← The Probate Archive
— How it went wrong · 41 cases
Died without a will
Dying without a will does not mean your property goes nowhere. It means the legislature wrote your will for you, decades before you were born, without knowing your name. Every case here is what that looks like at scale.
— The Florida law this runs into
The surviving spouse's intestate share.
Everyone else: descendants, then parents, then siblings, then grandparents and their descendants — and no further.
Half-blood kindred take half as much as whole-blood kindred of the same degree.
The court, not you, picks who administers the estate.
— 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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
— The other ways it goes wrong
Handwritten willsCapacity & 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.