A recluse died in a New York hotel with a fortune in cash, 1,103 people claimed it, and the 10 real heirs had never met her

Ellen Walsh was born in Oldham, England, in 1838 to an Irish peddler. In 1857, aged 19, she moved to New York and called herself Ida Mayfield, daughter of a Louisiana sugar planter named Henry Mayfield. The planter did not exist. She wrote to Benjamin Wood, a married congressman and owner of the New York Daily News, became his mistress and married him in 1867. Wood gambled. She took a share of his winnings and left him the losses, and by his death in 1900 she held nearly all his wealth. She sold the paper in 1901 for $250,000 to $300,000. In 1907 she withdrew nearly $1 million from her bank and moved into two rooms at the Herald Square Hotel with her sister Mary and a woman she called her daughter, Emma, who was another sister. Maids were not let in. When Mary fell ill in May 1931, Ida called for help. She was declared incompetent in September 1931. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and valuables were found in her rooms and in trunks in the basement. She died of pneumonia on 12 March 1932, aged 94. 1,103 claimants came forward, among them people named Mayfield and relatives of Benjamin Wood. Lawyer Joseph A. Cox traced her to a Dublin family named Walsh. Neither the Woods nor the Mayfields received anything. Ten Walsh relatives in England, Ireland and the United States shared the estate. As far as Cox knew, only one of them had heard of her.