← The Probate Archive
— Collection · 16 cases
Exotic & eccentric
A fortune locked for 92 years. A baby-making contest that gripped Depression-era Toronto. A woman buried at the wheel of her own Ferrari. Testamentary freedom means you can be strange about it, and courts will enforce strange right up to the point where it becomes illegal.
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 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 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.
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.
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 $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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
— 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.