Weird and Wonderful
Good - and not so good - fortune
Rough Justice
A homeless vagrant, Max Melitzer slept rough in Salt Lake City and Ogden, Utah, wheeling his meagre possessions in a grocery trolley. He was unaware that his brother in New York State had died - and left him a about $100,000. Max's uncle - the brother of the deceased - hired a law firm to try to located Max, and in June 2011, he was found by a private detective. This heart-warming story aroused considerable interest at the time but the trail has gone cold. Last we heard, Max was supposed to meet a family member at a bus station but he failed to appear.
And the Father is...
June 2011: DNA testing removed all doubts: Christian Pascaud's biological father was a wealthy vintner, William Arreaud, in St Emilion who had an affair with a young woman who picked grapes on her family's vineyard. They never married. After the father's death, his estate - a valuable chateau - went to the village, despite Pascaud having proved that he was Arreaud's son. However, French courts ruled against Pascaud - mostly on technicalities. He took his case to the European Court of Human Rights where, 11 years later, he won a modest monetary award, and the village retained the vineyard.
The Bainbridge Vase
An ordinary house clearance in northwest London yielded an extraordinary Chinese vase. After the death of their parents, a brother and sister brought the vase to a local auctioneer, who suspected that it was more than the usual bric-a-brac. Some reports say that the beneficiaries, who insist on anonymity, were a mother and son. Their anonymity has clouded many details of this story.
Chinese porcelain depicting Chinese scenes has been selling for very high prices to Chinese buyers, and this piece was no exception: the winning bid at the 2010 auction was $43m. But the buyer apparently refused to pay, and for a time, the vase, and the story, were in limbo. Last we heard (January 2010), the vase might have been paid for by a group of Chinese dealers. Whatever the outcome, the poignant part of this story is that the owners almost certainly had no idea of the phenomenal wealth that the vase could have brought them.
High Camp
Here is a prediction you can bank on: widow Doris Schmitt's relatives are none too happy with her last will. American fortune-teller preacher Harold Camping predicted that the world would end on 21 May 2011. A believer, Doris Schmitt, changed her will, leaving nearly all of her $300,000 estate to Camping. She died three weeks before the proposed Armageddon, unaware not only that the world did not end as predicted but also the Camping then set a new date of destruction.
Nina Viola Montepagani (b.1952)
This American daughter of an illiterate Italian immigrant might actually have been fathered by a multimillionaire Rome doctor. An Italian court refused to even begin considering her case because her birth certificate cites the immigrant as her father. So she goes to court in America to have her American father's name deleted. Full story.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Wellington R Burt (d.1919), a multi-millionaire American industrialist and politician - former mayor of Saginaw, Michigan and state senator - had long-term plans for his money, very long term.
Burt left a paltry few thousand dollars each to his closest relatives and, in his will, specified that the bulk of his vast wealth would go to his surviving relatives after two time periods had elapsed - firstly, his last surviving grandchild had to die and, secondly, a further 21 years had to pass.
The final death occurred in 1989, starting the clock on its 21-year countdown to 2010. Twelve very distant relatives were traced, sharing a pot estimated at just over $100 million. Burt's motives for this time-delay legacy remain buried with the man himself.
Tale of Two Fathers
Wills and estates usually deal in death certificates. Nina Viola Montepagani believes that her real father might be a wealthy Rome doctor so she goes to court in New York to get her birth certificate changed. more
Tuning in - lawyer hears voices
September 2010 Charna Johnson, a lawyer in the American state of Arizona, represented a man in probate proceedings related to the man's deceased wife in 2000. Nothing unusual about that, except that Johnson had originally represented the man in divorce proceedings a few months earlier.
After the wife died (from suicide), lawyer Johnson believed that she was receiving messages from the dead wife; that she was in effect channeling communications from the deceased. The grieving widower shared in the belief that his wife's thoughts and feelings were being communicated via Johnson.
A Hearing Officer prepared a report for the Arizona Supreme Court . It ran to 30 pages and looked into, among other things, allegations of a sexual relationship between the lawyer and the man, whom she originally met when she took ballroom-dancing lessons from him. The lawyer apparently and allegedly sent e-mails to her client which contained sexual suggestions, but she argued that, while the emails came from her, they didn't really come from her. She argued that she was actually channeling the dead wife's thoughts.
Don and Gill Pratt, and Mary Watson, June 2010
Out of the blue, Cornish taxi driver Don Pratt received some good news from a Northampton solicitor: one of Don's regular passengers had left her entire estate to him. She had been his customer decades earlier.
When Mary lived in Newquay and needed to go shopping or visit the doctor, she always called Don's Taxis because Don helped her with her packages in addition to transporting her from A to B.
They became personal friends, and Don was best man when Mary remarried. She also told him that if she survived her husband, she would make Don her beneficiary.
She did outlast her husband, and she remained true to her word, naming Don as her sole beneficiary. Her estate, which consisted of a small house and modest savings totalling £250,000, enabled Don to sell his taxi firm and retire.
Albert Gubay
Fresh out of the army in 1945, Albert Gubay made a win-win deal with His Maker: a devout Catholic, Gubay swore that if he became a millionaire, he would leave half his fortune to the Church.
In the event, he earned hundreds of millions, and he intends to keep his promise.
Born in Rhyl, Denbighshire in 1928, Gubay founded Kwik Save supermarkets and Total Fitness exercise centres, and also invested in property. A resident of the Isle of Man, he has given generously to numerous local causes, and in his will, he created a charitable foundation and earmarked a small fortune to go to the Roman Catholic Church.
Paige Chivers
Paige Chivers turned 18 in February 2010 and stands to inherit a large estate, assuming she is still alive. Paige, who lived in Blackpool, disappeared when she was 15, and police suspect the worst.
Her mother died in 2007, and Paige is a major beneficiary.
Several suspects were arrested and questioned but released without charge. A £12,000 reward is on offer for information on her whereabouts.
Zsolt and Geza Peladi
December 2009: For Hungarian brothers Zsolt and Geza Peladi, home was a cave, employment was selling any decent junk they could find, and family was a distant memory. Their sister lived in America, and their parents had died.
Then granny died too, in Germany. She was wealthy, and her estate passed to her grandchildren because her children were no longer alive. German lawyers handling the estate located the brothers and sister through genealogical research.
Sergey Sudev
What is Moldovan for 'schadenfreude'
Sergey Sudev, a journalism student in Moldova, used the internet to discover that he had an uncle in Berlin. They met occasionally.
It was almost entirely out of the blue, then, that Sergey inherited 950 million euros plus property, jewellery and other assets on the death of his uncle at the age of 56.
With this windfall, Sudev became one of the wealthiest people in all of Moldova. His popularity with the eligible women in his home town also soared. (In Gaetano Donizetti's opera L'Elisir D'Amoré, Nemorino, a plain and simple peasant, becomes attractive to the village's single women when he suddenly inherits a fortune.)
Karen Houppert
Professor's Policy Pays Dividends
When Karen Houppert was a student at Bennington College, in Vermont, USA, she took several courses in feminism from Professor Marcia Carlisle. Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" was one of the texts they studied in depth.
Houppert became a freelance journalist, Professor Carlisle moved to Phillips Exeter Academy, and the woman lost touch with one another.
One day in 2005, an official at Phillips contacted Houppert and told her that Carlisle had made her the beneficiary of her $75,000 life insurance policy. Houppert paid some debts, bought her own house and, long before she thought she was achieve it, set up a room of her own to use for creative purposes.
A Miscellany
Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry instructed in his will that his ashes should be scattered from an orbiting space satellite. His wish was carried out in 1997.
Canadian lawyer Charles Vance Miller (d.1926) bequeathed a considerable sum s to the Toronto woman who produced the most offspring over the ten years following his death. Four women tied with nine children each and received c.$100,000 in the "Great Stork Derby."
