← The Probate Archive
— How it went wrong · 35 cases
Remains & final wishes
The most bitter cases in this archive are over an estate's least valuable asset. A body cannot be divided, appraised, or replaced, and the decision has to be made in the first forty-eight hours by whoever is standing there. Which is exactly why the law does not leave it to your will.
— The Florida law this runs into
The “legally authorized person” hierarchy — your own written directions rank first.
The Funeral, Cemetery, and Consumer Services Act, including preneed contracts.
Health care advance directives, surrogates, and anatomical gifts.
— Where it happened
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 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.
Eighteen months, not seven years· 8-min read
Amelia Earhart
She vanished over the Pacific on July 2, 1937. The rule then said seven years of absence before a court would call someone dead. Her husband did not wait. On January 5, 1939 a Los Angeles judge declared her dead and opened an estate reported at just over $10,000 — for the most famous woman in aviation.
“I intentionally omit him”· 8-min readFlorida
Burt Reynolds
The will filed after his death in Jupiter, Florida said in plain words that his only son was left out of it. Every headline ran with that. The next clause of the same sentence explained why, and it was the opposite of what the headlines said.
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.
The novelist who wrote his own last chapter, and lost· 9-min read
Charles Dickens
He directed a plain funeral, no public announcement, and — emphatically — no monument of any kind. Five days after he died his friends had him buried in Westminster Abbey and the grave left open for the public. The clause that did hold was the one giving all his private papers to his sister-in-law.
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.
Thirty-three photographs· 9-min readFlorida
Dale Earnhardt
He died on the last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500. Within six weeks his widow had gone to a Volusia County courtroom, then to the Florida Legislature, and Florida had a new public-records law with his family's name on it. It still governs every death in the state.
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 Marcos estate, across four decades· 10-min readStill open
Fugitive fortunes
Two candidates: Robert Vesco, who fled with an estimated $220 million and died in Havana in 2007 with none of it recovered, and Ferdinand Marcos, whose estate has been litigated on three continents since 1989. We chose Marcos, because Vesco left no paper and Marcos left an enormous amount of it — including an estate tax bill that has grown from ₱23 billion to ₱203 billion.
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 estate that did not know what it held· 9-min readStill open
Henrietta Lacks
Cells taken during her cancer treatment in 1951 became the first human cell line that would not die. They are in laboratories on every continent. Her family found out twenty-two years later, and the question of what — if anything — her estate owns is still being litigated.
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 father, the Marine, and the inbox· 7-min read
Justin Ellsworth
A father asked for his dead son's email. The company said its terms of service did not allow it. A Michigan probate judge decided otherwise in April 2005, and every digital-asset statute in the United States traces back to that request.
Dead enough for the money, not for the title· 8-min read
Lord Lucan
He disappeared in November 1974. In 1999 the High Court declared him dead and granted probate — but issued no death certificate, so his son could not take the earldom. It took a new statute and another seventeen years. The certificate came in February 2016, forty-two years on.
239 estates, no remains· 9-min readStill open
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370
The aircraft left Kuala Lumpur on 8 March 2014 and was never found. Before a single family could be compensated, someone had to be declared dead — 239 times, in more than a dozen legal systems. This is the paperwork behind a disappearance, and it is still running in 2026.
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.
Ninety years of work, $18,000 left· 9-min read
Mickey Rooney
In March 2011 a 90-year-old man who had been making films since the Coolidge administration sat down in front of a United States Senate committee and described being unable to get information about his own money. Three years later he died. The estate came to eighteen thousand dollars.
You do not own your tissue· 8-min read
Moore v. Regents
John Moore's spleen was removed at UCLA in 1976. His cells became a patented cell line worth commercial licences. In 1990 the California Supreme Court told him he had never owned them — but that his doctor should have told him what the surgery was also for.
Ancestors who belong to no estate· 10-min read
NAGPRA and repatriation
Probate answers who inherits a person's property. It has never answered who is responsible for a person's remains when the death was centuries ago and the descendants are a nation rather than a family. In 1990 Congress wrote a separate statute for that, and it is still being worked through.
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 settlements, twenty years apart· 9-min readStill open
Pan Am Flight 103
A bomb destroyed the aircraft over Lockerbie in December 1988. A Brooklyn jury found the airline guilty of willful misconduct in 1992, which removed the treaty cap on damages. Libya's $10 million per family took until 2008. Twenty years is long enough for the heirs to need heirs of their own.
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.
Five months, one hearing, one estate· 8-min read
Steve Fossett
He took off from a Nevada ranch on a Monday morning in 2007 and did not come back. The largest peacetime search for an individual in US history found nothing. Five months later a Cook County judge heard three witnesses and declared him dead. The wreckage turned up seven months after that.
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.
The one decision your family cannot reverse· 9-min readFlorida
The Anatomical Gift Act
Almost everything you write down about your death is advisory. A Florida anatomical gift is not. Once the donor has made it, the statute says a family member, guardian, or health care surrogate may not modify, deny, or prevent it — and after death it is irrevocable.
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.
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.
An award, in exchange for the right to sue· 9-min readStill open
The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund
Congress created it eleven days after the attacks. It paid $7.049 billion to 5,560 claimants, and roughly 97% of eligible families took it rather than sue. Every award for a person who died had to pass through a probate court first — and it still does.
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.
Seven hundred bank accounts, and other things that were not true· 9-min read
W.C. Fields
The story is that he hid a fortune in hundreds of accounts under invented names. A biographer went and looked: about two dozen accounts, all in his own name. The parts of this estate that were real — a college for orphans, and a body nobody would cremate — took sixteen years to resolve.
— The other ways it goes wrong
Died without a willHandwritten willsCapacity & undue influenceTrustee & fee warsPetsStrange conditionsBlended 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.