Where there is a will, there is a won't
When Margaret Montgomery of Chicago died in 1959, she left her five cats and a $15,000 trust fund for their care to a former employee, William Fields. The will stipulated that Fields was to use the trust income solely for the cats' care and feeding, including such delicacies as pot roast meat. If, however, he outlived all the cats, Fields would inherit the trust principal. Nine years later the last cat, Fat Nose, died at 20, and Fields, 79, was $15,000 richer.
Probably the largest single group of pets to be named specifically in a will were the 150 or so dogs given $4,3 million by Eleanor Ritchey, an oil company heiress who died in 1968. The dogs were mostly strays she had collected at her 180-acre ranch in Deerfield Beach, Florida. When the last dog, Musketeer, died in June 1984, the entire estate - by then grown to nearly $12 million - went under the will to the Auburn University School of Veterinary Medicine to support research on dog diseases.
Charles Vance Millar, a Canadian lawyer and financier who died a bachelor in 1926, bequeathed the bulk of his fortune to whichever Toronto women gave birth to the largest number of children in the 10 years after his death. Four women eventually tied in the "stork derby" that followed the publication of his will. Each had 9 children, and they shared between them $750,000. A fifth woman who had 10 children was ruled out because 5 were illegitimate.
One of the world's shortest wills was left by an Englishman named Dickens. Contested in 1906 but upheld by the courts, it read simply: "All for mother".
A 19th-century London tavern keeper left his property to his wife - on the condition that every year, on the anniversary of his death, she would walk barefoot to the local market, hold up a lighted candle, and confess aloud how she had nagged him. The theme of the confession was that if her tongue had been shorter, her husband's days would have been longer. If she failed to keep the appointment, she was to receive no more than £20 a year, just enough to live on. Whether the wife decided to take the bigger bequest or spare herself humiliation is not known.
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