— The Probate Archive
Famous estates, and the fights they caused.
Probate reads dry on the page and never is in practice. It is the one area of law that runs entirely on family, memory, money and regret — a will in a couch cushion, a dog with a security detail, a body frozen in Arizona against a will that said cremate.
Every case here is sourced, and every case ends the same way: with the Florida statutes that would have governed the same facts here.
Cases
204
Collections
7
Florida cases
61
Still open
24
— Browse
— 204 cases
The will in the couch· 9-min readStill open
Aretha Franklin
The Queen of Soul was thought to have died without a will. Then her niece found three of them — one in a locked cabinet, one wedged under the sofa cushions. A Michigan jury took less than an hour to pick the couch.
Two trips to the Supreme Court· 10-min readFlorida
Anna Nicole Smith
A fourteen-month marriage to an 89-year-old oil billionaire produced nineteen years of litigation, two United States Supreme Court opinions that first-year law students still read, and — in the end — nothing at all.
The dog that got $12 million· 8-min readFlorida
Leona Helmsley
She left two grandchildren nothing and a Maltese named Trouble twelve million dollars. A Manhattan judge cut the dog to $2M and gave the grandchildren $6M. Then Trouble retired to a hotel in Sarasota with a security detail.
Two co-trustees, one Margaritaville· 8-min readStill openFlorida
Jimmy Buffett
He left $275 million in a trust for his widow and named her to run it alongside his longtime financial adviser. Neither can act without the other, neither can remove the other, and as of 2026 they are still in court in Palm Beach County.
The $24.6 million fee· 8-min readFlorida
Robert Rauschenberg
Three friends administered an artist's trust on Captiva Island and asked for $60 million. His own foundation said $375,000. A Lee County judge said $24.6 million — and Florida's appellate court affirmed, in the case that still governs what a trustee's work is worth here.
No will, six years, half to a stranger· 9-min read
Prince
He controlled his masters, his name, and every frame of video shot at Paisley Park. He did not leave a will. Six years later a judge signed off on a settlement handing half of it to a music-rights company he never met.
The greatest hitter, frozen in Arizona· 8-min readFlorida
Ted Williams
His will said cremate him and scatter the ashes off the Florida coast. Two days after he died in Florida, his son had the body flown to a cryonics facility in Arizona — on the strength of a note scrawled on a scrap of paper. The family went to war over it for two years.
Two wills, six weeks apart· 9-min read
Huguette Clark
A copper heiress worth $300 million spent the last twenty years of her life in a hospital room by choice, while her mansions sat empty and staffed. Then she signed two wills six weeks apart that said opposite things — and nineteen relatives who had never met her went to court.
The Mormon Will· 9-min read
Howard Hughes
One of the richest men on earth died without a will. Roughly forty of them then appeared — including a handwritten one, left on a desk at church headquarters, giving a Utah gas-station owner $156 million for a ride he said he gave a stranger in the desert.
The residuary clause that left the family forever· 8-min read
Marilyn Monroe
She left three quarters of everything to her acting coach, outright, with no one named after him. He outlived her by twenty years. When he died it passed to his third wife — a woman Monroe never met — who turned it into a fifty-million-dollar brand.
The best-timed death in American tax history· 7-min readFlorida
George Steinbrenner
For exactly one year — 2010 — the federal estate tax did not exist. The Yankees owner died in Tampa on July 13th of that year, with a fortune reported above a billion dollars, and his heirs paid nothing.
The Great Stork Derby· 8-min read
Charles Vance Millar
A Toronto lawyer with no family left his fortune to whichever woman in the city gave birth to the most children in the ten years after his death. He meant it as a joke about human greed. Then the Depression arrived and it stopped being funny.
The conviction that unhappened, and then happened again· 10-min read
Aaron Hernandez
For 673 days, an old common-law doctrine meant that a man who died before his appeal was heard had, in the eyes of the law, never been convicted at all. In 2019 Massachusetts abolished the rule and put the conviction back on the record.
The lawyer who never made a will· 8-min read
Abraham Lincoln
He was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1836 and practised for a quarter century. He drafted wills for his clients. When he was assassinated in 1865 he left none of his own, and a sitting Justice of the Supreme Court spent two and a half years sorting it out for free.
The $30 million he could not keep· 9-min readFlorida
Abraham Shakespeare
A Lakeland truck driver's assistant won a $30 million Florida Lotto jackpot in 2006 and took $17 million in cash. Within three years the money was gone, his house was titled to someone else's company, and he was dead. The estate spent four more years getting the house back for his two sons.
The estate that was built before the death· 9-min read
Agatha Christie
Her personal estate probated at about £106,000, which tells you nothing. Twenty-one years before she died she put the rights into a company, and along the way she handed individual works to individual relatives outright. Fifty years on it is still trading, and still in the family.
$2.8 million, and none of it hers· 8-min read
Aimee Semple McPherson
The most famous preacher in America died in 1944 with a personal estate of about $10,000. The organisation she founded was valued at $2.8 million. Her son took over the day she died — not by inheritance, but because the corporate bylaws said so.
Who can consent for the dead· 9-min read
Ajemian v. Yahoo!, Inc.
A man died in a bicycle accident with no will and an email account his brother said he had opened for him. Eleven years later the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court answered the question the whole field had been stuck on: a personal representative can give lawful consent on behalf of a decedent.
Convicted of paperwork· 9-min readFlorida
Al Capone
The federal government never proved Al Capone did the things he is remembered for. It proved he had not paid his income tax. He died on Palm Island in Miami Beach in 1947 still owing that government money — and the house everyone calls Capone's mansion was bought in his wife's name.
The $2 form that cost a fortune· 9-min readFlorida
Aldrich v. Basile
Ann Aldrich wrote her own will on an E-Z Legal Form and listed every asset she owned. Then she inherited more. Because the form had no line for a residuary clause, the new property went to two nieces she had never named — and the Florida Supreme Court said that was correct.
£50,000, three dogs, no headline· 7-min read
Alexander McQueen
Everyone remembers the designer who left money to his dogs. Almost nobody remembers the number: £50,000 out of £16 million, about three-tenths of one percent. It is the version of this bequest that works — and under English law, the version nobody could have enforced.
The trust that ran Florida· 10-min readFlorida
Alfred I. duPont & Ed Ball
Alfred I. du Pont died outside Jacksonville in 1935 and left almost everything to a trust for crippled children. His brother-in-law ran it for the next 46 years — a bank chain, a railroad, a paper company, half the Panhandle — until Congress amended the banking laws to make him choose.
The will that created the prizes· 8-min read
Alfred Nobel
Nobel wrote his own will in four handwritten pages, left 94% of his fortune to an organisation that did not exist, and named no country as his home. It took five years, a family lawsuit, and an executor moving securities out of France to make it work.
The consent forms were forged· 8-min read
Alistair Cooke
He broadcast Letter from America for 58 years and died in New York in 2004. A year later the family learned that a tissue-recovery company had taken bone from his body before cremation, on paperwork nobody had signed. Its principal went to prison for 18 to 54 years.
Eighteen months, not seven years· 8-min read
Amelia Earhart
She vanished over the Pacific on July 2, 1937. The rule then said seven years of absence before a court would call someone dead. Her husband did not wait. On January 5, 1939 a Los Angeles judge declared her dead and opened an estate reported at just over $10,000 — for the most famous woman in aviation.
Two percent of an unknowable number· 9-min read
Andy Warhol
Warhol left almost everything to a foundation. The executor hired a lawyer on a percentage of the estate — then the two sides came to court with valuations hundreds of millions apart, because the fee depended on the answer. Nine years, two appeals, and one bankruptcy later, the lawyer owed the estate money.
The estate that worked· 8-min readFlorida
Arnold Palmer
In the twelve months after he died, Arnold Palmer's estate earned about $40 million — roughly what he had earned in his last year alive. Thirty-nine licensees, a drink most Americans think is a beverage rather than a man, and no public estate fight at all. This archive is mostly failures. This is the other kind.
The twins born eighteen months late· 9-min readFlorida
Astrue v. Capato
Robert Capato banked sperm before chemotherapy and died in Florida in 2002. His widow gave birth to twins in September 2003. The Supreme Court held 9–0 that whether they were his “children” for Social Security purposes depended on Florida's intestacy statute — and Florida's answer was no.
Peak earnings at 26, peak risk at 26· 10-min read
Athletes and the short window
A professional athlete compresses a lifetime of income into a handful of years, at an age when almost nobody writes a will, with a body that gets hurt for a living. Then, for some of them, the earnings continue after death — and that is a separate problem.
The name he could not leave to anyone· 8-min read
Babe Ruth
He died in 1948 having built the most valuable name in American sport. Forty-two years later his two daughters sued a publisher for using his photograph and lost outright — New York gave the dead no right of publicity at all. In 2024 one of his shirts sold for $24.12 million.
Poor little rich girl· 9-min read
Barbara Hutton
She inherited a Woolworth fortune at twelve, took control of it outright at twenty-one, and married seven times. Almost nothing about her spending was illegal or even unusual for her class. What is instructive is the structure: a trust that protected her until her twenty-first birthday and then simply stopped.
The gift with three keys· 8-min readFlorida
Bebe Rebozo
Richard Nixon's closest friend left roughly 65% of his estate — about $19 million — to the Nixon Library, on the condition that the spending be approved by Nixon's two daughters and one other friend. The money sat for four years while the approvers disagreed, and a Miami judge finally ordered them into a room together.
The two-hundred-year experiment· 8-min read
Benjamin Franklin
Franklin left £1,000 each to Boston and Philadelphia with instructions to lend it to young tradesmen at 5% and let it compound for two centuries. The cities did roughly that. The money came out in 1990, and Boston still had to litigate who got it.
The estate as a demolition site· 10-min readStill open
Bernie Madoff
Bernie Madoff's criminal case took 199 days from arrest to a 150-year sentence. The civil unwinding is still running eighteen years later — $15.485 billion recovered, and estates on both sides of it: one that paid $7.2 billion, one that was left with $1.75 million of $18.6 million.
The will she signed two years after the book· 8-min read
Bette Davis
Her daughter published a memoir in 1985. In 1987 she signed a will naming both daughters and both grandsons as intentionally omitted, and split everything between her son and her assistant. Nobody contested it. The order of those events is the whole legal story.
$6 million sold for $2.25 million· 8-min read
Billie Bob Harrell Jr.
A Home Depot shelf-stocker won $31 million on Lotto Texas in 1997 and took it as 25 annual payments of about $1.24 million. Less than two years later he signed away ten years of those payments — worth over $6 million gross — for $2.25 million in cash. Twenty months after the win he was dead, and the cash was gone.
The contract that outran the will· 8-min readFlorida
Blechman v. Estate of Blechman
Bertram Blechman amended his revocable trust to leave his partner half the income from a family LLC. He had signed an operating agreement four years earlier saying his interest would vest in his children the moment he died. Florida's Fourth District held the contract got there first — and that the interest was never an estate asset at all.
Died in Miami, judged in Kingston· 10-min readFlorida
Bob Marley
He died in a Miami hospital on May 11, 1981, at 36, with no will — he considered writing one an unseemly interest in death. Jamaican law then divided his estate, a New York jury heard a RICO case about it, and a Florida-appointed ancillary administrator spent a decade recovering what had gone missing.
The son went to prison· 10-min read
Brooke Astor
Nearly every case in this archive ends in a settlement, because civil courts divide money and rarely assign blame. This one ended differently. A Manhattan jury convicted her only son of looting her estate, an appellate court affirmed, and at 89 he reported to state prison.
Fifty years of arguing about a face· 9-min readStill open
Bruce Lee
He died in 1973 owning the most recognisable silhouette of the twentieth century. Half a century later a federal judge in Manhattan could not decide which country's law governed it, because nobody could establish where he had been living when he died.
“I intentionally omit him”· 8-min readFlorida
Burt Reynolds
The will filed after his death in Jupiter, Florida said in plain words that his only son was left out of it. Every headline ran with that. The next clause of the same sentence explained why, and it was the opposite of what the headlines said.
The countdown that ended in Oslo· 9-min read
Casey Kasem
The most familiar voice in American radio spent his last month as the subject of a conservatorship fight, a court order about a feeding tube, and a search across two states. Then, six months after his death, his body was buried in Norway.
Six years and still open· 8-min readStill open
Chadwick Boseman
He died in August 2020 at 43 without a will. California split his estate three ways, a court ordered the distribution in October 2022, and in July 2026 his brothers went back to the same court on their parents' behalf saying it still had not been completed. As of August 2026 the matter is pending.
The novelist who wrote his own last chapter, and lost· 9-min read
Charles Dickens
He directed a plain funeral, no public announcement, and — emphatically — no monument of any kind. Five days after he died his friends had him buried in Westminster Abbey and the grave left open for the public. The clause that did hold was the one giving all his private papers to his sister-in-law.
Four months in a county morgue· 9-min readStill open
Charles Manson
He died in a Bakersfield hospital in 2017. A claimed son, a claimed grandson, and a memorabilia collector holding a two-page will all filed for the body. It sat in the county morgue for four months while a court sorted out who ranked highest. The estate case is still going.
The judgment outlives the defendant· 10-min readFlorida
Claims against the estate
In Florida, no cause of action dies with the person. What kills most claims against a dead defendant is not a defence — it is a calendar. Three months from a newspaper notice, and an absolute two years from the date of death that nobody can extend.
Ninety-five percent to one son· 9-min read
Cornelius Vanderbilt
The Commodore died in 1877 leaving the largest fortune in America — and left roughly ninety-five percent of it to a single son. Three of his other children went to court alleging insanity, spiritualists, and undue influence, and New York read the transcript over breakfast for more than a year.
A membership, a policy, and a trust· 9-min readFlorida
Cryonics contracts
Cryonics is not a bequest and it is not a burial. It is a contract signed while you are alive, funded by a life insurance policy that names the organisation as beneficiary, with the long-term costs held in a separate trust. The legal problems are all in the paperwork.
As near as possible· 10-min readFlorida
Cy pres
You leave money to a charity that no longer exists, or on a condition nobody can meet. The gift does not simply evaporate — a court can redirect it to the nearest charitable purpose you would have wanted. Florida codified that power in §736.0413, and its courts have used it on a wildlife society that never existed and on Janet Reno's homestead.
Thirty-three photographs· 9-min readFlorida
Dale Earnhardt
He died on the last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500. Within six weeks his widow had gone to a Volusia County courtroom, then to the Florida Legislature, and Florida had a new public-records law with his family's name on it. It still governs every death in the state.
The year the tax did not exist· 8-min read
Dan Duncan
For one calendar year — 2010, and only 2010 — the United States had no federal estate tax. A Houston pipeline billionaire died on March 29 of that year worth about $9 billion, and his heirs are reported to be the first American billionaires to pay no estate tax since the tax was created.
The letter that was only a wish· 9-min read
Diana, Princess of Wales
She signed a will, and the next day a letter of wishes: her jewellery and three quarters of her possessions to her sons, one quarter divided among her seventeen godchildren. Four months after she died, the executors obtained a court order changing it. Nobody outside the process knew for years.
The paintings the artist gave away· 10-min read
Donor intent
Norman Rockwell gave two paintings to the museum in the town where he had lived. Forty years after his death the museum announced it would sell them to fund its own survival. His sons sued and were told they had no right to be in the room.
The butler was the executor· 10-min read
Doris Duke
The richest girl in the world died in 1993 leaving roughly $1.2 billion, almost all of it to charity — and named as executor the butler she had hired six years earlier. Three years of Manhattan Surrogate's Court litigation followed, and it produced a rule that still governs how easily a court may fire the person a will chose.
Two pages and a misspelled name· 10-min read
Elvis & Lisa Marie Presley
A one-page amendment nobody witnessed removed Elvis's widow as trustee of his daughter's trust — and spelled her name wrong. Eleven months after the settlement, a stranger published a notice in a Memphis paper announcing the foreclosure sale of Graceland.
Fourteen years, three jurisdictions, one will nobody could find· 9-min read
Errol Flynn
He died in 1959 leaving a 1954 will, an ex-wife who said there was a 1957 one, a bank he had not paid, a tax authority that wanted its share, and real property in three countries. The estate stayed in probate for about fourteen years. One beneficiary was declared dead in 1984.
798 paintings, three weeks· 10-min read
Estate of Mark Rothko
Three weeks after Mark Rothko's will was admitted to probate, his executors handed all 798 of his paintings to the gallery two of them were connected to. The Surrogate removed every one of them and made them pay what the paintings were worth by the time of trial, not what they sold for.
The body that was hidden for sixteen years· 9-min read
Eva Perón
She was embalmed to last centuries. Three years later a military government took the body from the building where it lay, moved it around Buenos Aires, shipped it to Italy, and buried it in Milan under another woman's name. Her widower got it back in 1971.
The crime that happens inside the family· 9-min readFlorida
Exploitation of the elderly
Florida wrote a separate felony for taking an older person's money from a position of trust. It is graded by dollar value, it reaches the power of attorney and the joint account, and it comes with a reporting duty that lands on bankers and nurses before it ever reaches a prosecutor.
Everything owned, nothing held· 9-min read
Father Divine
The Peace Mission movement owned hotels in Philadelphia, farms in the Hudson Valley, and a 73-acre chateau on the Main Line. Its leader held title to almost none of it — which made his assets nearly impossible to sue and made one $4,476 judgment the most consequential case of his life.
The trap and the shield· 10-min readFlorida
Florida homestead
No dollar cap. No forced sale. The most generous homestead protection in the country — and a constitutional restriction that can quietly void the single most important gift in your will. Three Florida appellate decisions show exactly how the same clause does both jobs.
When the government claims the inheritance· 10-min readFlorida
Forfeiture and the estate
A forfeiture is not a creditor's claim. It is an assertion that the property was never lawfully the decedent's — with title dating back to the day of the offence, not the day of the seizure. It runs on its own clock, in its own court, and an estate that ignores it loses by default.
Good paperwork, no conversation· 9-min read
Frank Zappa
Zappa did everything the checklist asks. Trust, catalogue, archive, a spouse who knew the business. Twenty-two years later his four children opened the document and found that two of them had been made managers of the other two.
The gift with a life estate reserved· 8-min read
Franklin D. Roosevelt
He gave his house to the United States and kept the right to live in it. He gave away his own papers and had to invent an institution to receive them. He died on April 12, 1945; seven months later his family gave up their rights early, and the government moved in.
Burn everything, unread· 10-min read
Franz Kafka's papers
Kafka left written instructions that his friend Max Brod destroy every manuscript, diary and letter without reading them. Brod published all of it. Ninety-two years later the Supreme Court of Israel decided who owned the pile — and the question underneath is one Florida answers every week.
Buried in the can he invented· 7-min read
Fredric Baur
He was the organic chemist who worked out how to stack a curved potato crisp in a cylinder, and he asked his family to bury part of him in one. On the day, his children stopped to buy a can on the way to the funeral home. Original flavour. It is the only case in this archive where the instruction was simply followed.
What survives the marriage· 10-min readFlorida
Frozen embryo disputes
Cryopreservation created a category of property, or person, or neither, that outlasts the relationship that made it. Three decisions — Tennessee 1992, New York 1998, Alabama 2024 — answer the question three different ways. Florida answered it by statute in 1993.
The Marcos estate, across four decades· 10-min readStill open
Fugitive fortunes
Two candidates: Robert Vesco, who fled with an estimated $220 million and died in Havana in 2007 with none of it recovered, and Ferdinand Marcos, whose estate has been litigated on three continents since 1989. We chose Marcos, because Vesco left no paper and Marcos left an enormous amount of it — including an estate tax bill that has grown from ₱23 billion to ₱203 billion.
The chihuahua with the Escalade· 8-min readFlorida
Gail Posner
A Miami Beach heiress left her waterfront mansion and a reported $3 million trust to three dogs, and roughly $26 million to the household staff who cared for them. Her son received $1 million and filed suit. The house sold for $8.4 million.
Seven days short of ninety· 9-min readStill open
Gene Hackman
Two people died in the same house within about a week of each other in February 2025. Her will said her husband had to outlive her by 90 days. He outlived her by roughly seven. That gap, and not a single word of either document, decided where the money went.
Twenty-nine pages, no lawyer, no witnesses· 9-min read
George Washington
He wrote it himself over the summer of 1799 — twenty-nine pages in his own hand, on paper bearing his own watermark, and he said so in the document: no professional character had been consulted. It is one of the most studied wills in American history. Florida would not admit a page of it.
The codicil at 96· 9-min read
Georgia O'Keeffe
A 27-year-old potter knocked on the door at Ghost Ranch looking for odd jobs. O'Keeffe was 85. Eleven years later a codicil moved the residuary estate — reported at $47.2 million — from charity to him. Her sister and her niece went to court, and the answer arrived as a settlement rather than a verdict.
The man who died with the passwords· 9-min read
Gerald Cotten / QuadrigaCX
Canada's largest crypto exchange told 115,000 customers that roughly C$250 million was locked in cold wallets only its dead founder could open. Investigators opened the wallets anyway. They had been empty since April 2018.
The test is the relationship, not the recipient· 10-min readFlorida
Gifts to religious organisations
A relative discovers that most of an estate went to a congregation. The instinct is to argue about the organisation. Florida courts do not. They ask three questions about relationship, benefit, and procurement — and the answers would be identical if the recipient were a university, a caregiver, or a nephew.
The conservatorship decided a month before he died· 9-min read
Groucho Marx
At 86 he was the subject of a public court fight over who would control him: his companion and manager, or his son. A judge finally handed the job to his 27-year-old grandson three weeks before he died. Six years later a jury ordered the companion to repay the estate $471,842.
The countess who never existed· 8-min readFlorida
Gunther the German Shepherd
For thirty years a line of German Shepherds has been reported as the richest dog on earth, heir to a German countess. Reporters checked. There is no countess. There never was. The dog does, however, own a mansion on Brickell Avenue — which is a different and more interesting fact.
The estate with no paper trail· 8-min readFlorida
H. Wayne Huizenga
He built three Fortune 500 companies and owned three professional sports franchises. Forbes put him at $2.8 billion. When he died in Fort Lauderdale in 2018, the public record produced a probate file, a deed, and an auction result — and essentially nothing else. That is not an accident. It is Florida law working as designed.
The will they sealed· 9-min read
Harper Lee
Lee published one novel, then nothing for fifty-five years — until a second manuscript surfaced in a safe-deposit box when she was 88. She died the following February. Her will went under seal in an Alabama probate court, and a newspaper had to sue to read it. What it revealed was a trust nobody can read at all.
The will that was two years out of date· 8-min read
Heath Ledger
He signed his will in April 2003. His daughter was born in October 2005. The document never mentioned her, and under the law that governed it, it did not have to. His family handed her the entire estate anyway — which is the rare happy ending in this archive, and the one you should never plan on.
A stranger has been researching your family· 9-min read
Heir hunters
An industry exists to find the relatives of people who died without a will, prove the relationship in court, and take a percentage. It has made ordinary people rich, produced a British television series, and — in Salt Lake City in 2019 — produced two guilty pleas under the Sherman Act.
The estate that did not know what it held· 9-min readStill open
Henrietta Lacks
Cells taken during her cancer treatment in 1951 became the first human cell line that would not die. They are in laboratories on every continent. Her family found out twenty-two years later, and the question of what — if anything — her estate owns is still being litigated.
The law written for one marriage· 9-min readFlorida
Henry Flagler
Flagler built Standard Oil with Rockefeller, then built Florida — the railway, Palm Beach, Miami, Key West. In 1901 the Florida legislature made incurable insanity a ground for divorce. He was the only person ever divorced under it. It was repealed in 1905.
Thirty downstrokes, one in a sextillion· 9-min read
Hetty Green
Before she became the richest woman in America, Hetty Green sued her aunt's estate over a disputed page said to leave her everything. The defence hired a Harvard mathematician, who calculated the odds that the signature was genuine at roughly one in 2.666 sextillion. It is the first great use of statistics as evidence in an American courtroom.
The case that made inheritance property· 9-min read
Hodel v. Irving
Congress decided that fractional interests in Indian land worth a few dollars would simply stop passing to heirs. The Supreme Court held that taking away the right to leave something to your family is itself a taking — the first time the Court said so.
The trust that outlived everyone, and the name that kept working· 9-min read
Humphrey Bogart
He died in 1957 leaving a trust for his wife and two small children. It was still being administered when Lauren Bacall died fifty-seven years later. By then the family's real asset was not the money — it was the surname, licensed more than a hundred times and defended in federal court against a sofa.
The $3 million cannon· 8-min read
Hunter S. Thompson
He designed it in 1978, on camera, twenty-seven years before he needed it: a 153-foot tower in the shape of a two-thumbed fist, with a cannon on top to fire his ashes over Colorado. It happened exactly as drawn. It cost a reported $3 million, and his estate did not pay a cent of it.
1,103 heirs· 8-min read
Ida Wood
She spent twenty-five years in a Herald Square hotel suite with a fortune in cash, under a Southern-belle identity she had invented at nineteen. When she died in 1932, more than eleven hundred people came forward claiming to be her family. Ten of them actually were.
The seven warning signals· 9-min readFlorida
In re Estate of Carpenter
A Florida widow signed a will four days before she died, leaving everything to the daughter who had arranged it and nothing to her three sons. The Supreme Court of Florida used the case to write the list of warning signs that every Florida will contest has been argued around ever since.
Thirty-nine days· 10-min read
J. Seward Johnson Sr.
The Johnson & Johnson heir signed a will leaving essentially everything to his third wife — a Polish immigrant who had entered the household as domestic staff — and died five and a half weeks later at 87. His six children spent fifteen weeks in a Manhattan courtroom trying to undo it.
Control, deliberately· 8-min read
J.D. Salinger
Salinger published nothing after 1965 and sued the people who tried to publish him anyway. He wrote for another forty-five years regardless. The copyrights went into a trust before he died, and the trustees have spent sixteen years doing what he did — saying no, on his behalf, with legal authority to keep saying it.
The will that sold the team· 9-min read
Jack Kent Cooke
He left the Washington football club and its brand-new stadium to his own charitable foundation, with instructions to sell. Two years later the franchise went to a 34-year-old outsider for $800 million — then the most expensive transaction in sports. The widow he cut out of the will sued and reportedly took $20 million.
The richest man to lose everything· 9-min read
Jack Whittaker
He was already worth $17 million when he won a then-record $314.9 million Powerball jackpot at Christmas 2002. He took $113 million in cash, funded a foundation, gave away roughly $50 million — and faced more than 400 legal claims. By 2007 he said the money was gone.
The survivor who did everything right· 9-min read
Jackson Pollock & Lee Krasner
He died at 44 in a car crash with a reputation and not much money. His widow took the entire estate, controlled the supply of paintings for twenty-eight years, commissioned the catalogue, and then left the whole thing to a foundation that gives money to living artists. No litigation. No family war.
Cash in the wall, then an auction· 9-min read
James “Whitey” Bulger
Agents found $822,000 and 30 guns inside the walls of a Santa Monica apartment. A federal court turned that, and everything else he owned, into money for the families of the people he was convicted of killing. Then his own estate became a plaintiff, and lost.
Fifteen years to fund a scholarship· 10-min read
James Brown
He signed a will. It said his money should educate poor children in South Carolina and Georgia. It took a state attorney general, two removed trustees, more than a dozen lawsuits, and two trips to the South Carolina Supreme Court before a single scholarship was paid.
The house nobody could afford to keep· 8-min readFlorida
James Deering
Deering spent a reported $15 million building a Renaissance villa on Biscayne Bay, then died in 1925 with no wife and no children. His two nieces inherited 180 acres of Miami waterfront and spent twenty-seven years working out how to get rid of it.
The case that ate the estate· 8-min read
Jarndyce and Jarndyce
Dickens invented a probate suit so long that the heirs grew old inside it, and ended it in the only way it could end: the lawyers' costs consumed the entire fortune. He based it on real cases. One of them ran for sixty-two years.
The will signed two days before· 12-min readStill openFlorida
Jeffrey Epstein
The criminal case ended the moment he died. The civil claims did not, and there was no defendant left except an estate. What followed was years of probate in the US Virgin Islands, a compensation program built inside it, and $121 million paid to 136 claimants.
The oldest instruction still being followed· 8-min read
Jeremy Bentham
His will directed that his body be dissected in front of an audience, then dressed, seated in his own chair with his own walking stick, and kept in a case. It was done in 1832. It is still being done. No court has ever been asked to enforce it.
Disinheritance, done correctly· 8-min read
Jerry Lewis
His will excluded all six sons from his first marriage — by full legal name, together with their descendants, in a single sentence with no reason attached. Five years later he died and nobody contested it. This is what the well-drafted version of a hard decision looks like.
Twenty-seven, and no paperwork· 9-min read
Jimi Hendrix
He died at 27 without a will, so everything went to a father who had barely raised him. It took that father twenty-five years and a lawsuit to get the rights back — and then his own will started a second war between a son and an adopted daughter.
“For reasons which are well known to them”· 8-min read
Joan Crawford
She adopted four children and left two of them nothing, in eleven words that gave no reason and started a two-year fight. The disinherited pair objected to probate on capacity and undue influence. The estate paid $55,000 to make it stop.
One lawyer, three jobs· 9-min readFlorida
Joe DiMaggio
DiMaggio died in Hollywood, Florida in 1999. The lawyer who had represented him for two decades was named personal representative, initial trustee, and the person who would control the licensing of his name — all in a will that lawyer's own office was involved in producing. Then came the books, the tapes, and a federal grand jury.
An NFL team, and no cash· 9-min readFlorida
Joe Robbie
He founded the Miami Dolphins and built the first entirely privately financed stadium in America. He died owning almost all of both and almost nothing liquid. Within four years the family had sold the team, the stadium, and the name on the building.
“You fellows will have to figure out how to spend it”· 8-min readFlorida
John D. MacArthur
He ran an insurance empire and 100,000 Florida acres from a corner table in a Singer Island hotel coffee shop. When he died in West Palm Beach in 1978, ninety-two percent of it went to a foundation he had given almost no instructions to. Three years later it invented the genius grant.
The estate nobody got to read· 8-min read
John F. Kennedy
The most examined presidency in American history left an estate almost nobody has seen. Kennedy used a revocable living trust with a pour-over will, so the inventory never had to be filed. The money underneath it sat in trusts his father built decades before Congress wrote a rule for them.
For as long as she does not remarry· 9-min read
John Jacob Astor IV
The richest man on the Titanic left a pregnant teenage widow the income from a five-million-dollar trust and the use of two great houses — on one condition. She remarried four years later and gave all of it up. The terms are constantly misreported, and the law behind them surprises people.
The house kept ready· 7-min read
John Porter Bowman
Bowman buried a wife and two daughters, built them a $75,000 mausoleum, then left $50,000 in trust to keep his Vermont mansion maintained exactly as he left it — in case the family came back. The money ran out in the 1950s.
A California trust in a French country· 10-min read
Johnny Hallyday
The biggest rock star France ever produced signed a trust under California law leaving everything to his widow and their two daughters. France reserves three-quarters of an estate for the children. The question was which country he actually lived in.
Whose claim is it after you die?· 9-min read
Junior Seau
A lawsuit is an asset. When the person who could have brought it dies, somebody inherits the right to sue — and somebody else may already have settled it on their behalf. The Seau children spent six years establishing that the claim was theirs.
The father, the Marine, and the inbox· 7-min read
Justin Ellsworth
A father asked for his dead son's email. The company said its terms of service did not allow it. A Michigan probate judge decided otherwise in April 2005, and every digital-asset statute in the United States traces back to that request.
The cat who cannot own a bank account· 8-min readStill open
Karl Lagerfeld
He told interviewers his Birman cat was an heiress. French law says an animal is property, and property cannot inherit. Seven years after his death the estate is still tangled with the French tax authorities, and the woman caring for Choupette says nobody has been paid anything.
The daughter the trust had never heard of· 9-min read
Kobe Bryant
He signed the last amendment to his family trust in 2017. His fourth daughter was born in 2019. When he died in January 2020, the document that held the family's money named three children — and the trustees had to go to court to add the fourth.
An estate made of copyright· 9-min read
L. Ron Hubbard
Hubbard signed a new will the day before he died in 1986. About $25 million of a roughly $26 million estate was intellectual property, and the plan routed it through a family trust into religious corporations — one of which the government would not recognise as tax-exempt until 1993.
The page that only reached the leftovers· 8-min readStill open
Larry King
Two months after filing for divorce, he wrote a page by hand replacing the will that named his wife as executor. It became a two-year fight — over roughly two million dollars, while the assets that actually mattered sat quietly in trusts the page could not touch.
Ten minutes that outrank your will· 10-min readFlorida
Legacy contacts and memorialisation
Apple, Google and Facebook each let you name who gets into your account after you die. Under Florida law those settings beat your will, your trust, and your power of attorney. Almost nobody sets them.
Dead enough for the money, not for the title· 8-min read
Lord Lucan
He disappeared in November 1974. In 1999 the High Court declared him dead and granted probate — but issued no death certificate, so his son could not take the earldom. It took a new statute and another seventeen years. The certificate came in February 2016, forty-two years on.
The business succession that worked, and the box that did not· 9-min read
Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz
They built a studio together, divorced, and then did the one thing most co-founders never manage: one bought the other out, cleanly, at a price. By the time either of them died there was no company left to argue about. The argument that did happen was over love letters and a Rolls-Royce.
239 estates, no remains· 9-min readStill open
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370
The aircraft left Kuala Lumpur on 8 March 2014 and was never found. Before a single family could be compensated, someone had to be declared dead — 239 times, in more than a dozen legal systems. This is the paperwork behind a disappearance, and it is still running in 2026.
The stray who got the villas· 8-min read
Maria Assunta & Tommaso
A 94-year-old Roman widow handwrote a will leaving roughly €10 million — apartments in Rome and Milan, land in Calabria — to a black stray cat she had picked up four years earlier. Italian law does not let a cat take anything. What she actually created was a search, and a promise.
The house nobody would take· 9-min readFlorida
Marjorie Merriweather Post
She left Mar-a-Lago to the United States as a winter White House, Hillwood to the Smithsonian, and Camp Topridge to New York State. All three institutions handed the gifts back. The richest woman in America could not give her houses away.
The estate she gave away first· 8-min readFlorida
Marjory Stoneman Douglas
She died in Coconut Grove at 108 with no spouse and no children — the profile that usually produces a mess. It did not, because she had already handed over her papers in 1987 and her cottage in 1991, and left written instructions for her ashes. Almost nothing was left to fight about.
The house he promised out loud· 8-min read
Marlon Brando
He bought the house in 2002 and kept it in his own name. The woman who ran his household said he had promised to sign the deed over before he died. He never did — and an unwritten promise about real estate is, in almost every American state, a story rather than a contract.
Half a billion XRP, and a will that never mentioned it· 8-min read
Matthew Mellon
A Mellon and a Drexel by descent, he put $2 million into XRP and Forbes reported it had become a billion. When he died, his estate had one asset, no instructions, and a contract that limited how fast it could be sold.
The fortune nobody could find· 9-min readFlorida
Meyer Lansky
Federal investigators spent decades certain that Meyer Lansky had roughly $300 million hidden offshore. He died in Miami Beach in 1983, and what anyone could actually document was a bank balance under $35,000. Reputed wealth and provable assets are different things. Probate only deals in the second.
What is a name worth the day it dies· 10-min readStill open
Michael Jackson
He left a will, a trust, and two executors — the planning most estates never get. It still took twelve years, because the IRS said his name and likeness were worth $161 million and the estate had reported $2,105. The Tax Court split the difference at $4.15 million.
Ninety years of work, $18,000 left· 9-min read
Mickey Rooney
In March 2011 a 90-year-old man who had been making films since the Coolidge administration sat down in front of a United States Senate committee and described being unable to get information about his own money. Three years later he died. The estate came to eighteen thousand dollars.
You do not own your tissue· 8-min read
Moore v. Regents
John Moore's spleen was removed at UCLA in 1976. His cells became a patented cell line worth commercial licences. In 1990 the California Supreme Court told him he had never owned them — but that his doctor should have told him what the surgery was also for.
He sold his name before he died· 9-min read
Muhammad Ali
In 2006 Ali sold 80% of the marketing rights to his own name and likeness for $50 million. When he died ten years later, the most valuable thing he had ever owned was not in his estate — and when a broadcaster used his image the following year, the plaintiff was a brand-management company.
Ancestors who belong to no estate· 10-min read
NAGPRA and repatriation
Probate answers who inherits a person's property. It has never answered who is responsible for a person's remains when the death was centuries ago and the descendants are a nation rather than a family. In 1990 Congress wrote a separate statute for that, and it is still being worked through.
The will at Saint Helena· 8-min read
Napoleon Bonaparte
Dying on a rock in the South Atlantic, Napoleon wrote out a will in his own hand naming 97 legatees, added codicils for a week, and left money to a man acquitted of shooting at the Duke of Wellington. His burial wish took nineteen years to honour.
The will that was read out loud· 9-min readStill open
Nelson Mandela
Two months after he died, three judges sat in a room in Johannesburg and read his will aloud to the family. It was careful, specific, and provided for staff, schools, and the party. Twelve years later the courts are still working through what he left behind.
The will that was a forgery· 10-min read
Nina Wang
She spent a decade in court proving that a will benefiting somebody else was forged. She won. Then she died, and a one-page document appeared leaving her multi-billion-dollar estate to her feng shui consultant — and Hong Kong's courts spent six more years deciding it was forged too.
The name nobody could own· 10-min readStill open
Osho / Rajneesh
A movement bought 64,229 acres of Oregon for $5.75 million and sold the ranch six years later for less. The harder asset was the name. In 2009 the US Trademark Trial and Appeal Board cancelled the OSHO registrations as generic — the word had become the movement, and a movement is not a brand.
What a state does with a criminal fortune· 10-min readStill open
Pablo Escobar
There was no probate. Colombia did not administer the estate — it extinguished the title, under an action that runs against the property and does not require a conviction. Thirty years on, the ranch is a theme park, part of the land has gone to victims of the armed conflict, and the hippopotamuses are a federal problem.
Forty-five thousand works, no will· 10-min read
Pablo Picasso
The most prolific artist of the twentieth century left no instructions at all. It took six years, a court-appointed administrator, a five-year inventory, and a change in French law about who counts as a child to work out who owned what.
Two settlements, twenty years apart· 9-min readStill open
Pan Am Flight 103
A bomb destroyed the aircraft over Lockerbie in December 1988. A Brooklyn jury found the airline guilty of willful misconduct in 1992, which removed the treaty cap on damages. Libya's $10 million per family took until 2008. Twenty years is long enough for the heirs to need heirs of their own.
Philanthropy as the estate plan· 9-min readStill open
Paul Allen
The Microsoft co-founder died in 2018 holding about $20.3 billion, two professional sports franchises, and a Giving Pledge. His four-page will said almost nothing, because everything ran through a trust he signed in 1993. Eight years on, the liquidation is still going.
Forty-two, and no warning· 8-min readFlorida
Payne Stewart
Stewart won the US Open in June 1999 and was dead by October, at 42, in an aircraft accident that made no sense and gave nobody any time. What follows a death like that is not a will contest. It is a wrongful death action, and in Florida only one person on earth is allowed to file it.
The will that made a statute· 9-min read
Peter Thellusson
Thellusson died in 1797 directing his fortune to accumulate through the lives of every son and grandson living at his death. Projections ran to £14 million. Parliament passed a law to stop anyone doing it again, and by the time the last heir was identified in 1859 the costs had eaten the growth.
The will that stopped in 2004· 8-min read
Philip Seymour Hoffman
He signed a will when he had one child and never touched it again. Two more children arrived. He declined the trusts his accountant recommended, and he never married the mother of all three — which left the Internal Revenue Service a very clean shot at roughly $35 million.
Who owns what a president wrote· 10-min read
Presidential papers
For nearly two centuries a president's papers were his personal property, to keep, sell, seal, or burn. A widow with a furnace, a son with a safe, and one former president with 3,700 hours of tape changed that — and it took an Act of Congress and $18 million to finish the argument.
The guardianship scandal· 10-min readFlorida
Rebecca Fierle
She held the largest professional guardianship practice in Florida — more than 400 wards across 19 counties. One ward's death in a Tampa hospital in 2019 unwound all of it, and produced a statewide investigation, a criminal case, and a rewrite of Chapter 744.
The estate that owed more than it had· 9-min read
Redd Foxx
The IRS took his Las Vegas house and seven cars while he was still alive. Two years later he collapsed on a soundstage and died with a reported $3.6 million in tax debt and no will. A friend paid for the funeral, and the estate stayed open for another fifteen years.
Who owns the words· 8-min read
Roald Dahl
Dahl died in 1990 and left a body of work that behaves like a corporation. His family put the rights into a company, apologised in 2020 for things he had said, sold the company to Netflix in 2021, and in 2023 the publisher changed hundreds of words in the books. Every step of that was legal. None of it was his decision.
The estate that owed everything· 10-min read
Robert Maxwell
He went overboard from his yacht in November 1991. Within weeks the administrators found that hundreds of millions of pounds were missing from his companies' pension schemes. The empire was insolvent, the pensioners were unsecured, and in the end nobody was convicted of anything.
The word nobody defined· 9-min read
Robin Williams
He did everything right: a funded trust, a prenuptial agreement, two homes carefully allocated. Then his widow and his three children spent a year in a San Francisco courtroom arguing over what the word “memorabilia” means, across a list of roughly 1,200 objects.
When the claim is about the life, not the will· 9-min read
Rock Hudson
His estate poured into a trust written in 1974, and none of it was ever public. What was public was the lawsuit: a claim against the estate for what he did while he was alive. A jury awarded $21.75 million. A judge cut it to $5.5 million, and it stood.
The plan that predated the money· 9-min read
Sam Walton
In 1953 a variety-store operator in Arkansas put everything he had into a family partnership and gave his four children 20% each. Nine years later he opened the first Wal-Mart. By the time he died the fortune was measured in tens of billions — and most of it had never been his to tax.
Buried in the Ferrari· 7-min read
Sandra West
West directed that she be buried in a lace nightgown, seated in her powder-blue 1964 Ferrari, with the seat slanted comfortably. A Los Angeles court held the instruction unusual but not illegal. San Antonio poured two truckloads of concrete over the grave.
The death nobody mentioned· 9-min readFlorida
Schilling v. Herrera
Mignonne Schilling died in Miami in August 2004. Her brother — the sole beneficiary of her 1996 will — was not told until December 6, four days after her caregiver had petitioned to close the probate. By then there was nothing to contest. So he sued in tort instead, and Florida's Third District let him.
Marry within seven years, or Israel gets it· 9-min read
Shapira v. Union National Bank
An Ohio physician left each son a third of his estate on one condition: marry a Jewish woman with two Jewish parents, within seven years of his death. Otherwise the share went to the State of Israel. In 1974 a probate judge said the condition was perfectly good law.
Five minutes is enough· 9-min readFlorida
Simultaneous death
Two people die in the same accident and nobody can prove who went first. Most states solved this by requiring an heir to outlive the decedent by 120 hours. Florida did not. Here, surviving by five provable minutes moves an entire estate into somebody else's family.
Selling the story· 9-min readFlorida
Son of Sam laws
New York wrote its law the day after David Berkowitz was arrested, and the Supreme Court struck it down fourteen years later — not because compensating victims is illegitimate, but because a statute that taxes speech by its subject reaches Thoreau and Saint Augustine too. Florida's version, from the same year, is still in the statute book.
The congressman with no will· 8-min read
Sonny Bono
He was a member of the United States House of Representatives, 62 years old, with four children by three women and a catalogue of hit records. He died on a ski slope in January 1998 without a will — and nine months later Congress named the law that would keep his copyrights earning for another twenty years after him.
Five months, one hearing, one estate· 8-min read
Steve Fossett
He took off from a Nevada ranch on a Monday morning in 2007 and did not come back. The largest peacetime search for an individual in US history found nothing. Five months later a Cook County judge heard three witnesses and declared him dead. The wreckage turned up seven months after that.
The estate with no file· 8-min read
Steve Jobs
He died in 2011 holding a reported $7 billion. There is no probate docket, no inventory, no will contest, and no public accounting of who got what. The only trace the plan left in the public record is a single SEC form filed seven weeks later.
Thirty-two years, and no standing· 9-min read
Stieg Larsson
He died months before the first book was published. His partner of thirty-two years found a will in a drawer that turned out to be worthless, and Swedish law gave the whole Millennium trilogy to a father and a brother. The best cautionary tale in the archive for anyone who never married.
The money was never the problem· 10-min readFlorida
Sudden wealth collapse
A study of Florida Lottery winners found that a six-figure prize postponed bankruptcy rather than preventing it. A peer-reviewed study of NFL draftees found one in six filed within twelve years of retirement. The pattern is not carelessness. It is four missing structures.
The estate fight he lived to see· 10-min read
Sumner Redstone
Most probate litigation starts with a funeral. Redstone's started in 2015, while he was 92 and very much alive, when a former companion asked a Los Angeles court to declare him incapable of having removed her. Four years of litigation followed, in three states, over a trust that had not yet begun.
Separated is not divorced· 8-min read
Sylvia Plath
Plath and Ted Hughes separated in October 1962. She died the following February with no will, still legally his wife — so he inherited everything, including her copyrights and her journals. He edited the poems, published the diaries, and destroyed the last volume. Intestacy decided fifty years of literary history.
The womanless library· 7-min read
T.M. Zink
An Iowa lawyer left five dollars to his daughter and the rest of his estate to sit for 75 years, then build a library that no woman could enter and no woman's work could sit on the shelves. His daughter had the will set aside inside five months.
At least 2,500 dead, and almost no estates· 9-min readFlorida
The 1928 Okeechobee hurricane
The dike failed on the night of September 16, 1928, and the south shore of Lake Okeechobee went under. It remains the deadliest disaster in Florida history. Most of the dead were buried in mass graves, most were never identified, and almost none of them ever had an estate opened.
The one decision your family cannot reverse· 9-min readFlorida
The Anatomical Gift Act
Almost everything you write down about your death is advisory. A Florida anatomical gift is not. Once the donor has made it, the statute says a family member, guardian, or health care surrogate may not modify, deny, or prevent it — and after death it is irrevocable.
Five real bequests and one useful document· 9-min read
The animals who inherited
A cat in Buckinghamshire holds a Guinness record set in 1988. A border collie in Nashville has $5 million. A chimpanzee in Wauchula, Florida costs more than $30,000 a year and is not named in anyone's will. Sorted by what is actually documented — and what a working pet trust costs.
Every painting where he left it· 10-min read
The Barnes Foundation
Albert Barnes wrote a 1922 indenture fixing his collection in place forever: no loans, no touring shows, no colour reproductions, no rearranging a single wall. He died in 1951. In December 2004 a Pennsylvania judge let the whole collection move to Philadelphia — and it is still the most argued-about donor-intent decision in America.
The gap federal law left open· 9-min read
The body broker industry
Federal law forbids paying for organs. It was written for transplantation, and it stops there. Bodies donated for education and research fall outside it — and a small industry grew in the space, until an Arizona jury awarded donor families $58.5 million.
The most useful thing that never happened· 9-min read
The Bruce Willis iTunes story
In September 2012 the UK press reported that Bruce Willis was considering suing Apple for the right to leave his iTunes library to his daughters. His wife denied it the same day. The story was false — and it taught more people about digital inheritance than any statute has.
A promise to give, after you are gone· 9-min readFlorida
The charitable pledge
You sign a pledge card for $100,000. You die having paid $20,000. Can the charity collect the rest from your estate? In New York, Cardozo said yes on facts thinner than these. In Florida, the Supreme Court said no — and set out exactly what a pledge must contain to survive.
Who keeps the building· 10-min readStill openFlorida
The church split
A congregation divides. Both halves claim the sanctuary, the parking lot, and the endowment. The US Supreme Court has told states they may resolve this two different ways — and in April 2026 a Florida appellate court held that Florida still uses the older one, then asked the Florida Supreme Court whether it should.
What you own, what you only borrowed· 10-min read
The digital assets inventory
A Florida personal representative must file a verified inventory listing estate property with its fair market value. Half of what a modern person calls “my accounts” is not property at all. Telling the two apart is the job.
Standing, and who actually gets it· 9-min readFlorida
The disappointed charity
A grandchild left out of a trust often cannot get into court at all. A charity named in the same document usually can. The reason is a definition in Florida's trust code — and behind it stands an Attorney General with statutory power to sue on behalf of gifts nobody else is watching.
Chapter 740, and the three-tier rule· 10-min readFlorida
The Florida Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act
Florida wrote down exactly how a personal representative, trustee, or agent gets lawful access to a dead or incapacitated person's email, photos, and accounts. It is one short chapter, it has been law since 2016, and almost nobody uses the ten-minute step that sits at the top of it.
What a company is worth on the day nobody can run it· 10-min readFlorida
The founder with no successor
The owner dies. The estate tax is due in nine months, in cash. The personal representative has four months of statutory authority to keep the business trading. The buyer knows all of this. This is the most common six-figure mistake in Florida estate planning, and it is entirely preventable.
Seventy-eight years, three generations, one surname· 10-min readFlorida
The France family
NASCAR is not a league. It is a private company in Daytona Beach that has been owned and run by one family since 1948, through two deaths, one abrupt departure, and a $2 billion move to take the public half private. In April 2026 the CEO's name stopped being France.
A promise is not an instrument· 10-min readStill open
The Giving Pledge
Since 2010, more than 250 billionaires have publicly promised to give away most of their wealth. The pledge is explicitly not a contract, and fifteen years of data show most signatories are considerably richer than when they signed. This is what the paperwork behind a philanthropic estate plan actually does.
Three generations, no agreement· 9-min read
The Gucci family
Guccio Gucci left his company to his sons in 1953. By 1993 not one share was owned by anybody named Gucci. Nothing exotic caused it — no forged will, no missing heir. Just an ownership structure that split every time somebody died and a family that never wrote down how to disagree.
Four sons, twenty years· 9-min read
The Koch brothers
Fred Koch left his company to four sons. Two of them spent the next two decades suing the other two over what it was worth. Their mother wrote a clause into her own will disinheriting any son still litigating six weeks after her death — and a Kansas court enforced it.
An asset with no lock and no locksmith· 10-min read
The lost bitcoin problem
Somewhere between 1.5 and 3.7 million bitcoin appear to be permanently inaccessible. There is no bank to call, no court order that helps, and one man in Wales spent a decade and a High Court judgment trying to dig his out of a landfill.
Twenty-nine years is a long time to stay alive· 9-min readFlorida
The lottery annuity after death
Take the annuity and the state owes you thirty payments over twenty-nine years. Die in year six and the remaining twenty-four are an asset of your estate — taxable at their present value, non-assignable without a judge, and paid on a schedule nobody can accelerate.
You cannot pay them, and you cannot skip them· 9-min readFlorida
The missing heir
A brother nobody has spoken to since 1994. A cousin last known to be in Ontario. A named beneficiary who simply cannot be found. A Florida personal representative may not distribute their share to anyone else, and may not close the estate without them. There is a procedure, and it is four steps long.
Eight votes, one heir· 10-min read
The Murdoch Family Trust
A divorce settlement in 1999 locked four children into equal control of a media empire, and made the trust irrevocable. Twenty-four years later the settlor asked a Nevada court for permission to change it. The commissioner said no, in ninety-six pages, using the word “charade.”
Knowing it is not the same as being allowed to use it· 10-min readFlorida
The password problem
The most common digital estate plan in America is a spouse who knows the passwords. It fails on the two-factor code, it fails when the phone line is cancelled, and in the worst case it puts a grieving person on the wrong side of a felony statute.
Five years, or one specific peril· 9-min readFlorida
The presumption of death
Probate needs a dead person. When there is no body, no death certificate and no explanation, Florida supplies one by presumption: five continuous years of unexplained absence after a diligent search. Exposure to a specific peril can cut the five years to nothing.
Thirty envelopes in a safe· 9-min read
The sealed royal wills
In England a proved will is a public document anyone can buy a copy of. Except for one family. Since 1910 the wills of senior royals have been sealed by court order, and in 2021 a judge sealed Prince Philip's for ninety years after a hearing nobody was told about.
An award, in exchange for the right to sue· 9-min readStill open
The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund
Congress created it eleven days after the attacks. It paid $7.049 billion to 5,560 claimants, and roughly 97% of eligible families took it rather than sue. Every award for a person who died had to pass through a probate court first — and it still does.
A killer inherits nothing· 9-min readFlorida
The slayer rule
It began with a sixteen-year-old who poisoned his grandfather to stop him changing his will, and a New York court that refused to let the statute produce that result. Florida now writes it down: §732.802. It reaches wills, intestacy, joint property, and life insurance — and it does not require a criminal conviction.
Where the dog lives· 10-min readFlorida
The snowbird domicile fight
You can move to Florida and still owe New York. Domicile and residency are two different tests, states apply both, and auditors decide the first one by asking where you keep the things you would grab in a fire — the photographs, the jewellery, the dog. One Illinois couple fought a $1.8 million assessment over a fourteen-day difference and won.
When nobody comes forward· 9-min readFlorida
The unclaimed body
Florida has a written answer for what happens when a person dies and no one claims them. It runs through a hierarchy that ends with the words “or a friend or other person,” a medical examiner, an anatomical board, and — if all of that fails — a county commission.
Two billion dollars nobody has asked for· 9-min readFlorida
The unclaimed estate
Florida runs two entirely separate systems for money without an owner, and they have opposite deadlines. Escheated estate proceeds are gone after ten years. Unclaimed property is claimable forever. Almost nobody knows which one holds their money.
2,300 claimants· 8-min read
The Wendel sisters
The Wendels owned more than 150 Manhattan buildings and lived in a Fifth Avenue mansion with gas lamps, no telephone, and no electricity. When the last sister died in 1931 leaving roughly $100 million to charity, more than 2,300 people came forward claiming to be family.
The estate that could not pay· 9-min read
Thomas Jefferson
He died on the Fourth of July owing about $107,000. Six months later his executors sold the contents of Monticello, the farm equipment, and 130 human beings over five days in the cold. The house went in 1831 for around seven thousand dollars. The principal was not cleared until 1878.
Two notes nobody could read· 9-min read
Thomas Kinkade
Against a formal will, three codicils and a trust, his girlfriend produced two handwritten pages dated a month apart. They gave her the house and $10 million. The handwriting was close to illegible. His estranged wife — never divorced — was on the other side.
The address is the plan· 9-min read
Tina Turner
She left Tennessee for Switzerland in 1995, took Swiss citizenship in 2013, and signed away her American citizenship at the embassy in Bern that October. When she died in 2023, one question decided everything about her estate — and it was not what her will said. It was where she lived.
Two words, two years· 9-min read
Tom Petty
His trust said his widow and his two daughters should “participate equally” in managing the catalogue. Nobody wrote down what that meant. It cost a $5 million lawsuit, a shelved Wildflowers anniversary edition, and two years of a Los Angeles docket to find out.
The estate that ran on Post-it notes· 10-min readStill open
Tony Hsieh
The Zappos founder died at 46 with no will and a fortune reported at roughly $840 million. Creditors came forward with about $130 million in claims — one of them written on a sticky note. Five years later a document nobody had seen arrived at the courthouse in the mail.
The notice nobody reads· 8-min read
Tulsa Professional Collection Services v. Pope
For a century, estates cut off their creditors by running a legal notice in the classifieds. In 1988 the Supreme Court held that this is not due process for a creditor you already know about — and rewrote the first month of every probate in America.
The scholarship fund that outlived everyone· 9-min read
Ty Cobb
He bought Coca-Cola stock in 1907 and never sold. He funded a scholarship trust in 1953 and watched it work. When he died in 1961 he left it a quarter of an estate reported at $11.78 million — and it is still writing cheques in 2026.
The estate plan he had to write himself· 8-min read
Ulysses S. Grant
A partner's Ponzi scheme took everything he had in May 1884. That autumn he was diagnosed with throat cancer. He spent the last year of his life writing two volumes at the pace of a man racing a diagnosis, finished on July 18, 1885, and died five days later. His widow received about $450,000.
A homicide with no defendant· 8-min readStill open
Urooj Khan
He won $1 million on a Chicago scratch-off in June 2012. The Illinois Lottery cut the cheque on July 19. He died the next day, and the death was first recorded as natural causes. Six months later the medical examiner reclassified it as cyanide poisoning — a homicide. No one has ever been charged.
Seven hundred bank accounts, and other things that were not true· 9-min read
W.C. Fields
The story is that he hid a fortune in hundreds of accounts under invented names. A biographer went and looked: about two dozen accounts, all in his own name. The parts of this estate that were real — a college for orphans, and a body nobody would cremate — took sixteen years to resolve.
The ninety-two year wait· 7-min read
Wellington R. Burt
A Saginaw lumber baron died in 1919 having decided his children would get almost nothing. His will locked the fortune until twenty-one years after the death of his last grandchild alive when he died. Twelve descendants finally collected in 2011.
A will older than her daughter· 9-min read
Whitney Houston
She signed her will on February 3, 1993. Her daughter was born on March 4, 1993. Nineteen years and a divorce later, the document was still the one that governed — and it still described Bobby Brown as “my husband.”
The second-best bed· 8-min read
William Shakespeare
Shakespeare left his wife of thirty-four years one item: the second-best bed. Four centuries of readers have taken that as a parting insult. The period law of dower, and the going price of a bed in 1616, suggest they have it backwards.
— How the archive is organized
Seven ways an estate goes sideways.
Probates of note
The cases that changed the law itself.
79 cases
Celebrity estates
Famous names, ordinary mistakes.
117 cases
Pets
Dogs, cats, and the money that follows them.
7 cases
Macabre
The fights that aren't about money.
17 cases
Exotic & eccentric
Contests, deadlines, and one Ferrari.
16 cases
Historical
How probate became probate.
49 cases
The Florida files
Fought here, under the law we practice.
60 cases
— Or browse by how it went wrong
Nine failure modes.
The collections above are how people browse. This is how the law actually sorts these cases — and each one carries the Florida statutes it runs into.
Died without a will
Intestacy, and the strangers it invites in.
41 cases
Handwritten wills
Notebooks, napkins, couch cushions.
11 cases
Capacity & undue influence
Who was really holding the pen.
31 cases
Trustee & fee wars
When the people in charge become the fight.
100 cases
Pets
Dogs, cats, and the money that follows them.
8 cases
Strange conditions
Contests, deadlines, and one Ferrari.
33 cases
Remains & final wishes
The fights that aren't about money.
35 cases
Blended families
Second spouses. Stale documents.
43 cases
Taxes & timing
Dying in the right year is a strategy.
33 cases
— How we write these
Every case is built from published court records and reporting, cited at the bottom of each page. Where a matter is still open we say so and date it. Where someone was charged but not convicted, we say charged. Living people get verbs, not motives. And every case ends with the Florida statutes that would have governed the same facts here, because that is the part that might actually matter to you.
These are not our cases. Everything on this page is drawn from published court records and news reporting, cited below. It is general information about how probate and trust law works — not legal advice, and not a prediction about any case. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Other states' law differs from Florida's, which is usually the whole point of the story.