Howard Hughes left no valid will, a jury found the Mormon will naming Melvin Dummar a forgery, and Texas and California fought over his death taxes

Howard Hughes, the aviator, film producer and owner of Las Vegas casinos, died on 5 April 1976 aboard a plane from Acapulco to Houston. He was 70. About 3 weeks later a handwritten will was found at the Salt Lake City headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This "Mormon will" divided the estate into 16 shares, 1 for the church and 1 for "Melvin DuMar". Melvin Dummar ran a gas station in Box Elder County, Utah. On 8 June 1978 a jury in Clark County, Nevada, found the will a forgery. The Nevada Supreme Court and a Texas probate court rejected a claimed "lost will", and a Nevada court declared that Hughes had died without a will. His cousin William R. Lummis served as temporary administrator of the estate in Texas and co-special administrator in Nevada. Texas and California each claimed Hughes as a domiciliary to levy death taxes. The administrators said he was domiciled in Nevada, which had no death tax. On 22 June 1978 the US Supreme Court denied California leave to sue Texas. A Texas probate jury found Hughes a Texas domiciliary. On 14 June 1982, in Cory v. White, the Court held that the Eleventh Amendment barred the estate's federal interpleader suit against the 2 states' officials, and the same day it let California sue Texas directly. Under an August 1984 settlement Texas was to receive $50 million and California between $119 million and $150 million in cash and land. Most of the fortune went to 22 distant cousins. Summa Corporation, his holding company, was renamed The Howard Hughes Corporation in September 1994, and the heirs sold it to the Rouse Company for $520 million in February 1996. Dummar sued Lummis and former Summa executive Frank Gay in 2006, and a federal judge in Utah dismissed the suit in January 2007. Dummar died on 9 December 2018.