Actress Hazel Maddock hid dead mother's body in bedroom to claim her benefits

By James Tozer

Last updated at 11:31 AM on 14th June 2011

• One of the accused was an extra in Hollyoaks and Brookside

A television actress who left her elderly mother’s body for up to six months in the bedroom of the home they shared while pocketing her pension was yesterday warned she faced jail.

Worried neighbours had reported not seeing 95-year-old Olive Maddock for months.

Police were eventually called and smashed their way into her room where they found her remains.

The widow of a professor of naval engineering, Mrs Maddock had been a keen ballroom dancer, but in her later years she became an eccentric recluse living in a dirty, dilapidated house.

Yesterday Hazel Maddock, 61, an actress who has appeared alongside ex-EastEnders star Nigel Harman, and her 35-year-old artist daughter, Jasmine, both admitted preventing the pensioner having a lawful burial.

Hazel Maddock also admitted fraud after it emerged she had claimed her mother’s state  pension and pension credit following her death.

Police who were called to the ramshackle semi-detached house shared by the three women in  Wallasey, Wirral, Merseyside, last August were appalled by the filthy conditions they encountered.

They had to break down the door of Mrs Maddock’s room and found her remains lying on the floor.

Experts were unable to establish a cause of death because of the state of her body, but a post-mortem examination concluded Mrs Maddock had been dead for between two and six months.

The pair had been due to stand trial accused of keeping her death a secret, but yesterday both pleaded guilty to the unlawful prevention of her burial.

Hazel Maddock also admitted dishonestly making a false representation that her mother was still alive and entitled to receive benefits between July 6 and August 6.

The lie enabled her to obtain one payment of her dead mother’s state pension of £176.92 and a single payment of pension credit of £34.44.

Maddock has appeared as an extra in television soaps including playing a prison officer in Brookside. Her highest-profile role came in 2006 when she appeared in The Outsiders, a one-off ITV1 drama starring Harman.

Jasmine Maddock, now of East Finchley, North London, shook nervously during the hearing at Liverpool Crown Court and later broke down sobbing in a back room.

The court heard she was aware her grandmother had died but had failed to take any action.

A professional artist, she describes herself as a surrealist and has exhibited work at the Saatchi Gallery.

Both women were released on bail but Judge Gerald Clifton said that didn’t mean he wasn’t considering locking them up when he sentences them next month, telling Hazel Maddock that her offences were ‘serious matters’.

‘You must expect the possibility of a custodial sentence,’ he told Jasmine Maddock.

A neighbour of Mrs Maddock said: ‘Olive became a bit cantankerous as she got older but nobody deserves to be treated like  that.’