May 20, 2017 12:00pm by David Farrar

So how was the child conceived?

A Marlborough widow who fraudulently collected $373,000 from ACC has lost an appeal against her convictions.

ACC discovered Janice Walker was receiving a widow’s pension while living with another man. …

Walker denied nine criminal charges and took the case to trial. She was found guilty and ordered to pay the money back.

Her lawyer Rob Harrison appealed the decision, arguing last month that Autism Spectrum Disorder could have affected her communication with ACC and the court. She was diagnosed after her sentencing at the Blenheim District Court last year.

She spent 20 years lying and ripping the system off, and then claims it is due to something she found after she was sentenced!

However, the Court of Appeal in Auckland rejected Walker’s appeal on Friday.

She knew what a de facto relationship was and deliberately lied on the forms, the appeal decision said.

Walker raised four children, managed nine or ten rental properties and ran a business, so she must be a “mentally capable” person, the decision said.

Yet greedy for more.

Walker was eligible for weekly compensation from ACC after her husband died in an accident in the late 1980s.

She signed an ACC form every year until 2012 stating she was not married or in a de facto relationship.

However, an ACC investigation discovered Walker’s new partner moved into her 400-acre Okaramio property in 1992, and helped to build a family home there.

ACC’s investigation in 2013 found their relationship was “in the nature of marriage”, and weekly compensation to Walker should have stopped in 2004.

Walker was recorded as saying in an interview with ACC that she had lied about the man living with her in case it affected her payments.

But she maintained the relationship was not de facto because there was no sexual element.

“We were still living under the same roof, but there was no intimacy, no sleeping together, no talking,” she told an ACC staff member.

A small flaw in her argument though: