— How it went wrong · 8 cases

Pets

No animal has ever inherited anything. In every US state, in the UK and in France, a pet is property, and property cannot own property. What people actually create is a pet trust — and the gap between doing that well and doing it the way Leona Helmsley did is about ten million dollars.

— The Florida law this runs into

Fla. Stat. §736.0408

Trust for the care of an animal: enforceable, terminates on the animal's death, and a court may cut an amount that substantially exceeds the intended use.

Fla. Stat. §736.0409

Noncharitable trusts without an ascertainable beneficiary.

— Where it happened

£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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 other ways it goes wrong

Died without a will Handwritten wills Capacity & undue influence Trustee & fee wars Strange conditions Remains & final wishes Blended families Taxes & 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.

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