A Philadelphia widow left $17 million and no will, and 26,000 people claimed to be her heirs

Henrietta E. Garrett, born Schaeffer, died intestate as to a residuary estate of over $17,000,000. Nearly 26,000 claims were filed in the Orphans' Court of Philadelphia County by people saying they were her next of kin. A Master and examiners held some 2,000 hearings and heard over 1,100 witnesses. The record reached 390 volumes and more than 115,000 pages. For 15 years the Attorney General of Pennsylvania argued she had no next of kin and the estate should escheat to the state. One claimant, Mrs. Hoover, said she was Garrett's secret daughter, swapped as a baby in West Virginia in 1873, and produced a 1912 deathbed letter from the woman who raised her. Two government handwriting experts testified the whole letter was a forgery. On 18 September 1950 the Master filed a 900-page report with 2,077 findings of fact. It named three first cousins as heirs: Herman Adolph Kretschmar, Howard Sigismund Kretschmar and Johann Peter Christian Schaefer I. A compromise with the state recognised them. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected the remaining appeals in 1952 and on 5 January 1953. The last petition to the US Supreme Court was dismissed in 1953. Lawyer H. Alan Dawson, who had signed contingency fees with the three cousins in 1932, died in 1949; his estate collected about $800,000 and then fought the IRS over tax on it.