Priest’s email confession to two-year secret affair that ended in mother’s fatal overdose

UNITED KINGDOM
Daily Mail

By LOUISE ECCLES

A Roman Catholic priest faces an inquiry after sensationally admitting an affair with a vulnerable parishioner who later died of a drugs overdose.

In an extraordinary series of emails to her son, Father Stephen Cooper confessed he had been seeing nurse Kathleen Lardner in the months leading up to her death.

Extracts from her diary at the time reveal that the hospital ward manager suspected he was seeing another woman and made her feel ‘like a prostitute’.

Ten years on, Father Cooper now admits that Miss Lardner, who suffered from depression and anxiety, called him on the day she died to say she had taken some pills and ask for forgiveness.
But he says that at her insistence he did not phone an ambulance, despite realising she was in a ‘deep depression’.

By the time an ambulance was called by her long-term partner several hours later, it was too late. She died in hospital the same day, aged 41. An inquest found she had swallowed a fatal quantity of her partner’s blood pressure tablets.

Incredibly, Father Cooper presided over her funeral the following week, with her family and friends oblivious to the affair or her desperate phone call.

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