American widow left out of will of suicide husband who killed their daughter

An American widow whose husband killed their three year old daughter then took his own life near their Cork home is to sue his estate.

Twenty-six-year-old Rebecca McCarthy is taking legal action after her late spouse wrote her out of his will just before the deaths.

A distraught Rebecca is currently back home in America with her family according to the report.

The paper says that in the days before the tragedy last March, the 50-year-old husband changed his will to prevent his wife inheriting a Ballydehob farm and other assets.

The Sunday Independent reports says he left the bulk of his estate, including buildings and farm land to his immediate family and a neighbour.

Two months after the death of her three-year-old daughter and her husband, Rebecca discovered that he had excluded her from his will.

Sources close to the story told the Sunday Independent that she was ‘stunned’ by the news.

California born Rebecca has now launched a High Court action to restore her legal entitlement to her share of the family home and farm.

She is also seeking compensation from her late husband’s estate for trauma and distress over the loss of her little girl.

The couple met when Rebecca Bailey-Cejnar came to Ballydehob from America to spend her gap year.

She stayed with a local family in Ballydehob and attended school in nearby Schull.

She met McCarthy when she approached him for help about a school project on farming. They married when she turned 18.

The report says the relationship had become strained before the tragedy with the husband afraid that his wife would take their daughter back to America.

Rebecca’s father Harry Cejnar later rubbished these reports and said that Clarissa didn’t even have a passport, nor had her mother applied to get one for her.

The report says that on the day of the tragedy, McCarthy sought professional advice to find out if he could prevent his daughter from being taken out of the country and was told that he could not.

He later wrote a suicide note and explained that he was taking Clarissa to ‘heaven’.