← The Probate Archive
— How it went wrong · 11 cases
Handwritten wills
About half the states will honour a will you wrote out by hand with nobody watching. Florida is not one of them. That single difference decides several of the most famous cases in this archive.
— The Florida law this runs into
Signed at the end, in the presence of two attesting witnesses, who sign in your presence and each other's.
An out-of-state will is honoured here if valid where executed — except a holographic or oral one.
Proving a lost or destroyed will: two disinterested witnesses, or a correct copy plus one.
A will's custodian must deposit it with the clerk within 10 days of learning of the death.
— Where it happened
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.
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 $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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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 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.
— The other ways it goes wrong
Died without a willCapacity & undue influenceTrustee & fee warsPetsStrange conditionsRemains & final wishesBlended familiesTaxes & timing
Every case on this page is somebody else's. If any of it sounds like your situation, the fix is almost always cheaper and duller than the case was.
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.