← The Probate Archive
— Collection · 117 cases
Celebrity estates
The estates people actually read about. What is striking is how boring the underlying errors are: a will nobody updated, a beneficiary line nobody checked, a document nobody could find. Fame changes the size of the number and nothing else.
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 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 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.
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.
£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 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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.”
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 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.
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.
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.”
— Other collections
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.