Government was trying to kill patients in a medical trial and hide the evidence.

Days after the final confrontation, the pair were found with fatal slash wounds at a Premier Inn hotel in Greenock, Renfrewshire.

Cotton, 33, concocted her bizarre plot to convince the pair that they had broken a strict confidentiality agreement surrounding the secret medical treatment of a person whose identity she had made up. 

She used the imaginary identity of Stephanie Wilson on a dating website to lure Mrs McDonough’s son, Michael, into an online relationship and then spun a complex web of lies to con him out of nearly £5,000. She then attempted to persuade his family to part with a further £5,500.