← The Probate Archive
— Collection · 17 cases
Macabre
Bodies. Ashes. Cryonic suspension. Graves moved across an ocean. The most bitter probate fights are often over an estate's least valuable asset, because what the family is really arguing about cannot be divided.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 $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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
— 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.