How our sister was betrayed by the GP who put sex before duty: Siblings speak out after doctor started affair with lung cancer patient's husband days after she died

Moved on: Dr Judith Ames and Robert Owens pictured smiling together outside a GMC tribunal

During the final stages of her battle against cancer, Joyce Owens often spoke to friends in glowing terms of the ‘caring lady GP’ who came to see her.
Dr Judith Ames was a frequent visitor to the detached Plymouth home Joyce shared with her husband, Robert, a retired accountant, and cared for her from the moment she was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in May 2011 to the day she died in March 2012.
Had anyone told Joyce that Dr Ames, a married mother-of-three, was developing romantic feelings for her husband, or that only 13 days after her death she would take her place in the marital bed, her opinion might have been somewhat less charitable.
Having signed Joyce’s death certificate on March 9, 2012, Dr Ames, 52, rapidly embarked on an affair with the dead woman’s 66-year-old husband.
Within a couple of weeks, she had moved into his home and just 19 days after Joyce’s death, he had proposed — and she had accepted.
This week, the General Medical Council faced a moral conundrum of the highest order as it tried to decide whether Dr Ames’s actions were a sexually motivated abuse of her professional position and contrary to the GMC’s guidelines or — as Mr Owens argued at the hearing where he spoke in his GP lover’s defence — a ‘genuine love story’.
Certainly, the adoring glances shared between the couple as they walked hand in hand outside the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service in Manchester suggest the kind of all-consuming love that can overcome any obstacle — including Dr Ames’s husband of 20 years, Paul.
A teacher and the father of their three children, William, 21, Ed, 19, and Harriet, 15, Paul is said to be ‘utterly devastated’ by his wife’s behaviour.

For his part, Mr Owens is adamant this is not a case of a doctor preying on a vulnerable patient and her grieving husband.
Instead, he claims, his strong Christian faith made it possible for him to fall in love again so quickly.
‘Once she is dead, in my understanding, that’s it. I move on,’ he said of his wife of 34 years during one jaw-dropping moment at this week’s hearing.
Despite his passionate defence of his lover, Dr Ames was found guilty of abusing her professional position yesterday after days of deliberation by the GMC panel.

Tragic: Joyce Owens wife of Robert who was treated by Dr Judith Ames as she died from cancer

When questioned by the panel, she would not reveal when the relationship became physical, saying it was a deeply personal matter.
‘How we love each other is our own business,’ she added.
But the panel found that her actions were sexually motivated and that Mr Owens was ‘vulnerable’ after the death of his wife.
They must now decide whether her behaviour constitutes misconduct and if her fitness to practice is impaired. If so, Dr Ames could be struck off.
But uncomfortable and disturbing questions remain about this strange, hastily formed romance — not least those being asked by Joyce Owens’s family.

'There is such a thing as indecent haste, and while we understand that they are not in the first flush of youth, we think that they should have delayed moving in together while Joyce’s family and friends were given time to mourn her loss.'

Joyce Owens's siblings

This week, in a joint statement given exclusively to the Mail, her siblings, who have asked not to be named, said the doctor’s decision to move in with Mr Owens was a ‘betrayal’.
‘The decision of Robert Owens and Dr Ames to live together in the home [Joyce] shared with Robert, within a few days of her funeral, was a betrayal of her by the two people responsible for her care during the latter stages of her long, painful battle with cancer.
‘There is such a thing as indecent haste, and while we understand that they are not in the first flush of youth, we think that they should have delayed moving in together while Joyce’s family and friends were given time to mourn her loss.
‘Robert Owens’s statement to the effect that his Christian faith justified his decision to move on to a new partner so quickly after Joyce’s death is particularly distasteful to the family.’
The painful truth, of course, is that it was only because Joyce Owens, a heavy smoker, developed lung cancer that Dr Ames met her husband, Robert.
It was in May 2011 that Joyce, a retired doctor’s receptionist, visited Dr Ames at Mannamead Surgery in Plymouth, complaining of dizziness. She was referred to hospital, where lung cancer was diagnosed.
Joyce, who like her husband was a devout churchgoer at Mutley Baptist Church in Plymouth, chose not to have chemotherapy or radiotherapy, telling friends she wanted to enjoy her final days in peace.

Treatment: Dr Ames was a doctor at Mannamead Surgery in Plymouth when Mrs Owens was diagnosed with cancer

From that day until Joyce’s death, Dr Ames  became a regular visitor at the Owens family’s home.
According to one neighbour: ‘The doctor’s car was outside the house a lot while Joyce was ill, but we just thought she was in a really bad way and needed a lot of care. I think she would be absolutely horrified if she knew what was going on now.’
Two days before Joyce died, Dr Ames told a receptionist that she had developed a bond with Mr Owens and was off to the couple’s home for ‘gin and tonics’, while Joyce lay in bed upstairs, something which Joyce’s siblings told the Mail they found particularly distasteful.
Dr Ames also confided to a community nurse that she had become emotionally involved with the family.

'I went to the funeral and next thing I know, the doctor who had  looked after Joyce was living in her house.'
A neighbour of Mr Owens

According to another neighbour: ‘I went to the funeral and next thing I know, the doctor who had  looked after Joyce was living in her house.
‘I’m sure there were only two days between Joyce’s funeral and Dr Ames moving in. It’s just awful.
‘The couple were churchgoers and were always doing good deeds. They would often have underprivileged children round to their house for dinner or barbecues.’
Dr Ames and Mr Owens insist their relationship did not become sexual until two weeks after Joyce’s death.
Having moved into Joyce’s home, Dr Ames told colleagues she was prepared to quit her job if they disapproved of the relationship.
But her claim that she and Mr Owens had the support of Joyce’s family is at odds with the statement Joyce’s siblings gave to the Mail.

Hand in hand: Dr Judith Ames and Robert Owens

During the GMC hearing, it emerged that Mr Owens had spoken to one of his wife’s closest friends by telephone at the end of March and told her he had been in a relationship for a fortnight and was planning to marry again.
He told the friend Dr Ames was ‘upstairs in bed’. According to the GMC’s barrister, Simon Phillips, the friend was ‘shocked’.
In their joint statements, Joyce’s siblings said: ‘We wonder how his Christian faith justifies the telephone call he made just two weeks after Joyce’s death to her oldest friend, who herself was suffering from cancer, to tell her that his new partner was “up in bed” and that he intended to marry her.’
On several occasions this week, Mr Owens, who waived his right to anonymity to defend his fiancée, used his faith to justify his relationship with Dr Ames.
Saying they shared a ‘free spirit’, he said: ‘I have this mental attitude that I live for the present. I live with a very strong faith and relationship with God, and I’m able to deal with things very quickly.’
Perhaps significantly, he claimed it was not out of character for him to move on so quickly to a new partner, because he had done the same when his first marriage broke up and he went on to marry Joyce.
‘When my first wife left me and I realised that marriage was broken up, my motivation was to find a new partner,’ he said.
Indeed, inquiries made by the Mail this week seem to suggest that history is rather repeating itself.
For the late Joyce and Robert got together extremely rapidly — just two weeks after Joyce split from her first husband, in February 1978.
This week, Joyce’s ex-husband, the father of their two daughters who has asked not to be named, insisted that far from Mr Owens being abandoned by his first wife, Linda was ‘virtually pushed out’ by her husband’s infidelity with her best friend, Joyce.
He revealed a tale of domestic strife and heartache which stretches back three-and-a-half decades.
‘History is repeating itself. I see it all happening again with this doctor and her husband and their children,’ he told the Mail.

'There’s no sensitivity and feeling. They should have agreed to cool it for six months because the situation demanded that. Robert has a very perverted understanding of Christianity.'

Joyce's ex-husband

‘And why? Even if you have those feelings . . . all right, leave it a few months. Have some discretion.
‘There’s no sensitivity and feeling. They should have agreed to cool it for six months because the situation demanded that. Robert has a very perverted understanding of Christianity. He says he is of a deep faith, but I cannot reconcile his understanding of Christianity with my own.
‘You can’t do what you want in life. You are responsible for what you do, always.’
Joyce Mason was a 19-year-old shop assistant when she married for the first time in 1961 in Islington, North London.
She and her then 22-year-old husband, who is also a devout Christian, moved to Bedford so that they could afford to buy their own home, and subsequently had two children.
He recalls that it was at Brickhill Baptist Church in Bedford that their paths crossed with Robert Owens and his first wife, Linda, who had met and married in their hometown of Cardiff in 1969. ‘Joyce left me. She decided Robert was younger, had a degree, a good job and money and there you are,’ he says now.
‘It was a very painful time for me, and for Linda, too. She was left absolutely bereft by Robert. She adored him.
‘Linda didn’t walk out on him — she was virtually pushed out.

Smiling: The couple are said to have moved in with each other within weeks of Mrs Owens's death

‘Linda and I both left the church because we couldn’t cope, and they were accepted as a couple.
‘They cloaked themselves with respectability, but they hurt so many people by doing what they did.’
In the aftermath of the double break-up, Robert and Joyce moved to Devon. Extraordinarily, they took Robert’s three children with Linda and Joyce’s two daughters from her first marriage with them.
Tragically, in 1993 Robert’s youngest daughter, Delyth, was killed at the age of 18 when a tractor toppled onto her during work experience on a Cornish farm.
A bitter wrangle over Joyce’s two daughters meant that their father lost touch with them, despite years of trying to maintain contact.
‘Of course, the past is the past, but this is now,’ adds Joyce’s ex-husband. ‘One of my daughters wrote to tell me that Joyce had died.
‘Despite everything, I wrote to Robert to say how sorry I was and that I hoped things would get better for him, but I hadn’t realised that this woman had already moved in.

‘I can’t understand it. People just don’t do that. Whatever the passions involved, it’s quite bizarre to think that a doctor has done that.'

Joyce's ex husband

‘I can’t understand it. People just don’t do that. Whatever the passions involved, it’s quite bizarre to think that a doctor has done that.
‘My daughters must feel utterly betrayed. And, despite everything, I don’t think Joyce deserved this.’
There is little doubt, too, that the couple’s romance has torn two families apart.
Joyce’s two daughters, Sara and Jane, from her first marriage, are said no longer to be speaking to their stepfather.
Meanwhile, Mr Owens’s two surviving children from his first marriage — Christian, who lives in Edinburgh, and Rhiannydd, who lives in Arizona — are standing by their father.
Despite the criticisms the couple face, the relationship between Dr Ames and Mr Owens appears to be going from strength to strength. Although Dr Ames was not a regular church attendee before meeting Mr Owens, she now worships regularly with him.
In the run-up to his third marriage, Mr Owens appears to have left the church he attended with Joyce and found a new one, which he attends with Dr Ames. They have been embraced by the Baptist community and are planning to marry in September.
According to one neighbour: ‘We see the doctor and Robert a lot. They are a very active couple. They do a lot of cycling and canoeing. They seem to be very happy together.
‘Judith told me last Sunday that the couple were off to church to pray for Joyce, as that is what she had asked for.’
To the more forgiving, those prayers will be seen as a touching tribute to the woman whose shoes Dr Ames filled so swiftly. To others, of course, the very idea of such a gesture will only rub salt into the wounds created by this extraordinary romance.
In the end, it is impossible not to wonder what Joyce Owens herself would have thought had she known how swiftly her husband would fall in love after her death.
According to her first husband: ‘She wasn’t afraid to speak her mind and say exactly what she thought of someone.
‘I think she would put a knife in his back if she knew.’

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