A woman from the Shropshire/Welsh border who used a dead baby’s identification to buy a house and claim benefits has been spared an immediate prison sentence.

Georgina Murphy, 53, of Pen y Waun, Chirk, was given a nine-month prison sentence suspended for 12 months, and was placed on supervision for a year after she admitted nine offences of false accounting and fraud.

Mold Crown Court heard yesterday Murphy was suffering from a complex web of mental health difficulties brought about by years of abuse as a child.

The court heard Murphy used the identity of Gail Jones, who died in May 1957 just hours after being born.

Mr Alex Offer, prosecuting, told how it was a very sophisticated fraud where the defendant had created and used extensively the baby’s false identification.

The court heard Murphy had obtained a National Insurance Number in the baby’s name, together with a birth certificate, utility bills and wage slips.

The defendant owned two properties in Lakeholme Gardens, Oswestry and Y Waun in Chirk. The house in Oswestry had been bought in the name of Gail Jones, and a mortgage taken out in the false name.

False accounting charges centred on applications for council tax and housing benefit in the name of Gail Jones.

Mr Fergal Allen, for Murphy, said that it was a distasteful offence but the consequences for the deceased baby’s family had been unintended and unforeseen.

Judge Philip Hughes said the case was serious in that the defendant’s applications for benefits were false from the start and they went on for about three years from 2006 to 2009.

In court Gail Jones’s mother Doreen Jones, from Buckley, North Wales, spoke of her heartbreak.

She said when police officers asked her and her husband about their baby, she thought that there may have been a mix-up and that her baby had been given to someone else.