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Don and Gill Pratt, and Mary Watson, June 2010

Out of the blue, Cornish taxi driver Don Pratt fielded a telephone call from a Northampton solicitor telling him that one of his regular passengers from decades earlier had left her entire estate to him.

When Mary lived in Newquay and needed to go shopping or visit the doctor, she always called Don's Taxis. He provided an excellent service, helping her with her packages in addition to transporting her from  A to B, and she rewarded him with regular custom and good tips.

Over the years, they became personal friends, and when Mary remarried, she asked Don to be best man. 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 - a small house and modest savings - came to £250,000, enough for Don to sell his taxi firm and retire.

Albert Gubay

Fresh out of the army in 1945, Albert Gubay made a pact with His Maker, of a sort that we might describe as a win-win deal today.

Gubay, a devout Catholic, swore that if he became became a millionaire, he would leave half his fortune to the Church.

In the event, he earned many 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.

Dennis Hopper (1936-2010)

January, 2010: Suffering from advanced pancreatic cancer, Dennis Hopper filed for divorce from Victoria Duffy, his wife of nearly 15 years, despite - and very likely because of - his illness.

Hopper is the Hollywood movie actor and director who shot to fame with Easy Rider. He and Victoria signed a prenuptial agreement when they married nearly 15 years ago, according to entertainment blog TMZ. The agreement enables the wealthy actor to retain property, art and other assets worth millions of dollars if they were to divorce. His wife would also have to vacate their home.

If they had not separated and he were to die while they were happily (or not) living together, she would have become a merry widow, at least financially. She would have been entitled to a large amount of cash as well as valuable property.

Victoria is Hopper's fifth wife. He had adult children from previous marriages, one of which was to Michelle Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas pop group. That marriage lasted all of eight days, an experience that Phillips later described as "excruciating."

In his divorce filing, Hopper submitted documents from two doctors certifying that he was mentally competent.

Hopper and Victoria have a six-year old daughter, and some American lawyers believe that the court could overturn the prenuptial agreement to protect the child.

29 May 2010: Dennis Hopper died in California.

The Other Lottery - 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,

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. The sex appeal of the peasant Nemorino suddenly soars when he comes into a fortune, in Gaetano Donizetti's opera L'Elisir D'Amore.

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. One of the texts they studied in depth was Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own."

Houppert became a freelance journalist, Professor Carlisle moved to Phillips Exeter Academy, and a few weeks after she died in 2005, Phillips contacted Houppert.

Carlisle had named her former student as the beneficiary of her life insurance policy. With a windfall of $75,000, Houppert paid some debts and made a down payment on a house. The surprise legacy gave her a room of her own and the financial wherewithal to use it - much as Woolf had described - for creative purposes.