When the evidence fails, the estate pays for it
Two kinds of material on this page, kept strictly apart. Documented cases, each with a source you can check. And illustrations, which are invented to explain a mechanism and are labelled as such.
Documented cases
Each of these is a matter of public record. Where a popular version of the story is wrong, we say so rather than repeat it, because the wrong version is usually the more dramatic one.
An estate with no will, and six years of process
The musician Prince died on 21 April 2016 without a will. His estate went to a court appointed administrator, and the value itself became the dispute: the administrator put it at $82.3 million, the Internal Revenue Service at $163.2 million. It was finally agreed at $156.4 million in January 2022, and a judge approved distribution in early August 2022, more than six years after his death.
Two of his six heirs died during the administration.
Source: Associated Press, 15 January 2022. We do not quote a total for tax and fees, because no source states one.
A valid will, under a couch cushion
Aretha Franklin died on 16 August 2018 and was initially believed to have left no will. In May 2019 three handwritten documents were found in her home. One, dated March 2014, was under a couch cushion. Another, from 2010, was in a locked cabinet.
On 11 July 2023 a jury in Oakland County Probate Court, Michigan, held that the 2014 document was a valid will. It deliberated for less than an hour, almost five years after her death.
Source: NPR, carrying Associated Press, 11 July 2023. Note that the common claim she "died intestate" is now false: a court has held she left a valid will.
A will that arrived from nowhere
Howard Hughes died in April 1976. Weeks later a handwritten will was left anonymously at a church headquarters in Salt Lake City, leaving a sixteenth of the estate to a service station owner who said a stranger had asked him to deliver an envelope. In June 1978 a Nevada jury found the document was not authentic, and Hughes was declared to have died intestate. The court identified sixteen maternal heirs in 1981, and the estate was divided among cousins in 1983, about seven years after his death.
Source: EBSCO Research Starters and UPI, 10 August 1981. We give no figure for the estate's size, because contemporaneous estimates ranged from $163 million to over a billion. We also name no forger: the document was ruled a forgery, but nobody was ever charged.
Codicils signed by someone who no longer understood them
Brooke Astor was diagnosed with dementia of moderate severity in April 2001. Between late 2003 and March 2004, three codicils altered her estate in her son's favour. The trial record documented roughly 68 instances of confusion and 46 of paranoia in the months around the signings. One codicil was signed after a twenty minute meeting with a lawyer she had never met.
In October 2009 her son Anthony Marshall was convicted on fourteen of sixteen counts, including a scheme to defraud by altering the will when he knew she lacked capacity. The attorney Francis Morrissey was separately convicted of forging her signature on the third codicil. On appeal in March 2013 one count was vacated and the rest affirmed.
Source: the appellate opinion itself, People v Marshall, 106 AD3d 1 (1st Dept, 26 March 2013).
The case where the trust held
This one belongs here for the opposite reason. J. Howard Marshall died in 1995. His assets sat in a trust settled twelve years before his marriage to Anna Nicole Smith, made irrevocable shortly after it. She was never written into it.
The litigation reached the United States Supreme Court twice, in 2006 and again in 2011, and she received nothing from the estate. Both principals died before it ended. The dispute ran roughly fifteen years to the final decision, and related proceedings continued for years after that.
Sources: Marshall v. Marshall, 547 U.S. 293 (2006) and Stern v. Marshall, 564 U.S. 462 (2011). She won the 2006 case on a narrow question of federal jurisdiction only, and lost the case that decided the money.
Illustrations
The following are invented scenarios written to explain a mechanism. They are not real clients, not real cases, and not based on any individual.
The version nobody could find
A settlor updates a deed and tells one relative where the new copy is. That relative predeceases them. The family administers the estate on the older version, in good faith, and discovers the later one afterwards.
The beneficiary who could not check
A beneficiary is told the terms rather than shown them. Their only route to verification runs through the trustee, who is the person whose decisions they want to question.
The signature nobody could date
Two documents surface with unclear dates. Everything then turns on which came last, and the only witnesses are interested parties.
What a verifiable record would, and would not, have changed
Being precise about this matters more than being persuasive about it.
What it addresses
- Which document came last, and when it was committed. A timestamp nobody can move afterwards.
- Whether a document existed at all on a given date.
- Whether a record has been altered since.
- Verification without asking the counterparty for permission.
What it does not address
- Whether the settlor had mental capacity. The Astor case turned on capacity, and no ledger can establish it.
- Whether someone was subject to undue influence.
- Whether the terms are legally valid where they must operate.
- Tax, which is set by legislatures and does not care how the deed is stored.
An honest reading of these five cases: a verifiable record would have helped materially in some and been almost irrelevant in others. Anyone selling you a technology that solves all five is selling you something.