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Case files
Alexander the Great left his empire "to the strongest", and his general Ptolemy hijacked…King Attalus III left his kingdom to Rome in his will, and a man claiming to be a royal…Julius Caesar's will, opened after his murder, made Octavian his son and gave every Roman…Virgil asked for the Aeneid to be burned, and Augustus ordered it publishedWilliam the Conqueror's funeral stopped when a man said the church stood on his father's…Florence demanded Dante's bones for 200 years; friars took them out of the tomb, and a…Marco Polo's son-in-law kept his daughter's third of the Polo estate, and she won it back…Edward III did not repay the Bardi and Peruzzi, and both Florentine banks failed in the 1340sRichard III's bones were found under a car park, and his distant relatives sued the…Columbus's 1502 will disappeared while his descendants fought over the Veragua estate from…Columbus's heirs sued the Spanish Crown for 28 years over his promised tenth and…Spain and the Dominican Republic both claim Columbus's body; a 2006 DNA test matched the…Pedrarias Dávila had Balboa, his son-in-law by proxy, beheaded at Acla in 1519 for treasonLeonardo da Vinci's legitimate half-brothers cut him out of their father's estate, and his…Spain and then Mexico paid Moctezuma's heirs for Tacuba lands until a 1934 decree, and a…Magellan left a hereditary governorship to his son, but his wife and sons died, and his…Vasco da Gama was ordered out of his home town of Sines in 1507 and asked to leave Portugal…Jakob Fugger paid for Charles V's election, and his heirs lost much of the fortune when the…Elcano was granted 500 ducats a year for the first circumnavigation, was never paid, and…Pizarro's daughter and heir married her imprisoned uncle, his skull was found in a lead box…Pedro de Alvarado's widow took over his governorship of Guatemala and died in a mudflow two…De Soto's body was sunk in the Mississippi, and his widow governed Cuba and fought his…Henry VIII's will was signed with a stamp, not his hand, and its validity was disputed for…Cortés's heir was tried for treason, Mexico seized and sold the estate, and Lucas Alamán…Pedrarias's grandsons killed the bishop of Nicaragua and raided Panama in 1550 to recover…Chenonceau was taken for a royal debt, taken from a king's mistress by his widow, and…An impostor lived as Martin Guerre for three years, took his wife and land, and was hanged…Ottoman Sultan Mehmed III had his 19 brothers strangled on the day he took the throneFrancis Drake promised his estates to his wife, then signed them to his brother 2 days…Shakespeare left his wife his "second best bed" and struck his new son-in-law out of the willJames I gave Walter Raleigh's Sherborne estate to his favourite over a missing phrase in a…The House of Lords ruled the Earl of Banbury's sons were not his, and the Knollys family…Champlain named the Virgin Mary as his heir in 1635; his cousin sued in Paris and the will…Mughal prince Aurangzeb jailed his father for eight years and executed his brother to take…Vermeer died with 11 children and debts; his widow paid creditors in paintings and…Louis XIV jailed Fouquet for life 19 days after his party at Vaux-le-Vicomte, and in 2019…Spain's childless Charles II left his whole empire to a French prince in his will, and…Louis XIV's will gave power to his illegitimate son, and the Paris Parlement annulled it…William Penn went to debtors' prison while he owned Pennsylvania, and his heirs later…Peter the Great had his son tortured to death, changed the law so he could pick any heir,…Marlborough's £5,000 Post Office pension was paid to his heirs for 178 years, and…Descendants of a 1640s settler sued Trinity Church for downtown Manhattan, and courts ruled…Admiral John Byng was shot under the Articles of War, his family kept his estate, and no…An uncle shipped his 12-year-old nephew to America as a servant to take the Anglesey…Lord Baltimore was acquitted of rape in 1768, left Maryland to his illegitimate son in…Captain Cook's body was returned in pieces, and his widow outlived all six children and…Virginia confiscated Lord Fairfax's Northern Neck, and his heir's land claim reached the…The House of Lords convicted the Duchess of Kingston of bigamy, and she left England with…Mozart's widow passed off a Requiem finished by his student as his own and sold it twiceThe Revolution auctioned Versailles's furniture in 17,000 lots, and a top expert was…A doctor stole the heart of the boy king Louis XVII, and DNA in 2000 ended 200 years of…Peter Thellusson locked his fortune away for three generations, and Parliament changed the…William Jennens died with an unsigned will in his pocket, and claimants fought over his…Washington's will freed 123 people, his heir sold 54 more, and the family sold Mount Vernon…Benedict Arnold was paid £6,315 for changing sides and died in debt; his widow paid the debtsNelson left Emma Hamilton to the nation; Parliament paid his brother and Emma died in debt…Thomas Paine's bones were dug up by an admirer, shipped to England and lostMeriwether Lewis died insolvent with his drafts refused by the War Department, and 198…Phrenologists stole Haydn's head after burial, and it was reunited with his body 145 years…The Earl of Berkeley's eldest son was ruled illegitimate in 1811 after the church register…William Clark became court guardian of Sacagawea's two children in 1813 and freed York only…Bounty mutineers' descendants argued in 2004 that burning the ship in 1790 put Pitcairn…Soviet soldiers emptied Blücher's mausoleum in 1945, and his family lost the Silesian estateNapoleon's will left 10,000 francs to the man who tried to shoot the Duke of WellingtonShelley's father would fund his widow only if she published no biography, and she kept the…The Ottoman state killed Ali Pasha of Ioannina in 1822 and confiscated more than 950 farmsByron's friends tore up and burned his memoirs in his publisher's fireplace four weeks…Thomas Jefferson's will freed his two youngest sons by Sally Hemings, and his debts sent…Lady Jane Douglas said she gave birth to twins in Paris at 50, and the Duke of Hamilton…Beethoven took his nephew from the boy's mother in court; the nephew shot himself, then…A duke's illegitimate son left his fortune to the United States, which used it to found the…Stephen Girard left $7.5 million for "poor white male orphans", and courts fought over the…Walter Scott owed £130,000 when his printer failed, refused bankruptcy, and wrote until he…A house painter's daughter claimed to be a royal princess, and a jury ruled her proofs…Stephen Van Rensselaer III's will ordered $400,000 in back rents collected, and his tenants…The Church refused Paganini burial, and his embalmed body was moved from cellar to cellar…Karl Wilhelm Naundorff sued the Bourbons as the lost son of Louis XVI, and DNA from the…Edgar Allan Poe's self-appointed literary executor was his enemy, who wrote his obituary…Vice President Richard Mentor Johnson's daughter was ruled illegitimate, and a Kentucky…Belgium bought out the Duke of Wellington's "perpetual" Waterloo rent in 1988 and kept a…Parliament bought Wellington an estate, and the 7th Duke gave Apsley House to the nation in…The 17th Earl of Shrewsbury left his estates to the Duke of Norfolk's baby son; a distant…The Lee family lost Arlington over a $92.07 tax, the Army buried soldiers on it, and the…The 2nd Duke of Buckingham owed £1.46 million, fled his creditors, and Christie's sold the…Uriah Levy willed Monticello to the United States, the Confederacy auctioned it, and New…Dickens left £1,000 to the actress he hid for 12 years, and burned 20 years of letters in…Livingstone's heart was buried in Zambia, his body was carried 1,000 miles to Westminster…Santa Anna sold La Mesilla to the United States for $10 million, mortgaged his estates from…Cornelius Vanderbilt left nearly all of $100 million to one son, and the son he passed over…Argentina confiscated Rosas's property and sentenced him to death; he died a tenant farmer…A widow said the Duke of Portland had faked his own death as a London shopkeeper, and the…France seized Chambord in 1915 because its owner served Austria, while his half-brothers,…The last Kamehameha princess left her lands to a school, and a judge removed its trustees…A 1997 essay called "Broken Trust" led a Hawaii court to remove the Bishop Estate trustees,…Glenveagh's builder evicted 244 people in three days, a later owner vanished in a storm,…A Georgia planter left his estate to his daughter by an enslaved girl, and his white…Grant lost his savings in the Grant & Ward fraud and wrote memoirs that paid his widow…Bavaria deposed Ludwig II as insane over his castle debts, he died in a lake the day after…Emily Dickinson's poems were edited by her brother's mistress, and her sister sued the…Carlsberg's founder gave his brewery to a foundation after a feud with his son, who built a…Austria's crown prince shot his 17-year-old lover and himself at Mayerling, and the throne…Richard Burton's widow burned his manuscript of The Scented Garden and his diaries after he…Van Gogh's brother died six months after him, and Theo's widow built the reputation from…Moltke bought Kreisau with his 1866 war grant; his great-grandnephew was hanged in 1945 and…The 3rd Duke of Sutherland left his fortune to his second wife, and she went to Holloway…A 10-year-old Sikh maharaja signed away the Koh-i-Noor to Queen Victoria, and other…The Dukes of Hamilton sold Hamilton Palace's collections in 1882 and 1919, then demolished…Alfred Nobel gave 94 percent of his fortune to prizes, and his relatives and the King of…The last Prince of Condé was found hanged after willing Chantilly to an 8-year-old prince,…Peary brought six Inuit to New York in 1897, and the museum faked a funeral and kept…A Wapping butcher's son claimed the Tichborne baronetcy, and a 188-day perjury trial sent…Horace Tabor left his wife for Baby Doe, lost his silver fortune in 1893, and Baby Doe was…The House of Lords gave the Poulett earldom to the 6th Earl's 15-year-old son over the…Nietzsche's sister took control of his papers while he was insane, published The Will to…Oscar Wilde died bankrupt in Paris; his friend Robbie Ross bought back the rights and gave…A lawyer and a valet killed William Marsh Rice in 1900 to take the fortune he left to found…Parliament cancelled the Kaiser's 15 Rhodes Scholarships in 1916, and Zimbabwean officials…Stanley was refused burial beside Livingstone in Westminster Abbey, and his papers were…Jane Stanford, sole funder of Stanford University, died of strychnine in 1905 and the…John D. Rockefeller's father lived 50 years as "Dr. Levingston" with a second wife and was…Cassie Chadwick said she was Andrew Carnegie's illegitimate daughter, borrowed against…Lord Sackville's son by a married Spanish dancer sued for Knole and the peerage, and the…Leopold II owned the Congo personally, married his 26-year-old mistress five days before he…Tolstoy signed a secret will in the woods to give his copyrights to the publicA duke bought Kylemore Castle with an American heiress's family money, lost it to debts,…A prince left the family emeralds to his mistress in 1910, and every senior British royal…Scott's last plea raised £76,000: widows were paid by their husbands' rank, and £10,000…Bram Stoker's widow sued over Nosferatu, and a German court ordered every copy of the film…George Vanderbilt's widow sold most of Biltmore's land to the United States, and his…Hawaii's last queen was imprisoned in an upstairs bedroom of her own palace, and the…Queen Liliʻuokalani sued the United States for Hawaii's crown lands and lostPrince Paolo Borghese lost the family fortune in the Rome building crash, and the state…Modigliani died poor, his partner jumped from a window the next day, and Italian police…Princess Isabel sued Brazil for her Rio palace in 1895, and her heirs lost the case 125…Ivan Morozov's great-grandson sued Yale and the Met for a Van Gogh and a Cézanne seized by…Shackleton died about £40,000 in debt, his widow chose his grave on South Georgia, and his…Nan Britton lost her libel suit over Warren Harding's daughter in 1931, and DNA proved the…Kafka told Max Brod to burn his papers; Brod saved them, and the fight over them ended in a…Adele Bloch-Bauer's will asked for her Klimt portraits to go to Austria; the Nazis took…Rudolph Valentino's will gave his ex-wife $1, and his body went into a borrowed cryptEarl Haig was given £100,000 by Parliament and an estate by public subscription, and his…The oil heir who carried $100,000 to the Interior Secretary was shot dead in his new…A Philadelphia widow left $17 million and no will, and 26,000 people claimed to be her heirsArthur Conan Doyle's heirs charged licence fees for Sherlock Holmes until a court ruled the…Portugal's last king left his collections to the nation, and Salazar's government put the…Ivar Kreuger shot himself in Paris in 1932, and auditors found his match empire rested on…Tomáš Baťa died in a plane crash, his half-brother took the shoe company, and the family…A recluse died in a New York hotel with a fortune in cash, 1,103 people claimed it, and the…Hungary seized Baron Herzog's collection of 2,000 artworks in 1944, and US courts ended his…Hindenburg's Neudeck estate was put in his son's name, and Hitler's government added…John Ringling left his Venetian mansion and art museum to Florida and died with $311 in the…Lenin's 1918 decree took Sergei Shchukin's 258 paintings, and his heirs' claims in Paris…George V's doctor injected him with morphine and cocaine so his death would make the…Henry Wellcome left his drug company to trustees in 1936, and in 1995 they sold it to its…J.M. Barrie gave Peter Pan to a children's hospital, and Parliament made the hospital's…Atatürk left his İş Bankası shares to his party, and the state took them twiceRobert Johnson died in 1938 with nothing, and a Mississippi court found his heir 62 years laterSir Henry Pellatt built Casa Loma with Home Bank loans, the bank failed, and Toronto took…Banker Fritz Mannheimer died ten weeks after his wedding, his bank failed, and Hitler…Jacques Goudstikker died fleeing the Nazis, Göring took his paintings, and the Netherlands…The Vestey meat brothers left Britain over income tax, set up a Paris trust and bought a…Franz Koenigs lost his drawings to a bank five weeks before the German invasion; Hitler…Oklahoma oilman E.W. Marland annulled his adoption of his wife's niece and married her,…James Joyce's grandson destroyed his aunt Lucia's letters and threatened scholars until the…The Kaiser's heirs claimed thousands of artworks and compensation, dropped the suits over…Oscar Hartzell sold shares in a $22 billion Sir Francis Drake estate that did not exist,…Charles Bedaux hosted the Windsor wedding at Candé, died in FBI custody awaiting treason…Louis Renault died in custody before trial, and France took his company without paying his…Banker Fritz Gutmann was killed at Theresienstadt, and his heirs sued an American collector…Rommel took poison on 14 October 1944 in exchange for a state funeral and pensions for his…Vichy expropriated the Rothschild vineyards at Pauillac, and Philippe de Rothschild's wife…German troops packed the Amber Room into 27 crates in 1941, and it has been missing since 1945The Anne Frank Fonds named Otto Frank a co-author of the diary to extend its copyright past…The Hershey school trust voted to sell Hershey Foods to Wrigley for $12.5 billion in 2002,…The Hershey school paid $12 million for a failing golf course, and the attorney general…W.C. Fields paid his son's mother $20,000 to deny he was the father, and his will's orphan…William S. Hart left his only son nothing and his ranch to Los Angeles County; the son…Thailand's 20-year-old king was found shot in his bed, and three palace servants were…The Fords put 90% of Ford Motor into a foundation and kept the votes, and Henry Ford II…Joan Irvine Smith fought the foundation that controlled her grandfather's Irvine Ranch for…The government ordered opencast mining up to Wentworth Woodhouse, and the Fitzwilliam…US Army papers show Hideki Tojo's ashes were scattered over the Pacific in 1948Margaret Mitchell's estate sued to stop a novel retelling Gone With the Wind from the view…The 10th Duke of Devonshire died in 1950 before his tax plan matured, and his heirs took 17…Czechoslovakia passed a law to take one family's estate, and the Schwarzenberg heirs have…Hearst's will locked his company in a trust until every relative alive in 1951 dies, and…Fritz Thyssen paid for Hitler's rise, lost his fortune to him in 1939, survived the camps…Pétain's property was confiscated in 1945 and his coffin was stolen from Île d'Yeu in 1973A Pennsylvania judge let the Barnes Foundation move Albert Barnes's art to Philadelphia in…Argentina's military seized Eva Perón's embalmed body and buried it in Milan under a false nameThe author of Goodnight Moon left her royalties to a neighbour's nine-year-old son, who…The 12th Duke of Bedford was found shot in 1953, and the son he had cut off opened Woburn…Jim Thorpe's widow sold his body to two Pennsylvania towns, which renamed themselves after himHank Williams' daughter was born five days after his death, made a ward of the state, and…The Quandt fortune behind BMW used about 50,000 forced labourers, a 2011 family-funded…Diego Rivera locked Frida Kahlo's bathroom after she died, and her clothes and papers…Hitler paid his field marshals 4,000 Reichsmarks a month and gave Guderian a confiscated…The Nazis held Louis de Rothschild hostage in Vienna in 1938 and released him for the…Calouste Gulbenkian left his oil fortune to a Lisbon foundation and his son Nubar about…Peary and Henson each fathered a son in Greenland, and Henson was moved beside Peary at…Charlie Parker's wife, his partner and his mother fought over his body, and he was buried…Bela Lugosi's widow and son sued Universal over Dracula merchandise and lost in 1979The Florio family built Sicily's largest business group and lost all of it to the banks and…Baron Ferenc Hatvany came out of hiding in 1945 to find his Budapest bank vaults emptied,…Count Alfred Potocki shipped about 700 crates from Łańcut to Vienna before the Red Army…Jack Warner took control of Warner Bros. in 1956 after his brothers sold out; Harry died…Iraq's 23-year-old king and his family were shot in the palace courtyard, and the regent's…Cigarette heir Jan Philipp Reemtsma sold his inheritance and was kidnapped for a 30 million…A Kentucky man adopted his own wife so she could inherit from his mother's trust, and the…Frank Lloyd Wright's grave in Wisconsin was emptied 26 years after his burial, and his body…Billie Holiday died under arrest in a hospital bed with 70 cents in the bankBhopal's heiress left for Pakistan, her sister's line took the palaces, and in 2025 a court…Loretta Young hid her daughter by Clark Gable in orphanages, then "adopted" her, and…Fausto Coppi's son was born in Argentina so he could carry the Coppi name, because Italian…Eleven weeks after Boris Pasternak died, the Soviet state arrested his companion over his…The US government seized Dashiell Hammett's royalties for back taxes, and after he died…The Dominican Republic confiscated the Trujillo family's property by law in 1962, and his…Juan March bought Barcelona Traction bonds, had the company declared bankrupt in Reus and…Ernie Kovacs's mother sued his widow, Edie Adams, over how she paid his tax debtsSylvia Plath died separated but not divorced, so Ted Hughes inherited her work and…Ian Fleming had two heart attacks during the Thunderball trial, settled, and died nine…Philippine Executive Order No. 1 paid MacArthur $500,000 in 1942, and the payment stayed…Sam Cooke was shot by a motel manager who then sued his estate, and his manager's company…Tchibo heir Günter Herz was forced out by his family in 2001 and sold out with his sister…King Farouk left Egypt on his yacht, and one of his gold coins later sold for $18.9 millionAlfried Krupp was convicted at Nuremberg, got his property back in 1951, and left the firm…Prince Janusz Radziwiłł lost about 43,700 hectares to Soviet and communist seizure, and his…Prince Felix Yusupov sold two Rembrandts to Joseph Widener with a buy-back option, raised…The Lobkowicz family lost its castles to the Nazis in 1939 and the Communists in 1948, and…China's last emperor kept his title and palace after abdicating, and soldiers blew open his…Arndt von Bohlen und Halbach gave up the Krupp inheritance for 2 million marks a year so a…Ezra Vincent signed a paper acknowledging his daughter, and in 1971 the Supreme Court let…A jury awarded John Steinbeck's stepdaughter more than $13 million against his son's family…A Florida judge ruled that the will giving Jack Kerouac's estate to his widow's family was…A Schiele portrait lent to MoMA was seized in New York as Nazi loot, and the Vienna museum…The Kabaka of Buganda climbed his palace wall to escape the army, and died in a London flat…Mark Rothko's executors sold 798 of his paintings to a gallery one of them worked for, and…Jimi Hendrix died with no will, and his father's will later cut his brother out of an $80…Marquis Casati Stampa shot his wife, her lover and himself; his daughter inherited at 19…Jim Morrison left everything to Pamela Courson; she died three years later without a will,…Edward VIII gave up the throne, sold Sandringham and Balmoral to his brother, and hid how…Marie Robertson's heirs sued Princeton over her $35 million gift in 2002 and settled in…Picasso died with no will and about 43,000 works, and the French state took its tax in…India's 2005 Supreme Court ruling gave the Raja of Mahmudabad's son back his palaces, and…Marjorie Merriweather Post deeded Mar-a-Lago to the nation, and Congress handed it back in…Christabel Russell said she was a virgin when her son was conceived, and the House of Lords…Mario Lalli called Robert "my son" in a notarized paper, and the Supreme Court still let…Chile dug up Pablo Neruda 40 years after the 1973 coup, and scientists found botulism…About 50 distant cousins of Henry Darger sued the landlords who saved his art, 49 years…The Tolkien estate sued New Line for $150 million, saying it had received nothing from…Gram Parsons' road manager stole his body from Los Angeles airport and burned it in Joshua TreeCharles Lindbergh had seven secret children in Germany, confirmed by DNA 29 years after his…Karnataka took Mysore Palace during the Emergency, lost in court in 1997, and passed a law…Lord Lucan vanished the night his children's nanny was killed in 1974, and the High Court…The government refused Mentmore for £2 million, and Sotheby's sold its contents for more…Oilman H.L. Hunt had three families with 15 children, and the wife from his bigamous…A court had ordered Sherman Gordon to support his daughter, but Illinois gave his only…Louis Kahn died unidentified in a Penn Station restroom, owing hundreds of thousands of…The Three Stooges' heirs fought each other over royalties, then won the case that set the…Spain's Supreme Court confirmed in March 2026 that Franco's grandchildren must give the…Saudi King Faisal was shot by his nephew during an audience, and the nephew was beheaded in…Ethiopia's Derg said Haile Selassie died after prostate surgery, and his bones were found…Beryl Buck left oil stock for Marin County, Shell's purchase made it worth $253 million,…Gordon Getty, sole trustee of the family trust, sold Getty Oil to Texaco, and his nieces…J. Paul Getty paid part of his kidnapped grandson's ransom and lent the rest to his son at…The 7th Duke of Leinster sold his future inheritance to a moneylender and died in a London…Getty Trust chief Barry Munitz resigned in 2006 and paid back $250,000 after reports on his…Two men stole Charlie Chaplin's coffin for ransom, and his widow refused to payAn heiress and her nurse were killed inside Glensheen, and the adopted daughter who stood…Jacqueline Onassis paid to stop her aunt's eviction from Grey Gardens, and the house sold…Joan Crawford's will left out Christina and Christopher "for reasons which are well known…Groucho Marx's companion lost the fight over his estate, and his heirs lost the rights to…Bing Crosby's sons waited for a trust they could not touch until 65, and their mother's…Nabokov told his wife to burn his last novel; it sat in a Swiss bank vault for 32 years…Lynyrd Skynyrd's widows and survivors used a 1988 court order to block a film about the…J. Roderick MacArthur sued his late father's $1.5 billion foundation in 1984 and asked a…Raul Gardini ran his in-laws' Ferruzzi group, was voted out in 1991 and shot himself in…Charles Clore moved to Monaco to avoid tax, and the Revenue proved after his death that he…Rams owner Carroll Rosenbloom drowned, his widow inherited 70 percent of the team, fired…Conrad Hilton left his hotel shares to his foundation, and his son Barron spent 10 years in…Norway bought shipowner Hilmar Reksten's shares in 1975 while his fortune sat hidden…Marcel Boussac, France's richest man in 1951 and Dior's backer, died ruined; his collapsed…Peter Sellers signed a trust for his daughter the day he collapsed; his widow kept a £4…Nicaragua's Decree 3 confiscated Somoza family property in 1979, and Somoza was killed in…Iran sued the exiled Shah in New York for billions, lost, and the tower his foundation…Bob Marley died without a will, and his widow forged his signature to move his companies…Charles Harpur-Crewe died in 1981, an £8 million tax bill fell on Calke Abbey, and the…Joe Louis owed the IRS more than $1 million and ended his life as a casino greeter in Las VegasWhaling magnate Anders Jahre denied owning a fortune abroad, and Norway spent 30 years…A Johnson & Johnson heir left $400 million to the maid he married, and his six children suedMuddy Waters' heirs spent 35 years fighting his manager over his copyrightsItaly's crown jewels have sat in a Bank of Italy vault since 1946, and a Rome court ruled…A Maharana's will gave Udaipur's City Palace to his younger son, and 41 years later the…Lord Brooke sold Warwick Castle to Madame Tussauds for £1.3 million in 1978, ending 374…Jackie Coogan earned $3 million as a child; $252,000 was left when he sued his motherTruman Capote's ashes were divided, stolen at a party, returned in a garden hose, and…Marvin Gaye was shot dead by his father, left no will and $9 million in debt, and his…Anna Anderson claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia for 64 years and fought German courts…A jury found Rock Hudson hid his AIDS from his lover and awarded $21.75 million against his…Philip Larkin's secretary shredded his 30 volumes of diaries after he died, on an…Georgia O'Keeffe's late codicils left most of a $65 million estate to her assistant, 58…ETA killed the 17th Duke of Veragua, a descendant of Columbus and a Spanish vice admiral,…Borges left everything to the woman he married seven weeks before he died; she died without…Fred Astaire's widow charged fees for clips of him, lost a federal appeal over 90 seconds…Andy Warhol's foundation valued his art at $95 million; a court said $390.9 million, and…The Binghams sold the Louisville Courier-Journal after a daughter demanded her shares be…Chiang Ching-kuo never acknowledged his twin sons, and one of them took the Chiang name 63…Basquiat died at 27; his estate shut its authentication board, and the FBI later seized 25…August Busch III ousted his father from Anheuser-Busch in a boardroom coup, and 33 years…Faridkot's Maharaja lost his only son, and a will read three days after his death gave his…Prince Paul Esterházy made his widow sole heir, and the Esterházy family lost Burgenland's…Bette Davis wrote her daughter, her adopted daughter and two grandsons out of her will…A Madrid judge had Salvador Dalí exhumed for a paternity test 28 years after his death, and…Gloria von Thurn und Taxis auctioned the family treasures and handed 2,200 objects to…French law gave a child born of adultery half a share of his mother's estate until Europe's…Joe Robbie's nine children sued each other, his widow claimed her 30 percent, and a $47…Armand Hammer built his museum with Occidental Petroleum money and died with shareholders,…A French court declared Yves Montand a girl's father after his death, and his body was…A Los Angeles man willed 15 vials of his sperm to his girlfriend before killing himself,…A fugitive baron died in Manila with two infant sons by two women, and the Lords gave his…Publisher Robert Maxwell went overboard from his yacht, and his sons inherited companies…Dr. Seuss's widow ran his licensing for 27 years; three years after her death his estate…Freddie Mercury left his house and half his fortune to his ex-girlfriend, who buried his…Gina Rinehart's children sued her for control of a $5 billion family trust, and her…Freddie Bartholomew's parents lost a court fight with his aunt over the boy and his MGM salaryFrancis Bacon's sole heir sued Bacon's dealer for up to £100 million, then dropped the case…Doris Duke left $1.2 billion with her butler as executor, and a court-appointed lawyer said…The 6th Earl Cawdor left Cawdor Castle to his second wife, and a court put his son's…Albert II of Monaco acknowledged two children born outside marriage, and Monaco's…Walt Disney's twin grandchildren split over a $400 million trust after the trustees paid…Audrey Hepburn's two sons ended up on opposite sides of a lawsuit over who controls her imageGail Zappa left two of her children control of Frank Zappa's estate, and Dweezil was told…Russborough House was robbed four times from 1974 to 2002, and Sir Alfred Beit gave his…Robert Tönnies sued his uncle Clemens to take back a 5 percent gift in the family meat groupA court removed 17-year-old Frances Bean Cobain from Courtney Love's care, and she took…The Duke of Northumberland agreed to sell a Raphael to the Getty for £35 million, and the…Maurizio Gucci was shot dead in Milan in 1995 on the order of his ex-wife Patrizia ReggianiA British widow had her dead husband's sons abroad, then fought until Parliament let his…Lana Turner left her daughter $50,000 and the rest of a $1.7 million trust to her maid of…Bob Ross left his name to his son, and his business partners won it in courtSelena was shot by her fan club president; her father later sued her widower to stop a TV…Eazy-E married on his deathbed and left Ruthless Records to his bride; his son challenged…Jerry Garcia's widow barred his ex-wives from his funeral and stopped paying his $5 million…François Mitterrand's secret daughter walked behind his coffin after the state had paid to…Tupac Shakur's estate forced Drake to delete a song that used an AI copy of Tupac's voiceTupac's mother beat his absent father in court and built his estate; her executor was then…Shearn Moody Jr. was accused of making Moody Foundation grants to himself, and the IRS…CBS newsman Charles Kuralt kept a second family for 29 years, and a letter from his…Craig McCaw's ex-wife took about $460 million, mostly in Nextel stock, and bought a…Gianni Versace was shot dead in Miami and left half his fashion house to his 11-year-old nieceThe Butlers sold Kilkenny Castle to the town for £50 in 1967, and the Ormonde earldoms went…Louis Napoléon's 1997 will passed over his son Charles and named his 11-year-old grandson…Michael Hutchence left half his estate to his baby daughter, and the money went into…Jack Kent Cooke's will ordered the Redskins sold to fund his foundation, and his son was…Princess Diana's executors changed her will after her death and gave each godchild one item…A forged will leaving £386,000 to Dr Harold Shipman exposed Britain's worst serial killerA German woman born in 1948 lost her father's estate to relatives he never met, and…Four governments returned more than $780 million of General Sani Abacha's money to NigeriaTammy Wynette's daughters sued her husband for $50 million, and her body was exhumed for an…Frank Sinatra's will disinherited any family member who challenged it, listing 13 forbidden…Brunei accused the sultan's brother of taking billions as finance minister, and the Privy…U-Haul's founder lost his company to his sons, a daughter-in-law was shot dead, and a jury…Banker Edmond Safra died in a fire his nurse set in Monaco while his bank was being sold to…The 7th Marquess of Bristol spent a fortune of up to £35 million on drugs and died at 44…King Hussein of Jordan removed his brother as heir after 34 years, two weeks before he diedRome's last Doria Pamphilj princess adopted two English babies, and her daughter went to…Hyundai's founder split his empire between feuding sons, and the heir he chose jumped from…Daniel Wildenstein's widow said his sons hid the art fortune in trusts, and France…Lord Wraxall's will gave Tyntesfield to 19 relatives and ordered a fast sale, and the…The JCB founder's sons litigated in three countries over the company, then a cousin's £30…Japan's Supreme Court struck down the half-share rule for children born outside marriage in…Zhang Xueliang inherited his murdered father's Manchurian army in 1928 and spent more than…Dale Earnhardt's widow got Florida to seal his autopsy photos, and 18 states copied the lawNepal's crown prince shot dead the king, the queen and seven relatives, and was king for…Dhirubhai Ambani died without a will; one son became Asia's richest man and the other told…A 19-year-old Pritzker heir sued her father and 11 cousins for raiding her trusts, and took…Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza sued over his family's Bermuda trust and sold his collection to…Freddy Heineken was kidnapped for 35 million guilders, and his only daughter inherited…Twins conceived after their father's death were denied his Social Security benefits by a…Hall of Famer Mike Webster lived in his truck, died at 50, and his estate won his NFL…A Jersey accountant sued to open Princess Margaret's sealed will to prove he was her secret sonThe Queen Mother left her estate to her daughter free of inheritance tax under a 1993 deal…Margherita Agnelli sued her three children over her mother's estate, and Turin prosecutors…Strom Thurmond's family confirmed his Black daughter six months after his death, and South…Anita Mui put her estate in a trust to keep it from her mother; the mother sued for 20…John Ritter's family collected $14 million in settlements, then lost a $67 million suit…Alberto Sordi's sister left his €50 million to a foundation, relatives accused nine people…Dayanidhi Maran alleged his brother took control of Sun TV while their father was in a…Stieg Larsson's partner of 30 years got nothing from the Millennium fortune because they…Dart Group's founder fired his son during his own divorce, then married on his deathbed and…The McCain brothers fought over which nephew would run their french fry empire, and one…The 10th Earl of Shaftesbury was strangled by his wife's brother in Cannes, and his heir…Portugal vetoed António Champalimaud's bank deal with Santander until Brussels overruled it…Prince Bernhard denied a secret daughter to the Lockheed inquiry, then left her and a…Marlon Brando's $21.6 million will left out one child, and a son's girlfriend scattered…Ray Charles gave each of his 12 children $500,000 and left the rest to a foundation; seven…Sal. Oppenheim survived the Nazis under another name, then lost its independence over loans…James Brown left his fortune to educate poor children, and 15 years of lawsuits came before…Thieves stole the coffin of Friedrich Karl Flick, heir to a Nazi-era fortune, from his…Chile's Supreme Court forfeited Pinochet's assets in 2018 after the US Senate exposed his…Stroessner's family wealth was never prosecuted, and human bones were found in his former…Brooke Astor's son was convicted of looting her estate while she had Alzheimer'sThe Gallo brothers raised their younger brother after their parents' murder-suicide, then…Dow Jones's family owners split over Murdoch's $5 billion offer, and adviser fees helped…Two men took a Leonardo off the wall at Drumlanrig Castle, and the lawyers who arranged its…Rudolf-August Oetker's eight children from three marriages split the Dr. Oetker group in…The Winnie-the-Pooh rights holder sued Disney for 13 years, and lost because its…Heath Ledger's will was written before his daughter was born and left her nothingA Geneva court ordered a Russian fertilizer billionaire to pay his ex-wife 4 billion…Jocelyn Wildenstein's divorce was reported at $2.5 billion, and the judge barred her from…Formosa Plastics' founder died without a will, and his son sued to unwind $15 billion…Robert Mondavi was pushed out of his family's winery after a fight with his brother, sued,…The Red Duchess of Medina Sidonia married her secretary on the day she died, and her…Iceland exhumed Bobby Fischer to test a girl's paternity claim, and the DNA said noIndonesia's Supreme Court ordered General Suharto's Supersemar foundation to pay about 4.4…George Carlin's estate sued a podcast over an AI-made comedy special and won its removalPaul Newman left his food company to a foundation run by his adviser, his daughter said the…Deutsche Post's chief hid money in a Liechtenstein foundation, a bank clerk sold the data,…A Doosan heir exposed his brothers' slush fund to win the chairmanship, was cast out of the…A Saudi trading family accused its son-in-law of a $9 billion fraud, and a Cayman judge…Steve Cohen's first wife sued him 19 years after their divorce, alleging he hid $5.5…Bernie Ecclestone put his Formula One shares in his wife's Liechtenstein trust, and the…Kumho's board fired one founding brother, the group split in two, and the brothers sued…Indira Gandhi's government jailed Jaipur's Rajmata and searched Jaigarh Fort for treasure…Two barristers bought Countess Markievicz's childhood home and spent seven years in court…Franz Ulrich Kinsky sued the Czech state more than 100 times for land taken in 1945, and…Ryan O'Neal took a Warhol portrait from Farrah Fawcett's home; her university sued and lostVivian Maier was a nanny who died unknown; after her photographs sold, Cook County took…LVMH secretly built a 17 percent stake in Hermès, and 52 family members locked half their…Elaine Wynn's divorce left her shares voting with her ex-husband's, and she sued Wynn…A German paper heiress's prenup held in London, and her French ex-husband's £5.85 million…A polo club founder adopted his 42-year-old girlfriend after a fatal drunk-driving crash,…A Utah judge ruled Gary Coleman's ex-wife was not his common-law wife; his ashes were…Tony Curtis left everything to his wife and named his five living children to exclude themDennis Hopper filed for divorce while dying of cancer and fought his wife over money until…J.D. Salinger blocked an unauthorised Catcher in the Rye sequel, and his estate settled to…Steve Jobs swore he was sterile to avoid paying for his daughter, lost on a blood test, and…A singer's son by a Suharto minister changed Indonesian law: children born outside marriage…Jimmy Savile left £4.3 million to friends and his charity; abuse claims froze the estate…Peter Falk's daughter lost a conservatorship fight to his widow and then pushed for a lawAmy Winehouse's father sued her friends over $1.2 million from her dresses and lostWhitney Houston left everything to her daughter; three years later the daughter died and…Harold Hamm's ex-wife refused his $974.8 million check, then cashed it and lost her appeal…A Tetra Pak heir kept his wife's body in their London house for two monthsAldi's Theo Albrecht was ransomed for 7 million marks, and his son's widow fought the…Sherman Hemsley's body stayed in a funeral home refrigerator for months while a…Rajesh Khanna's live-in partner sued his widow and daughters for 14 years, and his bungalow…Thomas Kinkade's girlfriend produced handwritten notes leaving her his mansion and $10…Jenni Rivera's children sued their grandfather's label for exploiting her music, and the…An oil trader hid London houses inside his companies, and the UK Supreme Court ordered them…A DNA test showed a baronet's grandfather was not his father's son, and the Privy Council…Paul Walker left $25 million to his 15-year-old daughter, who then sued PorscheAmanda Bynes lived under her mother's conservatorship for nine yearsJerry Buss's sons tried to vote their sister off the Lakers board; she went to court and…A Belgian court ordered King Albert II to take a DNA test, and his secret daughter became a…A granddaughter accused TV evangelists Paul and Jan Crouch in 2012 of spending their…Casey Kasem's wife and children fought over his care until he died, then she took his body…A London judge awarded a Russian oligarch's ex-wife £453 million, then found their son had…"Putin's banker" put $100 million into New Zealand trusts for his family, and a London…Vladimir Potanin's ex-wife sought billions in Moscow, then moved to London to try again,…Hedge fund manager Chris Hohn was ordered to pay his ex-wife about $530 million, and the…The 11th Duke of Marlborough went to court in 1994 so his drug-addicted heir would never…The Duchess of Alba gave her estate to her six children before marrying a civil servant 24…Spain's Supreme Court admitted a paternity suit against Juan Carlos I, then threw it out 7…Mickey Rooney worked 90 years and left an $18,000 estate to one stepsonKen Takakura's adopted daughter cremated him before his family knew he had died, and…A recluse found with 1,406 artworks in his Munich flat left them all to a Swiss museum, and…Gabriel García Márquez said his last novel must be destroyed; his sons published it on his…Doctors declared Donald Sterling incapacitated, and his wife sold the Clippers out from…Spain's King Felipe renounced his father's inheritance after a $100 million Saudi payment…A Korean court ordered SK Group's chairman to pay his ex-wife 1.38 trillion won, and the…Samsung's founder's eldest son sued his brother Lee Kun-hee for 4.1 trillion won in shares…A Japanese furniture founder fired his daughter, she beat him in a proxy fight, and the…Spain seized José María Ruiz-Mateos's Rumasa group by decree in 1983, and his second group…Kirk Kerkorian's investigator took Steve Bing's dental floss from the trash and proved…Lee Kuan Yew's will asked that his house be demolished, and Singapore made it a national…Kirk Kerkorian left $2 billion to charity, and his 57-day wife was paid to go awayThe Ranbaxy brothers sold their drug company for billions, owed the buyer Rs 3,500 crore,…Esselunga founder Bernardo Caprotti took back the shares he had given his children and left…The 6th Duke of Westminster's £9 billion estate passed in trust to his 25-year-old son over…Anton Schlecker's drugstore chain collapsed in 2012, and his son and daughter went to…A former baker bought a prince's title by adult adoption, sold it on to adopted sons, and…Zsa Zsa Gabor's husband ran her estate as conservator and moved most of her ashes to BudapestHarper Lee's second novel was published when she was frail and her lawyer controlled her…Juan Gabriel left everything to one son, and a man claiming to be another son asked a court…Thailand's new king changed the law to put the Crown Property Bureau's billions in his own nameJohnny Hallyday disinherited two of his children under California law, and a French court…Arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi's ex-wife won a divorce payment reported near $874 million,…Liliane Bettencourt gave a photographer about €1 billion, and her daughter's complaint…Jerry Lewis's will excluded all six sons from his first marriage and their childrenBill Paxton's family sued his surgeon and Cedars-Sinai after he died following heart surgeryBillionaire Barry Sherman and his wife were found strangled at their pool; police first…Aaron Hernandez's suicide wiped out his murder conviction, and two years later the state's…Glen Campbell's wills cut out three of his eight children, and they challenged his capacity…Tom Petty's daughters sued his widow for $5 million over control of his musicRomania's King Michael was forced to sign a pre-typed abdication, and his grandson was…XXXTentacion was shot dead at 20, and his son was born seven months later outside his willCrypto CEO Gerald Cotten died in India holding the only keys to C$215 million, and…Sun Hung Kai's chairman was removed by his mother and brothers, who said he was mentally…Magna founder Frank Stronach sued his daughter and grandchildren over the family's racing…Baron Empain was kidnapped in Paris in 1978, lost part of a finger, was held 63 days, and…A Texas-born princess was evicted from the Roman villa with Caravaggio's only mural after…A Delhi court forced a former chief minister to give blood for a paternity test; his son…Robert Indiana was sued the day before he died alone on a Maine island, and his LOVE estate…Japan's "Don Juan of Kishu" left his fortune to his town; his widow was acquitted of…Stan Lee's last manager was charged with elder abuse after the Marvel creator diedPaul Allen's will ordered his teams sold, and his sister sold the Trail Blazers for about…Tom Benson's daughter and grandchildren sued to have him declared incompetent after he gave…Ingvar Kamprad put IKEA into a Dutch foundation in 1982 that The Economist called the…New York shut down the Donald J. Trump Foundation in 2018 and Trump paid $2 million to…MacKenzie Scott left her marriage with 4 percent of Amazon and gave Jeff Bezos the votesKorean Air's "nut rage" heiress joined an activist fund to oust her brother, and lost the…Porsche tried to buy Volkswagen and ended up owned by it, and Ferdinand Piëch was later…Nipsey Hussle was shot dead outside his store, and his family took guardianship of his…Goo Hara's mother left when she was a child and claimed half her estate; Korea changed its…Pat Bowlen's trust was meant to keep the Broncos in his family; two daughters and his…A London judge ordered Dubai's ruler to provide £554 million to the ex-wife whose phone he…The Sacklers drew $11 billion out of Purdue Pharma, museums removed their name, and the…Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee's heirs paid 12 trillion won in inheritance tax, the largest…Diego Maradona left five recognised heirs, more paternity claims, and two trials over his…Sumner Redstone's ex-girlfriend said he was incompetent, the judge disagreed, and his…Lotte's 93-year-old founder fired his younger son, the shareholders kept the son, and a…The Marquess of Bath's trustees asked the High Court in 2026 to let his surrogate-born son…The heir of the House of Hanover offered Marienburg Castle to the state for one euro, and…Bulgaria sued its former tsar to take back his palaces, and the Supreme Court gave him…Banco Espírito Santo collapsed in 2014 and its chief Ricardo Salgado was sentenced to eight…Steve Bing's father asked a court to rule that Bing's two children born outside marriage…Zappos founder Tony Hsieh died with no will, and five years later a will appeared in the…Deputies and firefighters shared photos of Kobe Bryant's remains, and his widow won $28.85…Oman's sultan died childless, and his successor's name was read from a sealed envelopeThe Barclay twins' nephews bugged the Ritz conservatory and recorded their uncle's business…Melinda French Gates left the Gates Foundation with $12.5 billion from Bill Gates under…Tengelmann chief Karl-Erivan Haub vanished near the Matterhorn, and his brother bought out…Argentine president Carlos Menem's son from his prison-era affair was recognised by a court…Tom Girardi was put under his brother's conservatorship with Alzheimer's disease, then…South Korea could not collect 86.7 billion won of Chun Doo-hwan's forfeiture after he diedDMX died without a will, leaving 15 children, a fiancée the court would not recognize, and…The Zulu king's widow challenged his will as forged, and his successor's recognition went…Japan's Princess Mako refused a ¥140 million payout to marry a commoner and lost her royal…Leonardo Del Vecchio split his holding company into eight equal shares, and his heirs are…Anne Heche's ex said a 2011 email was her will, and the court gave her estate to her…Wendy Williams has been under a guardianship since 2022 and is still asking a New York…Pelé fought a paternity case he lost, and after his death a woman claimed his estate until…The Tata board removed Cyrus Mistry in 2016, and India's Supreme Court upheld it over the…Barre Seid gave his company to a new 501(c)(4) run by Leonard Leo, a $1.6 billion political…A 2014 letter said the four Hinduja brothers owned everything jointly, and the eldest…Robert Blake was acquitted of murdering his wife, then ordered to pay her children $30 millionGina Lollobrigida left half her estate to an assistant who was convicted of exploiting her,…After Mohamed Al Fayed died, more than 180 women came forward, and Harrods went to court…Matthew Perry died of ketamine, and his doctor, his assistant and a dealer called the…Michael Oher of "The Blind Side" learned he was never adopted, and a judge ended the Tuohy…Silvio Berlusconi left €100 million to his 33-year-old partner and €30 million to a friend…Greece took its exiled king's palaces without payment, and the European Court ordered €13.7…The SEC fined the LDS Church and Ensign Peak $5 million for hiding its stock portfolio…Alain Delon never acknowledged the son his mother raised, and French courts ruled the claim…Suzuki Motor was run by four adopted sons in a row, including Osamu Suzuki, who married…Alain Delon's three children fought over his care and his two wills, and in 2026 two of…Wahaha founder Zong Qinghou's three other children froze $1.8 billion in Hong Kong to claim…Liam Payne fell from a Buenos Aires hotel balcony with no will, and his £24 million went to…Shannen Doherty signed her divorce settlement the day before she died of cancerRatan Tata's will gave a third of the residue to a little-known Jamshedpur businessmanElon Musk gave his foundation $7.9 billion in Tesla stock in two years, and its filings…Lord Brocket was jailed for five years for insurance fraud in 1996, and his trustees leased…The Hudson's Bay Company sold Rupert's Land for £300,000 in 1869, went insolvent in 2025,…Gene Hackman and his wife were found dead a week apart, and his children are fighting wills…Sunjay Kapur died at a polo match, and his children say the will leaving his Rs 30,000…Michael Schumacher's family has kept his condition secret since 2013, and a former guard…Sly Stone was living in a van when a jury awarded him $5 million in stolen royalties, and…Bill Gates said in May 2025 the Gates Foundation will spend its endowment and close on 31…Raymond's founder gave his son his 37 percent stake and says he was then pushed out of the…Hermès heir Nicolas Puech planned to adopt his gardener, then said his $15 billion in…Babatha hid her lawsuits over her son's guardianship and her dead husband's orchards in a…When Aaron of Lincoln died in 1186, Henry II took his whole estate and set up a separate…Henry III took a third of David of Oxford's estate in 1244 and held his widow Licoricia in…Gracia Nasi's sister Brianda sued her in Venice for half the Mendes fortune and denounced…The Habsburg state owed Samuel Oppenheimer millions when he died in 1703; it declared his…Württemberg hanged Joseph Süß Oppenheimer in a cage in 1738 and auctioned his property…Mayer Amschel Rothschild's 1812 will shut his daughters and sons-in-law out of the bank;…Baron Maurice de Hirsch left his fortune to his widow, who gave it away and passed the rest…Credit Suisse demanded a death certificate for a banker killed at Majdanek; his daughter…The Nazis forced Max Warburg to give up M.M. Warburg & Co in 1938; his son Eric needed…The Lubavitcher Rebbe's grandson sold books from the movement's library as his inheritance;…An Ohio doctor's will gave his son seven years to marry a Jewish woman or lose his share to…Peggy Guggenheim's grandsons sued the Guggenheim Foundation in Paris to undo her gift of…Max Feinberg's trust treated any grandchild who married outside Judaism as dead, and the…Rabbi Joseph Halpern's family settled his estate before a Beth Din in Zurich, then fought…The Satmar Rebbe's will named his younger son successor; New York's highest court refused…Rabbi Ovadia Yosef left nearly everything to his youngest son; his other children fought…Jeffrey Epstein signed his will two days before he died in jail; victims' claims cut the…Five daughters of Zelophehad asked Moses for their dead father's land, and the ruling made…Hatshepsut took the throne from her stepson Thutmose III, who had her statues smashed and…The Deeds of Suppiluliuma say a widowed Egyptian queen asked the Hittite king for a son to…Mes sued to recover land granted to his ancestor Neshi under Ahmose I, after a court ruled…Queen Tiye plotted to put her son Pentawere on the throne of Ramesses III, and a 2012 CT…Naunakhte of Deir el-Medina cut the children who did not support her out of her willEight thieves confessed to stripping the gold from the mummies of king Sobekemsaf and queen…The Adoption Papyrus says an Egyptian stable master adopted his wife as his daughter to…The Kebra Nagast says Menelik I, son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, took the Ark to…Ptolemy VIII willed Cyrene to Rome in 155 BC, and his son Ptolemy Apion's will handed it…Ptolemy XII's will named Cleopatra VII and Ptolemy XIII joint heirs under Roman protection,…Mark Antony gave Cleopatra's children kingdoms in 34 BC, and after 30 BC Octavian killed…Sitt al-Mulk set aside the Fatimid heir after the caliph al-Hakim disappeared in 1021 and…The vizier al-Afdal put al-Musta'li on the Fatimid throne in 1094 over his elder brother…Mapungubwe's royal dead were dug up in 1933 and reburied on their hill in 2007, but the…Shajar al-Durr hid the death of Sultan al-Salih Ayyub in 1249, became sultan after his heir…Mansa Musa said he took Mali's throne because his predecessor sailed into the Atlantic and…Ethiopia's emperors held their brothers and sons on Amba Geshen for life until Ahmad ibn…Moulay Ismail of Morocco died in 1727 with hundreds of sons, and his army made and unmade…France passed a law in 2002 to return Sarah Baartman's remains to South AfricaDingane and Mhlangana killed their half-brother Shaka in 1828, and their brother Mpande…Sayyid Said died at sea in 1856, his sons split Oman and Zanzibar, and his daughter Salme…Tewodros II shot himself at Maqdala in 1868, Britain auctioned his treasury and took his…Kitchener had the Mahdi's tomb destroyed in 1898 and his skull taken, and Parliament…Menelik II's death was kept secret in 1913, and his named heir Lij Iyasu was deposed in…Nigeria vested ownership of the looted Benin Bronzes in the Oba of Benin in 2023Egypt kept every object from Tutankhamun's tomb and paid the Carnarvon heirs their costs in…The British demanded the Asante Golden Stool in 1900 and never obtained itNigeria's Supreme Court upheld Gladys Ukeje's share of her father's Lagos estate and…Swaziland's royal council deposed Queen Regent Dzeliwe in 1983 after Sobhuza II diedKenya's Court of Appeal gave S.M. Otieno's body to his brother and clan over his widow's…Lesotho's military ruler exiled King Moshoeshoe II and put his son on the throne, the son…A Lesotho chief's eldest daughter sued to inherit his chieftainship, and the courts kept it…Switzerland released Mobutu Sese Seko's frozen money to his heirs, and his body stays in RabatSouth Africa's Constitutional Court upheld the Valoyi community's choice of Tinyiko…South Africa's Constitutional Court made two Khayelitsha girls sole heirs of their father…Nelson Mandela's grandson moved three of Mandela's children's graves to his own village,…Angola's former president died in Barcelona, a daughter fought to bury him in Spain, and a…The plays say Oedipus's sons agreed to rule Thebes in alternate years, then killed each…The Odyssey says 108 suitors ate through Odysseus's estate while he was away, and planned…Livy says Amulius broke his father's will, took the throne of Alba Longa, and made his…Geoffrey of Monmouth says King Leir split Britain between two flattering daughters, who…Demosthenes's guardians handed back the house, 14 slaves and 30 minae of a 14-talent…A Roman husband's funeral inscription says relatives tried to void his wife's father's will…Rome's triumvirs ordered the 1,400 richest women to value their property for a war tax, and…Pliny says an 80-year-old father disinherited his daughter 11 days after remarrying, and…Clovis's sons sent their mother scissors and a sword, then killed two of their dead…A 1939 inquest ruled the Sutton Hoo ship burial was Edith Pretty's property, and she gave…Charlemagne's 811 division left two-thirds of his treasure to 21 archbishoprics and a…Louis the Pious's sons deposed him twice and fought a battle at Fontenoy, and the Treaty of…Egil's saga says a queen's men cut the court ropes to stop Egil's inheritance suit, and…El Cid's widow carried his body out of Valencia, and his bones were moved five times…Matilda of Tuscany gave her lands to the papacy, a historian says the surviving deed is a…Henry I's barons swore to make his daughter queen, and his nephew Stephen took the crown…Eleanor inherited Aquitaine at about 13, took it back when France annulled her marriage,…Richard I's nephew Arthur disappeared in his uncle King John's prison, and Arthur's sister…The Völsunga saga says Fafnir killed his father for a cursed gold hoard and refused his…Philip IV arrested every Templar in France in one morning, the pope gave their property to…France kept two kings' daughters off the throne, passed over Edward III, and later cited a…Jacques Coeur financed Charles VII's war, then the king charged him with poisoning the…John Paston claimed Sir John Fastolf's lands under a deathbed spoken will, and the Duke of…Charles the Bold died at Nancy, the King of France seized Burgundy from his 19-year-old…Parliament declared Edward IV's sons illegitimate, they vanished in the Tower, and two…Lorenzo de' Medici took 53,643 florins from his cousins' inheritance, and two years after…Pope Alexander VI built a state in central Italy for his son Cesare Borgia, and Cesare lost…Isabella of Castile's will made her daughter Joanna queen, and Joanna's father and son kept…England made Conn O'Neill's son by a blacksmith's wife his heir, and Conn's son Shane had…Scientists and five tribes fought for 20 years over a skeleton about 9,000 years old, a…Pakal took Palenque's throne at 12 after an enemy sacked the city and the king died, and…At Cahokia a man and woman were buried on 10,000 shell beads, and the same mound held 53…The Mixtec codices record that Lord Eight Deer killed his wife's father to take Tilantongo,…Sarmiento records that Inca Viracocha named his illegitimate son Urco heir, fled the Chanca…The dead Inca kings kept their palaces, servants and estates, and the Spanish seized their…Hawaiian tradition says Līloa left the kingdom to his son Hākau and the gods to his…Atahualpa's captains hanged Huáscar's wives and children on the Cuzco road, burned a dead…An Inca princess was married to the captain who captured her uncle, their daughter got a…Pocahontas's son inherited Virginia land, and Virginia's 1924 race law made an exception…Plymouth put Metacom's head on a pole for about 20 years and sold his wife and…Christopher Codrington willed his Barbados plantations to a Church of England missionary…Jamaica granted Cudjoe's Maroons 1,500 acres by treaty in 1739, then shipped them to Nova…Kalaniʻōpuʻu left Hawaiʻi Island to his son and the war god to his nephew Kamehameha, and…Haiti's King Henry shot himself, rebels bayoneted his 16-year-old heir ten days later, and…France made Haiti pay 150 million francs in 1825 to compensate its former slaveholders, and…Settlers cut off Yagan's head for a £30 reward, it was shown in London and buried in a…The Native Land Court declared Ōrākei inalienable, the Crown took or bought almost all of…Two Hawaiian kings died without naming heirs, the 1874 election ended in a riot that killed…The Bishop Museum lent 83 burial objects to a Hawaiian group for one year, the group sealed…Oil made each Osage headright worth a fortune, at least 24 Osage were killed in the early…A woman married "the world's richest Indian", the Interior Secretary gave away $1.1 million…Cuba seized the Havana docks in 1960, a US company won more than $100 million from each of…Oil on an 11-year-old Creek Freedwoman's allotment brought her $300 a day, a white guardian…A 40-acre allotment had 439 owners, Congress let tiny shares pass to the tribe instead of…The Vunivalu of Bau title stood empty for 34 years after 1989 because Cakobau's clan could…Eddie Mabo died five months before the High Court upheld Meriam title to his island, and…Tonga's constitution lets only children born in marriage inherit the throne or a noble…Hawaii's "last princess" was ruled unable to manage her $215 million trust, married her…The Māori King's council passed over the son who had stood in for him and named his…Around 1800 BC an Egyptian priest left everything to his wife and named a guardian for his…Aristotle's heirs hid his library in a trench to keep it from the kings of Pergamum, and…The Kongō family built temples for 40 generations from 578, and lost the company to debt in…A Japanese inn passed father to son for 46 generations since 718, and the heir's death put…An empress gave her dead husband's treasures to a temple in 756, took back two swords, and…Tradition says conjoined twins left Biddenden 20 acres for bread and cheese, and the rector…A bishop's son ran England's oldest almshouse for decades on an income Trollope turned into…Tradition says a dying Lady Tichborne crawled round 23 acres for a bread dole and cursed…Two Muslim families have opened the Church of the Holy Sepulchre every day for centuries,…A waqf fed Maghrebi pilgrims in Jerusalem for 774 years, and its quarter was bulldozed in…A Highland family kept St Fillan's crozier for 500 years, took it to Canada, and sold it…Jakob Fugger fixed the Fuggerei's rent at one guilder a year in 1521, and the rent has not…Thomas Gresham left London a free college, and Parliament sold the building for a tax…Hideyoshi ordered his tea master to kill himself in 1591, and the Sen family won back the…England's richest commoner left his fortune to a hospital, and his nephew and Francis Bacon…Saskia's will let Rembrandt use their son's inheritance only if he never remarried, and he…Edward Colston's charities carried his name for 300 years, until protesters threw his…Benjamin Franklin left Boston and Philadelphia £1,000 each for 200 years, and his heirs, a…John Knill's will pays ten girls to dance round his empty tomb in St Ives every five years,…Jeremy Bentham willed his body to be dissected and displayed, and students stole his head…Mexico seized the Jesuit mission fund for California in 1842, and the claim ran 125 years…A Korean family gave away 300 years of wealth to found a college, and the government merged…The Shiji says the First Emperor's chancellor and his seal-keeper forged his last letter,…Emperor Wu chose his youngest son as heir and had the boy's mother put to death, according…Liu He was emperor for 27 days, was removed for 1,127 offences, and his gold-filled tomb…Li Shimin killed his two brothers at the Xuanwu Gate, executed their ten sons and had the…Wu Zetian deposed one son, had another forced to kill himself, made herself emperor, and…The Liao History says Abaoji's widow cut off her right hand and put it in his coffin…Song records say the founder's mother made him leave the throne to his brother, and on the…Fan Zhongyan's 1050 clan trust fed every member a daily rice ration, and within a few years…Genghis Khan's sons fought over the eldest son's birth before he named a successor, and his…Ögedei named a grandson as heir, two widows put other men on the throne, and Möngke…When Möngke died at a siege, two of his brothers were proclaimed Great Khan in the same…The Yongle Emperor took his nephew's throne in 1402, and the deposed emperor's two-year-old…Danjong's uncle took his throne, and three Joseon records give three accounts of how the…King Gwanghae's officials killed his eight-year-old half-brother in exile, and the boy's…Koxinga ordered his heir and his own wife killed over a child born to a wet nurse, and died…The Kangxi Emperor deposed his heir twice, and the son who followed him hid the next heir's…King Yeongjo locked his heir in a rice chest until he died, and the heir's son became king…Cixi made her sister's son emperor, an official killed himself to object to the adoption,…Confucius's 77th-generation heir was made a duke as a baby, and Red Guards later dug up his…When the Bogd Khan died in 1924, Mongolia's government took his seal, declared a republic…Sun Hung Kai's eldest son was kidnapped for a record ransom, then removed as chairman by…The last Korean imperial heir divorced his American wife after relatives pressed for a son,…Evergreen's founder left his whole personal fortune to his youngest son, the three older…The Ramayana says a queen used two old promises to disinherit the heir, and his brother…The Pali canon says eight peoples demanded the Buddha's ashes; one share, found in 1898,…The Mahabharata says the blind elder brother lost the throne, and his cousin staked the…The Mahabharata says Bhishma gave up the Kuru throne and vowed never to marry so his father…The Mahabharata says King Yayati passed over four sons who refused to take his old age, and…A nomad chief and five women were buried with 20,000 gold objects in Afghanistan;…The Markandeya Purana says King Harishchandra gave the whole earth to a Brahmin sage, then…The Culavamsa says Kassapa walled up his father alive after the king showed him a reservoir…Jain tradition says Bahubali beat his elder brother for the kingdom, gave it up, and stood…The Chola heir Aditya Karikala was murdered, and his brother Rajaraja seized the killers'…Kalhana's chronicle says Queen Didda of Kashmir killed three grandsons on the throne and…Mahmud of Ghazni left his throne to one son; the other blinded him, and the blind brother's…Sultan Iltutmish named his daughter Razia heir over his sons; the nobles crowned a son, and…Malik Kafur read out a will that made a six-year-old sultan of Delhi, blinded the heirs,…Babur's son Kamran held his infant nephew Akbar on the walls of Kabul under fire, and…Asaf Khan crowned a Mughal prince to hold the throne for Shah Jahan, and Shah Jahan had him…A Sikh guru disinherited his elder son for changing one verse for Aurangzeb, and rival…Aurangzeb was buried under a plain stone as he willed, and his sons fought for the throne;…The Jagat Seths financed the British at Plassey; six years later the Nawab had the two…The British army broke up Tipu Sultan's gold throne to divide as prize money; his sword…The British deposed the last king of Kandy, barred his family from the throne forever, and…A Bellary liquor contractor died without a will, his brother claimed the estate as a Hindu…Begum Samru's heir was declared insane on his wife's petition, and after his death she…The East India Company refused the Raja of Jhansi's deathbed adoption, took the state, and…Nepal's Rana prime ministers passed the office brother to brother by a roll; in 1934 the…A Bengal prince was cremated in 1909, a holy man claimed to be him, and the Privy Council…Jinnah left his Bombay house to his sister; India took it as evacuee property, and his…A devadasi singer spent her fortune on a temple for the saint Thyagaraja, was barred from…Mahar families inherited village land in return for hereditary service; Ambedkar told them…The Nawab of Rampur's eldest son took all his private property in 1966; after 53 years the…Three days after Hyderabad surrendered in 1948, its minister moved £1 million to Pakistan's…Kerala tradition says Parashurama gave the land to Brahmins; only eldest Namboodiri sons…Four families held Tirumala's priesthood by birth and kept the temple jewels in turns;…Travancore's last ruler died in 1991, the Kerala High Court said his brother could not…A woman claiming to be heir of the kings of Awadh lived nine years in a Delhi railway…Vineeta Sharma's father died in 1999 and the Delhi courts said she was too late to share…Gwalior's Rajmata disinherited her son and barred him from her last rites; the Scindia…Priyamvada Birla's will left a Rs 5,000 crore group to her accountant; the Birla family has…Diego de Almagro willed his governorship of New Toledo to his mestizo son, Pizarro ignored…The Inquisition burned a lord of Texcoco in 1539 after his own relatives testified against…Pedro de Valdivia's wife waited 27 years in Spain, learned on her voyage that he was dead,…Malinche's daughter sued her father's widow for the encomienda of Xilotepec, citing her…The Inquisition burned the heir to Nuevo León's governorship with his mother and three…A Cuzco chief sued for four years to be recognised as the last Inca's heir, then led the…Portugal's 1792 sentence declared Tiradentes's children and grandchildren infamous, and…Chica da Silva, born enslaved, made a will naming 14 children as heirs and divided enslaved…Simón Bolívar's will left only the Aroa copper mines, his sisters sold them in 1832, and…Pedro I left his heart to Porto, the city council and a church brotherhood fought over…Juárez refused to hand over Emperor Maximilian's body after the 1867 execution, and his…Maximilian made the two-year-old grandson of Mexico's first emperor a prince and his ward,…Eliza Lynch buried Paraguay's dictator and their son in 1870, was expelled when she came…Pedro II's heirs still collect 2.5 percent of every land sale in central Petrópolis, 137…Pancho Villa's grave was opened in 1926 and his head taken, and his widows' court fight…Carlos Gardel's will said he was born in Toulouse and left everything to his mother, and…Venezuela confiscated dictator Juan Vicente Gómez's fortune after his death in 1935, after…Bolivia seized the tin king's mines in 1952, and his heir offered the government a 5…Mexico's Supreme Court annulled Pedro Infante's second marriage six days before he died in…Gabriela Mistral left her South American royalties to the poor children of her village, and…Cuba seized the Arechabala family's Havana Club rum company in 1959, and the family's…Ernest Hemingway's widow gave his Cuban house to Castro's government in 1961 and shipped…Bolivian officers cut off Che Guevara's hands in 1967, a minister had them smuggled toward…Assis Chateaubriand had Vargas change the law to win custody of his daughter, gave his…Thieves cut the hands off Juan Perón's body in 1987 and demanded 8 million dollars, and the…Luis Barragán's archive was sold in 1995 and kept closed in Switzerland, and an artist made…Cantinflas's son and nephew fought over his films on the strength of a deathbed paper, and…Pablo Escobar's four hippos outlived him, Colombia seized his ranch, and in 2026 the…Joseph Safra's son sued his mother and brothers over the family bank, alleging his father…Justinian II lost his throne and his nose in 695, took Constantinople back in 705, and was…Empress Irene had her son Constantine VI blinded in the room where he was born and ruled…Leo VI married his mistress as his fourth wife to make their son legitimate, and the…Sviatoslav split Rus' among three sons, and within eight years one had died in battle with…The Primary Chronicle says Sviatopolk had his brothers Borys and Hlib killed in 1015, and…Empress Zoe adopted Michael V as her heir, he exiled her, and the people of Constantinople…The princes of Rus' agreed at Liubech in 1097 that each would keep his father's lands, and…Bolesław III had his half-brother blinded, then split Poland among his sons in 1138, and…Georgia's King George III had no son and crowned his daughter Tamar co-ruler, and the place…Serbia's King Milutin ordered his son blinded, and that son was later deposed by his own…The last king of Armenia was ransomed from Cairo, made lord of Madrid for life, and his…Moscow's grand prince was blinded by his cousin in 1446, after his mother tore a disputed…Polish lords stopped the crown sent for Vytautas in 1430, he died uncrowned, and his grave…A lady-in-waiting stole the Holy Crown of Hungary in 1440 so a baby born hours later could…Vlad III Dracula's head was sent to the sultan, and the grave at Snagov opened in 1933 held…Queen Charlotte of Cyprus lost her throne to her father's illegitimate son and signed her…The last Byzantine emperor's nephew signed his imperial rights over to the King of France…Ivan III crowned his grandson Dmitry as heir in 1498, then made his son Vasily heir and…Ivan the Terrible struck his heir on the head in November 1581, and his dynasty ended with…Tsarevich Dmitry died at Uglich in 1591, a man using his name took the throne in 1605, and…The Ottomans beheaded Prince Constantin Brâncoveanu and his four sons in Istanbul in 1714…Russia's infant emperor Ivan VI was deposed at 15 months, held prisoner for 23 years, and…Ivan VI's brothers and sisters were born in prison, held at Kholmogory for 36 years, and…Catherine the Great tried to pass over her son Paul for the throne, and Paul made a law…Georgia's last king asked Russia for protection, Russia abolished his dynasty, and his…Russia's richest count married his serf actress in secret, she died weeks after their son's…Alexander I sealed his brother's renunciation of the throne in envelopes, Russia swore…The Bolsheviks sold the tsars' Fabergé eggs abroad, and one sold in New York in 1964 as a…Russia buried the last tsar's family 80 years after the shooting, the Church has not…The Soviet state sold the Romanov jewels by the kilogram in 1926, while a British…Lenin's widow opposed embalming him and gave the party his letter asking it to remove…Brașov gave Bran Castle to Queen Marie in 1920, her daughter lost it in 1948, and Romania…Malcolm Forbes spent 25 years buying the tsars' Fabergé eggs, his family sold all nine to a…Badri Patarkatsishvili died in Surrey worth over $1 billion, a relative produced a copy of…Boris Berezovsky lost his case against Abramovich, died seven months later, and a judge…Prince Adam Karol Czartoryski sold his family's collection to Poland for €100 million, the…At Varna on the Black Sea, one old man was buried with a third of all the gold in a…Ancient DNA from a Cotswold tomb shows five generations of one man's family, buried by…A man from the Alps was buried near Stonehenge with Britain's oldest gold; the younger man…Bronze Age farmsteads in Germany's Lech valley kept a rich core family and poor unrelated…Genesis says Sarah demanded that Hagar's son "shall not be heir with my son," and Abraham…After four reigns of Hittite princes killing each other, King Telipinu wrote the order of…Nuzi law kept land inside the family, so the landowner Tehip-tilla had himself adopted by…Genesis says Rachel stole her father's household gods as Jacob fled, and Jacob unknowingly…Joseph made Israel swear to carry his bones out of Egypt; Exodus says Moses took them, and…Judges says Gilead's sons drove their half-brother Jephthah out of the inheritance, then…Kings says Solomon's mother and the prophet Nathan had the dying David name Solomon over…Kings says Naboth refused to sell King Ahab "the inheritance of my fathers," and Queen…Genesis says Jacob bought Esau's birthright for a bowl of stew and took his blind father's…Genesis says Abraham paid 400 shekels for a family tomb at Hebron; the Talmud says Esau…Genesis says the dying Jacob took the firstborn's double share from Reuben and gave it to…Sennacherib named his younger son Esarhaddon heir; his elder sons killed him, and…Cambyses killed his brother Bardiya in secret; a man ruled Persia under the dead brother's…Cyrus the Younger's mother argued he was born to a reigning king; his elder brother got the…The freed-slave banker Pasion willed his widow and his bank to his own freed slave Phormio;…Herod the Great executed three sons, changed his will in his last days, and died five days…Luke's parable of the prodigal son: a younger son took his inheritance while his father…Sa'd ibn al-Rabi' was killed at Uhud and his brother took everything; his widow brought…Jabir, with only sisters to inherit, asked Muhammad how to leave his estate; the last verse…While Muhammad's family prepared his body, a meeting in a Medina courtyard chose Abu Bakr…Fatima asked Abu Bakr for her inheritance from Muhammad; he refused, she did not speak to…Mu'awiya made his son Yazid heir to the caliphate; Muhammad's grandson al-Husayn refused to…A king of Ugarit divorced his Hittite-born queen, made their son choose between his mother…A boy king of Sidon cursed anyone who moved his coffin; in 1855 it was dug up, fought over…Palmyra's ruler and his heir were murdered in 267, and his widow Zenobia ruled for her own…A Sogdian merchant's wife left in Dunhuang wrote that she would rather be a dog's wife than…The last Sogdian king of Panjikent claimed the throne of Samarkand, was captured on Mount…Tibetan Buddhist histories say a monk shot Emperor Langdarma in 842; his two sons by…Qarmatian raiders took the Black Stone from Mecca in 930 and held it for about 20 years…Yemen's Queen Arwa ruled for half a century and left her jewels by will to a boy imam who…Siberia's last khan lost his capital to Cossacks in 1582 and his family to Moscow in 1598;…Bhutan's founder died in 1651, and his officials kept the death secret for 54 years while…Tibet's regent hid the Fifth Dalai Lama's death for 15 years; a Mongol khan later deposed…Kenesary Khan was beheaded in 1847 and his skull sent to Omsk as a trophy; in 2021 Putin…The last emir of Bukhara fled across a river on a raft in 1920 and left three sons behind;…The regent who found the 14th Dalai Lama handed power to a rival in 1941, was arrested for…Yemen's Imam Yahya groomed his son to inherit an office meant to go to the most able;…Oman's sultan was counting his money when his son demanded his abdication in 1970; he fired…The 16th Karmapa died in Illinois in 1981; two rival successors were enthroned, and the…Indian troops disarmed Sikkim's palace guard in 1975; the last king died in New York, his…The Dalai Lama named a six-year-old as Panchen Lama in 1995; the boy disappeared within…Three Abu Dhabi rulers were killed in family feuds in six years; the survivors swore to…Rafik Hariri was killed in 2005; his family chose the second son as political heir, the…Ras al-Khaimah's ruler removed his eldest son as heir after four decades; when the ruler…A Qatari collector died in 2014 owing auction houses millions; his heirs split over his…Qatar's emir took power from his cousin in 1972; in 1995 his son took it from him and froze…One Sursock left his Beirut villa to the city as a museum; another Sursock palace passed to…Nick Reiner, charged with killing Rob and Michele Reiner, sues for his $1.5 million trust fundCharles V gave the Welser bank Venezuela for its loans, and a Spanish governor had the head…Mitsui's 1722 house code barred any branch from dividing or selling its share, and the US…Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy's baronetcy fund pays only an heir who gives up his own name, and every…David Sassoon's sons split his firm in two, his daughter-in-law Flora was pushed out, and…William Waldorf Astor built a hotel beside his aunt's house over who was "Mrs. Astor", and…Savva Morozov's mother pushed him out of the family mills, he was found shot in Cannes, and…Marshall Field's son was shot two months before he died, and his will locked his fortune…The Dodge brothers sued Henry Ford for dividends, sold him their shares for $25 million,…Hugo Stinnes had a hand in more than 4,000 companies when he died in 1924, and his sons…Simón Patiño built a tin fortune from one Bolivian vein, and five years after his death the…Seibu's founder left his railway empire to his third son over the eldest, and that son was…Mohammed bin Laden's sons ran his construction group for decades, and three of them signed…Guerrillas killed Eugenio Garza Sada in a kidnapping attempt in 1973, and his family split…Montoneros kidnapped the Born brothers, heirs to Bunge y Born, and freed them after nine…Iran's revolutionary court had plastics maker Habib Elghanian shot in 1979, and the state…Barbara Hutton inherited the Woolworth fortune at 21, married seven times, and died with…H.L. Hunt's sons bought a third of the world's silver, lost more than $1 billion, and filed…Aristotle Onassis's only granddaughter inherited half his fortune at 18, after her father…The Rong family's mills passed to the state in the 1950s, and the son who stayed became…The Oppenheimers sold their 40 percent of De Beers for $5.1 billion in 2011, and in 2026…Two Rothschild banks went to law over who could use the family name alone, and settled in…K.K. Modi's trust deed split his family into court cases, and his son accused his mother's…A Babylonian business house split its father's estate on one clay tablet, and its records…Sima Qian writes that a merchant bought a hostage prince the throne of Qin, then drank…The History of Ming says a rich man paid for a third of Nanjing's walls, offered to pay the…The merchant of Prato rewrote his will five weeks before he died and left 100,000 florins…A Hanseatic merchant was jailed for debt in Bruges for years, died weeks after release, and…Florence seized the Pazzi bank's property the day after the cathedral murder and ordered…The shogunate confiscated Osaka's richest merchant house in 1705 for living beyond its stationA widow inherited a Kobe sugar trader, her manager made it bigger than Mitsui, rioters…Brazil's largest industrial group lost its chosen heir in a car race, passed to the…Bill Koch sold his stake for $1.1 billion, sued his brothers for more, lost, and settled…Idi Amin seized the Madhvani sugar estate in 1972; the widow came back to one working…Puma's founder left everything to one son, the other son won control in court, and the…An Wang put his son in charge of a $3 billion company, the son was out by 1989, and Wang…Arnaud Lagardère inherited control of his father's group in 2003, lost it to Vivendi in…A Sinar Mas son was left 1 billion rupiah, sued his half-brothers over an estate he put at…LG's chairman adopted his nephew as heir; his widow and daughters sued to undo the share…Cicero says Sophocles' son sued to take his estate on the ground that he was senile, and…Alexander razed Thebes and sold its people into slavery, but spared the house and…Octavian traded Cicero to Antony for the proscription list, and Antony's wife pierced the…Ban Gu died in a magistrate's prison with the Book of Han unfinished, and the emperor…The Hou Han Shu says Cai Yong begged to be mutilated so he could finish his history, died…A Tang emperor sent an agent in disguise to take Wang Xizhi's Orchid Pavilion Preface from…Tradition says Sultan Mahmud's gold for the Shahnameh reached Ferdowsi's town as his coffin…Li Qingzhao lost her late husband's collection to war and thieves, then reported her second…Venice gave Petrarch a house for his library, the library went to his enemies' heirs and…Zeami lost his son and the leadership of his Noh troupe to the shogun's favourite, and was…Tradition says Hindus and Muslims fought over Kabir's body and found only flowers under the…Danjūrō I was stabbed to death in his dressing room by a rival actor, and his 15-year-old…Chopin's sister smuggled his heart into Warsaw, an SS officer took it in 1944, and…Solomon Linda sold "Mbube" for 10 shillings, and his daughters seized Disney's South…Rikidōzan hid that he was Korean, died of a yakuza stab wound, and left his 22-year-old…A Chinese fast-food chain used a Bruce Lee figure as its logo for 15 years, and his…Josephine Baker barricaded herself in the kitchen of her château when it was sold for her…Kim Kwang-seok's daughter, heir to his song copyrights, died in 2007, and her mother told…Choi Jin-sil's ex-husband regained rights over her children the day she died, and a fan…Fairuz's nephews blocked her from staging her late husband's musical without their…Jayalalithaa left no will; a court gave her house to her niece and nephew, and the state…João Gilberto's daughter had him declared incapable while he faced eviction, and his heirs…A Delhi court ruled that Sushant Singh Rajput's publicity rights died with him, so his…Mohbad's father has kept the singer unburied for nearly three years until a court-ordered…William Beckford inherited a Jamaican sugar fortune at 10, built Fonthill Abbey, and sold…Hetty Robinson produced a will page giving her all of her aunt's $2 million, and a Harvard…Isaac Singer left a sewing-machine fortune to children by five women, and a former partner…Henry Flagler's widow left $5 million to her new husband in a codicil signed eight days…A judge took 10-year-old Gloria Vanderbilt from her mother and gave her and her trust to…A tobacco heir was shot at Reynolda, his pregnant widow was indicted for murder, and their…Four states and the United States claimed $37.7 million in death taxes from Hetty Green's…Harry Thaw's mother spent the family fortune to free him after he shot Stanford White, and…Evalyn Walsh McLean wore the Hope Diamond through a son's death, a husband's insanity and…Ann Woodward shot her husband, the owner of Nashua, a grand jury cleared her in 30 minutes,…The Aga Khan's will passed over his son Aly Khan and made his 20-year-old grandson imamGuinness heir Tara Browne died at 21 before his £1 million inheritance, and his mother won…Alfred Bloomingdale's mistress sued his dying body for palimony, was beaten to death a year…Claus von Bülow was acquitted of trying to kill his wife, then gave up her fortune to…Huntington Hartford had $90 million at 12, lost about $30 million on Paradise Island, and…A woman took over a $30 million lottery winner's money, and police found him buried under a…A Chicago man died of cyanide the day after his $1 million lottery check was issued, and…A Saudi billionaire took a diplomatic post to defeat his ex-wife's claim, lost, and died…Jack Whittaker won a $314.9 million Powerball jackpot, and his granddaughter and daughter…Abby Choi's former husband and his father and brother are on trial for her murder over a…The last Nizam of Hyderabad inherited one of the world's largest fortunes and died in…A dying woman told her mother "I want you to carry my babies," and the Court of Appeal…A 15-year-old died under a subway train, and her parents fought Facebook for eight years to…A Chinese couple died in a car crash five days before their embryos were to be implanted,…Mandela's eldest daughter put his ID card, shirts and a Robben Island key up for auction in…Douyin creators sold AI videos of dead actor Qiao Renliang saying he had not really left,…Banking heir Matthew Mellon died with $193 million in XRP, the keys hidden under other…Tob Cohen's body was found in the septic tank of his Nairobi home, and his widow is on…Robert Mugabe left about $10 million and no will, and a village chief fined his widow five…José José's older children searched Miami hospitals and funeral homes for his body, and two…Gugu Liberato's will left nothing to the mother of his three children, and a chef who said…Tanzanian tycoon Reginald Mengi's will left his estate to his second wife and their twins,…An unmarried Delhi man froze his sperm before chemotherapy, a court ruled it was property…Bernard Tapie was beaten in his home six months before he died owing the state more than…An 88-year-old Shanghai man signed his 3 million yuan home over to the fruit seller who…Bitcoin pioneer Mircea Popescu drowned off Costa Rica, and no heir or keyholder has come…Majid Al Futtaim died with ten heirs and a $16 billion mall group, and a court set up by…Gal Costa's adopted son asked to exhume her and challenged her widow's claim to half the…Nexon founder Kim Jung-ju's family paid inheritance tax with 29.3 percent of his holding…A Miami businessman burned a drawing he said was Frida Kahlo's to sell 10,000 NFTs, and…Israeli troops shot hostage Yotam Haim as he fled his captors, and in 2026 a court let his…The Kojiki says the Sun Goddess sent her grandson to rule Japan with a mirror, a jewel and…Emperor Tenji passed over his brother for his son in 671, and the brother raised an army,…The Laguna Copperplate of 900 AD cleared the children of Namwaran of a debt in gold, and…A retired emperor and his brother went to war over the throne in 1156, and the winning side…A six-year-old emperor drowned at Dan-no-ura in 1185 in his grandmother's arms, and the…The shogun's nephew killed him on the shrine steps in 1219 to avenge his father, and the…Vietnam's only reigning empress was made to hand the throne to her child husband in 1225,…The Pararaton says a smith cursed the kris that killed him, and that it killed three rulers…A widowed nun rode from Kyoto to Kamakura in 1279 to sue her stepson for her son's estate,…Two heirs of Majapahit went to war, 170 Ming soldiers died in the crossfire, and China…A royal in-law took Vietnam's throne from his own grandson in 1400, and China invaded…Japan's Southern Court gave up the sacred regalia in 1392 on a promise to share the throne,…Two princes of Ayutthaya killed each other on elephants in 1424, and looters robbed their…Kyoto Imperial University took bones from a Ryukyuan royal tomb, descendants sued for them,…A childless shogun adopted his brother as heir in 1464, then his wife bore a son, and the…Hideyoshi took over Nobunaga's house by backing a two-year-old heir, and after he died…The shogunate confiscated Lord Asano's 53,000-koku domain the day he drew his sword, and…The child shogun died in 1716 and the Tokugawa main line ended, so a branch lord whose…The future Rama I took the Emerald Buddha from conquered Vientiane, and it has stayed in…General Chakri took Taksin's throne in 1782 while Taksin's son and heir was away at war,…Gia Long dug up the Tây Sơn emperors in 1802, pounded their bones and locked their skulls…Burma took Ayutthaya's former king prisoner in 1767, and in 2013 a Thai team dug up the…Raffles made Hussein sultan without the regalia, and in 1897 a court ruled his grandsons'…Prince Diponegoro was arrested at peace talks in 1830, and the kris the Dutch returned in…Japanese scientists dug up more than 1,600 Ainu remains for study, and Ainu groups sued…Emperor Tự Đức's will called his heir unfit, and his regents crowned four emperors in just…The Dominican landlords evicted José Rizal's family from Calamba in 1890, and the United…Dutch troops took a quarter tonne of gold from the Lombok palace in 1894, and with it the…King Thibaw handed Burma's crown jewels to a British colonel in 1885, and the Nga Mauk ruby…Siam's 1924 succession law barred princesses, so King Vajiravudh's only child, born as he…Thailand's finance ministry sued its abdicated king for 6.27 million baht in 1939 and won…A landowner whose family gave the Viet Minh 700 taels of gold was shot as the land reform's…The Cojuangcos bought Hacienda Luisita in 1957 on a promise to sell it to tenants, and the…Japan's imperial family paid 3.3 billion yen in property tax in 1947, and in 1989 the new…Marcos drew a salary of 100,000 pesos a year, and the Philippine Supreme Court took $658…Marcos's body lay in a glass case in Batac for 23 years until a 9-5 Supreme Court vote put…A Baguio locksmith said Marcos's men seized his golden Buddha, and a Hawaii jury valued the…Bảo Đại handed his gold seal to the revolution in 1945, sued his own son for it in France,…Yogyakarta's sultan has five daughters and no son, and all 11 of his younger brothers…Malaysia stopped paying the Sulu sultan's heirs in 2013, and a Spanish arbitrator awarded…Kelantan's council made the sultan's son sultan while the father lay ill, and the father…A Bangkok dealer died under US indictment for selling looted Khmer statues, and his…Two half-brothers were each crowned Pakubuwono XIII in 2004, and in 2025 two of the next…Beau Brummell spent his inheritance on clothes and cards, fled London by night, and died in…Thieves stole A. T. Stewart's body from his New York vault, and his widow paid $20,000 for…Coco Chanel used Nazi anti-Jewish laws to try to take her perfume company from the…The Vuitton family's patriarch brought in Bernard Arnault and was fired from LVMH, and…Halston sold his name with his company for $16 million and was then barred from itNicola Trussardi and his son Francesco died in car crashes four years apart, and the family…Isabella Blow's father left her £5,000, and after her death her estate put her McQueen…Yves Saint Laurent signed a civil union days before he died, and his collection sale…Alexander McQueen died the day before his mother's funeral and left £50,000 to his dogs and…Lacoste's chairman sued to annul his daughter's appointment, then both sides of the family…Missoni's chief executive vanished in a plane off Venezuela, his father died before the…L'Wren Scott left her $9 million estate to Mick Jagger and wrote that she had left out her…Karl Lagerfeld left about €200 million to his assistant, models, his godson and his cat,…Pierre Cardin's great-nephew found a will naming him sole heir to an €800 million estate,…Mango's founder fell to his death on a hike with his son, and a judge has named the son the…Roberto Cavalli split his estate equally among his partner and six children, and the heirs…Giorgio Armani's will orders his heirs to sell 15 percent of his company to a rival group…Valentino left his estate to a foundation in Liechtenstein that the public had never heard ofTycho Brahe's heirs were never paid for his observations, so they took them back from…The Church refused Galileo a tomb for 95 years, and when his body was moved in 1737…Pierre-Paul Riquet spent his fortune on the Canal du Midi, died eight months before it…Robert Hooke said he would endow the Royal Society, died without a will, and cousins he…Isaac Newton died without a will, and his heirs held his alchemy and theology papers for…John Harrison solved longitude at sea, the Board of Longitude withheld the £20,000 prize,…The Revolution guillotined Nicolas Leblanc's patron, seized his soda works and published…Nicéphore Niépce died before photography paid, his partner named it the daguerreotype, and…Charles Goodyear patented vulcanized rubber, spent the profits in court, and died $200,000…Samuel Colt left $15 million, and the "nephew" in his will was the son of his brother, who…Antonio Meucci could not pay $10 to renew his telephone caveat, Bell got the patent, and…Louis Le Prince filmed moving pictures in 1888, vanished from a train in 1890, and his son…Rudolf Diesel vanished from a Channel steamer in 1913 and left his wife a bag of money with…Germans gave Count Zeppelin 6 million marks after his airship burned, and his…Sakichi Toyoda sold his loom patents to a British firm, the money started Toyota, and the…The Nazi state forced Hugo Junkers to give up his patents and his company, and he died…The US government sealed Nikola Tesla's papers after he died, his nephew took them to…The Smithsonian got the Wright Flyer for $1 on a contract that returns it to the Wright…Edwin Armstrong jumped from his apartment after years of suing RCA over FM radio, and his…Einstein gave his Nobel money to his first wife and asked to be cremated in secret, and the…RCA fought Philo Farnsworth for the television patent, lost, paid him royalties, and he…Shuji Nakamura was paid ¥20,000 for the blue LED patent, a Tokyo court awarded him ¥20…Robert Kearns showed Ford his intermittent wiper, sued for decades, won about $30 million…The Shiji says a physician with five daughters and no son was sentenced to mutilation, and…Christian tradition says the body of Luke "the beloved physician" was moved from Thebes to…Cao Cao had his physician Hua Tuo put to death, and Hua Tuo burned his book of methods in…The Bukhtishu physicians served the caliphs for six generations: one was sentenced to…An emperor gave Japan's oldest medical book to one physician family, and the author's…Rahere founded St Bartholomew's Hospital after a vow in Rome, Henry VIII seized its income…Sultan Qalawun built Cairo's great hospital with forced labour after a vow in a Damascus…A Nahua healer's 1552 herbal was sent to Spain, passed through a royal pharmacist and a…The Chamberlen family kept the obstetric forceps secret for over a century, and their…Thomas Guy sold his South Sea stock at the top of the 1720 bubble and left the profit to…Charles Byrne arranged to be buried at sea to escape the anatomists, and John Hunter got…William Morton patented ether anaesthesia, never collected a royalty, and died in debt…Johns Hopkins left $7 million in railroad stock to found a hospital, the stock stopped…John Pemberton invented Coca-Cola, sold it off in pieces while addicted to morphine, and…Father Damien was buried on Molokai where he had served leprosy patients, Belgium took the…Joseph Merrick's manager stole his savings, the London Hospital took him in, and after his…Germany sent the heads of Herero and Nama prisoners to Berlin for race research, and the…Ishi asked to be cremated by Yahi custom, and the university sent his brain to the…Roche's founder lost control of his company in the 1919 crisis, and his heirs used a voting…A Merck grandson handed the family's American shares to the US government in 1917, and the…Workers in Tokyo dug up the bones of at least 62 people at the old Army Medical School in…Doctors took Henrietta Lacks's cells without her knowledge in 1951, and her estate has…Thailand executed Si Quey in 1959 and a hospital museum displayed his embalmed body as a…Grünenthal paid 100 million marks into a foundation for thalidomide victims, and a 1971 law…René Favaloro, who developed coronary bypass surgery, shot himself after his foundation…A doctor patented a cell line from John Moore's spleen, and California's Supreme Court…Hamdard split at Partition, its Pakistani founder was shot dead in Karachi, and the Delhi…Curt Engelhorn sold Boehringer Mannheim to Roche with no German tax paid, two of his…Hanmi Pharm's founder died owing a family tax bill of 500 billion won, his widow and…Edwin Drake drilled the first US oil well in 1859, lost his savings by 1866, and lived on a…The Nobel brothers built Russia's largest oil company in Baku; Ludvig's son fled the…Baku oil baron Taghiyev lost his mansion to the Bolsheviks in 1920 and died two days after…Mexico expropriated the foreign oil companies in 1938, crowds brought chickens and jewelry…Britain blew up Burmah Oil's installations in 1942, the House of Lords ruled the Crown must…Mossadegh nationalised Iran's oil, was overthrown in a CIA and MI6 coup, and was buried…Phillips Petroleum found Ekofisk on its last required well in 1969, and Norway saved the…Fort Worth oil heir Cullen Davis was tried for killing his stepdaughter and for hiring a…A Pertamina general died with 54 million marks in Singapore accounts in his and his widow's…A Beverly Hills oil widow's will told her brother-in-law to bury her in her Ferrari or lose…Clint Murchison Jr. inherited an oil fortune, bought the Dallas Cowboys for $550,000, and…Electra Waggoner Biggs sued in 1991 to sell her family's oil-and-cattle ranch, and after 25…Nigeria hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight Ogoni activists over oil-region protests, buried…Russia jailed Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky and auctioned his oil company for back…Omar Bongo left about 300 billion CFA francs and 54 children; one daughter took his heir's…Chesapeake founder Aubrey McClendon was indicted for rigging oil lease bids and died in a…An H. L. Hunt great-grandson took a nine-figure settlement and promised not to contest his…Equatorial Guinea's vice president bought a Paris mansion on a minister's salary, France…Angola's president made his daughter head of the state oil company; his successor fired…Venezuela seized foreign oil projects in 2007, and a Delaware judge ordered its US refiner…Mungo Man and Mungo Lady, Australia's oldest known people, came home after decades in…Two disabled boys at Sungir were buried head to head with 10,000 ivory beads, and DNA…The Red Lady of El Mirón was buried behind an engraved rock, then her skull and long bones…Construction workers found the Clovis child on the Anzick family ranch in 1968, the…Nevada held Spirit Cave Man for decades against his tribe, a judge called it arbitrary, and…The infant buried with the shaman of Bad Dürrenberg was not her son but a descendant four…Çatalhöyük buried its dead under the house floor along the mother's line, and baby girls…One founding father's bones were carried to Gurgy and reburied, and his descendants over…Two hikers found Ötzi in 1991, a survey put him 92 metres inside Italy, and the finders…The man buried in the inner chamber of Newgrange was the son of a brother and sister or a…Fifteen members of one family were killed with blows to the head at Koszyce, and the…At Eulau a mother, father and two sons killed in a raid were buried facing each other, the…Queen Puabi of Ur was buried in gold, and the attendants Woolley said drank poison were…At Mokrin a rich mother's teenage son was buried with nothing, and a poor mother's son was…A woman in a silver diadem was buried under the council hall of La Almoloya, and most of…Treasure hunters sold the Nebra sky disc for 32,000 marks, and the museum director who…DNA showed a woman in Mycenae's royal Grave Circle B was buried beside her brother, by…The Egtved girl was buried at 16 to 18 with a child's cremated bones, and scientists still…Fu Hao led the Shang king's armies, the oracle said her childbirth was "not good" because…DNA showed the Celtic prince of Hochdorf was the uncle of the prince of Asperg, through his…The Vix grave held the largest metal vessel of the ancient world, buried with a woman, and…On the Xiongnu frontier the great tombs were built for women, each flanked by commoner men…Looters emptied a Moche tomb at Sipán in 1987, police shot their leader, and the…Archaeologists flew the Ukok princess to Novosibirsk in 1993, the Altai people blamed her…The Lady of Cao was buried with war clubs and a crown, the first Moche woman found with a…Avar family trees show widows taken by their husband's son or brother, and one male line…Looters had dug all around it, but the Wari tomb at Castillo de Huarmey held 58 noblewomen…Pueblo Bonito's richest crypt held one maternal line for 330 years, and scientists…The Inca chose a 13-year-old girl for sacrifice a year before her death, fed her elite…The Book of Esther says the king hanged Haman on his own gallows and gave his house to…Athens condemned Alcibiades, auctioned his property item by item on marble slabs, ordered…The Gospel of John says soldiers diced for the executed Jesus's seamless robe, and three…Seneca offered Nero his 300-million-sesterce fortune, was refused, and three years later…Theodoric had Boethius clubbed to death and seized his estates, and the king's daughter…Harun al-Rashid had his vizier Ja'far killed in one night in 803, hung his body in Baghdad,…Song China killed its leading general on a charge its chancellor admitted might not exist,…Edward III hanged Roger Mortimer without a trial and took his lands, and Mortimer's…Joan of Arc's mother sued to clear her daughter's name, and in 1456 the church declared the…Gilles de Rais sold his castles to the Duke of Brittany, seized a priest in church, and was…Henry VIII beheaded Thomas More and took the family's property, and his daughter bribed a…Hideyoshi's adopted heir was forced to kill himself after a son was born, and 39 of his…England dug up Oliver Cromwell, hanged his corpse and put his head on a pole, and…Salem pressed Giles Corey to death under stones for refusing a jury trial, and his land…The Earl of Derwentwater was beheaded in 1716, Parliament gave his estates to Greenwich…A Bengali official accused Warren Hastings of bribery, was charged weeks later with forging…The Revolution guillotined Lavoisier and seized his notebooks, and his widow fought until…China's new emperor arrested his father's favourite five days after the old emperor died,…The Army hanged Captain Jack, shipped his head to Washington in a barrel marked "specimens…A 16-year-old poisoned his grandfather to stop him changing his will, and New York's…Lizzie Borden was acquitted of killing her father and stepmother, inherited his fortune…Britain hanged Roger Casement in 1916 and buried him in quicklime, returned him to Dublin…Bukharin made his wife memorise his last letter before his arrest, and she carried it…Partisans shot Mussolini, fascists stole his body from an unmarked grave, and the state hid…Hungary hanged Imre Nagy in 1958 and buried him face down under a woman's name, and over…Saddam Hussein was buried in his own mausoleum, the mausoleum was destroyed, and no one…Russia put a dead lawyer on trial and convicted him in 2013, and the European court ordered…Japan hanged Aum's founder in 2018, his daughters fought over his ashes, and the state…Alex Murdaugh renounced his murdered wife's estate, the family estate sold for $3.9…O.J. Simpson paid little of the $33.5 million judgment while alive, and in 2025 his…Navalny died in an Arctic prison colony, and the state held his body for eight days while…A mob demolished the house where Sheikh Hasina's father was killed, and a tribunal…Tradition says Caliph Uthman was killed while reading this Quran; Russia took it as a…Aleppo's Jews were told their 1,000-year-old Bible was burned in 1947; it reached Israel in…China's Heirloom Seal passed to every usurper for 1,100 years, and the last Later Tang…Monks scraped Archimedes off the page in 1229, a Paris family kept the book in a damp…A bankrupt emperor of Constantinople pawned the Crown of Thorns to Venetian lenders, and a…Edward I took Scotland's coronation stone in 1296; four students took it back on Christmas…Korean thieves stole a Buddha from a Japanese island temple, a Korean temple claimed…Tradition says Pedro the Cruel took the "Black Prince's Ruby" from a Granadan sultan he…An emperor gave Nuremberg the crown jewels "for permanent custody" in 1423; Vienna took…Gutenberg's investor sued him in 1455 while the Bible was being printed, and Soviet…Burma's king offered a fortune for the Buddha's tooth, Goa's archbishop ground it to…France sold its crown jewels in 1887 to stop a king returning; the Louvre bought one back…The last Medici left the Florentine Diamond to Tuscany, the Habsburgs took it to Vienna,…Hawaiʻi's ruling chief put his feather cloak on Captain Cook in 1779, and it took 237 years…A Tehran mob killed Russia's envoy in 1829, and the Shah paid for it with a diamond carved…A banker's nephews fought ten years over his jewels, and the heir who got the Hope Diamond…A violin dealer was found dead on a farm with 144 Italian instruments, and his heirs sold…A widow at 19 promised to guard her family's two great bronze cauldrons, hid them through…A Nawab of Dhaka pledged the Daria-i-Noor to the British in 1908, and Bangladesh has not…Hungary's crown guard handed the Holy Crown to the US Army in 1945, it sat in Fort Knox for…Italian fishermen netted a Greek bronze in 1964, Italy's courts acquitted the sellers, and…A Hungarian soldier was found hanged beside an empty pit in 1980, and the Roman silver he…A father and son found a medieval church hoard with metal detectors; the High Court gave…Death duties forced an earl's family to sell Leonardo's notebook in 1980, and a widow's…A man says he found the only other copy of the Korean alphabet's founding book while…A metal detectorist found a Roman cavalry helmet in a Cumbrian field, a private buyer paid…Babylon took the Temple vessels; Daniel says Belshazzar drank from them the night he was…Athens's Thirty Tyrants arrested rich foreign residents for their money, took Polemarchus's…Sulla's freedman bought a murdered man's estate of 6 million sesterces for 2,000, and the…Rome carried the Temple treasures in triumph, the Vandals took them to Carthage, and…Britain carried gates from Mahmud of Ghazni's tomb to India in 1842 as the stolen gates of…The Jurchens took two Song emperors north in 1127; a 1142 treaty brought home the father's…Venice took four bronze horses from Constantinople in 1204, Napoleon took them and…The Church gave Raymond VI's county to the crusade leader and refused his body burial, and…Hulagu took Baghdad and killed the last Abbasid caliph in 1258, chroniclers gave seven…A British officer shot the last Mughal emperor's sons in 1857, and in 2025 India's Supreme…Schliemann smuggled Priam's Treasure out of the Ottoman Empire and gave it to Berlin, the…Talaat asked the US ambassador for the list of Armenians insured by American companies, and…The Hagiwara family kept San Francisco's Japanese Tea Garden for 47 years; the 1942 removal…Franco's side shot Blas Infante in 1936, a tribunal fined him 2,000 pesetas in 1940, and…Iraq took the property of the Jews who left in 1951, US troops found their community's…A doctor fled south in 1950 with one daughter, and 59 years later his four children left in…Raj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar were born in Peshawar houses their families left at partition,…Titina Loizidou was kept from her Kyrenia land after 1974, won in Strasbourg, and Turkey…Lilly Cassirer gave up her Pissarro to the Nazis for an exit visa in 1939, and her heirs'…British and French troops looted the Summer Palace in 1860; Yves Saint Laurent's estate…Czechoslovakia seized the Prince of Liechtenstein's estates as German property in 1945, and…Adolphus Busch's widow stayed in Germany during World War I, and the US Alien Property…Stalin's agents killed Trotsky and members of his family; he sealed his exile papers at…Japan hanged Soviet spy Richard Sorge and Moscow refused to claim him; his Japanese partner…Hitler willed his property to the Nazi Party, a Munich court gave it to Bavaria, and…Hitler was godfather to Göring's daughter, the city of Cologne gave her a Cranach, and she…The Soviets said Raoul Wallenberg died in a Moscow prison in 1947; Sweden's tax agency…The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953, child-care agencies petitioned for custody of their…The CIA gave Army scientist Frank Olson LSD without telling him, he fell from a New York…Beria was shot half an hour after his verdict in 1953; his son lived as Sergo Gegechkori…A Belgian police officer kept Lumumba's tooth after dissolving his body in acid; Belgium…Oregon claimed a dead woman's estate because her only heirs lived in East Germany, and the…The KGB seized Vasily Grossman's novel and every draft in 1961, and the FSB gave the papers…Syria hanged Israeli spy Eli Cohen in 1965 and kept his body; 60 years later the Mossad…Ho Chi Minh's will asked for cremation and his ashes split three ways; the Politburo…Polish colonel Ryszard Kukliński passed 40,000 pages to the CIA, was sentenced to death in…North Korea's leader's half-brother was killed with VX at Kuala Lumpur airport, and…FBI spy Robert Hanssen forfeited $1.4 million from Moscow and his pension, and his plea…CIA officer Aldrich Ames paid cash for a $540,000 house on a salary under $70,000; he and…Herodotus says Periander killed his wife, lost his heir over it, and stripped the women of…Zheng's minister was killed in the sheep market, his rivals died on the days his ghost…Suetonius says Caligula ignored Tiberius's will, killed his co-heir, and haunted the…Pliny tells of an Athens house let cheap because of its ghost; the philosopher who took it…Japan's court exiled Michizane on a rival's charge, then restored his offices and made him…Masakado fought his uncles for land, called himself the new emperor, and his head mound in…Emperor Sutoku lost the throne to his brothers, died in exile, and was brought home as a…Sejo dug up Queen Hyeondeok's tomb after her son's fall; the legend says her coffin was…Perchta of Rožmberk was married off for money in 1449, refused her dying husband's plea for…James V burned Lady Glamis in 1537, took Glamis Castle and its silver, and the legend says…Burton Agnes Hall has passed by inheritance since 1610, and its builder's daughter is said…Oiwa's shrine says she and her adopted-heir husband restored the Tamiya fortunes; the 1825…Dorothy Walpole married the man her father forbade, died of smallpox at Raynham in 1726,…Okiku broke one of ten heirloom dishes, was killed and thrown into a well, and Himeji…Kent inherited his dead lover's money, and her "ghost" accused him of poisoning her; a…Raghunathrao's men killed the 17-year-old Peshwa in his palace, his widow bore a son who…Worrall held Fisher's power of attorney, said Fisher had sailed for England, and sold his…Rose Hall's heir died in debt, his widow sold her rights for £200, and a novel later made…A widow left her inherited fortune to a Lincoln charity home; her family said a planchette…Borley Rectory passed from father to son for 64 years, drew ghost hunters for a decade, and…Three Lemps shot themselves in the family mansion, Prohibition closed the brewery, and the…Pink Chaffin said his dead father led him to a second will hidden in Genesis 27, and a…Sarah Winchester inherited a rifle fortune and built a San Jose mansion; the medium who…The Amityville house sold for $80,000 after six murders; the family that fled sued, and a…Japanese courts cancelled auction sales of houses where owners had died by suicide, and in…A New York court ruled the Nyack house "haunted as a matter of law" and let the buyer walk…A Hong Kong buyer asked twice whether anything had happened in the flat; a boy had fallen…China's courts jail grave robbers who sell women's corpses as "ghost brides" for sons who…A Dutch water board still pays interest on dike bonds sold in 1638 and 1648, and Yale…Parliament confiscated South Sea director Edward Gibbon's £106,543 in 1721 and left him…Families who had inherited unpaid Mississippi bonds for 90 years gave them to the Prince of…Khedive Ismail sold Egypt's Suez Canal shares to Britain for £4 million in 1875, and the…Ernst Abbe gave the Zeiss works to a foundation, and after 1945 a western and an eastern…Nine Americans won $41.3 million from China on 1911 imperial railway bonds, and the…Russia repudiated the tsar's bonds, France settled for $400 million in 1997, and the…Germany paid the last interest on its 1920s reparation loans on 3 October 2010, 92 years…The IRS valued Samuel Newhouse's newspaper shares at $1.32 billion and sought a $305…Audrey Walton put about $200 million of Wal-Mart stock into two trusts reported as gifts…A son-in-law moved 98 percent of a dying Texan's fortune into a family partnership the day…An IRS auditor who said she was held back as a Jewish woman left $22 million in stock to…Samsung's heir and his three siblings bought Everland bonds at 7,700 won a share in 1996,…A hedge fund had Argentina's navy training ship held in Ghana for 11 weeks over defaulted bondsA son used his dying mother's power of attorney to move $10 million into a partnership and…A secretary bought three Abbott shares for $180 in 1935, never sold them, and left $7…Two brothers bought life insurance to keep their company in the family, and the Supreme…A Vermont gas station attendant and janitor left more than $8 million in stocks, and his…A legal secretary bought the same stocks as her bosses for decades and left more than $8…Warren Buffett's will once named the Gates Foundation; he removed it in 2024 and stopped…The Book of Joshua says Achan hid silver and gold from Jericho in his tent, and Israel…The Bible says King Hezekiah showed Babylon's envoys his treasury, and Isaiah told him his…Second Maccabees says a king's minister came to seize the widows' and orphans' deposits in…Emperor Wen gave his favourite a copper mountain and the right to mint coins; the next…A father found a treasure in his Athens house and willed every citizen a mina a year; his…The Praetorian Guard sold the Roman Empire to Didius Julianus for 25,000 sesterces a…The Quran says a servant of God rebuilt a wall in an inhospitable town so two orphans could…Two detectorists sold a Viking-age hoard with coins showing Alfred the Great beside…Basil II left 200,000 pounds of gold and no son; his successors spent it, and the gold coin…Mel Fisher lost his son and daughter-in-law hunting the Atocha, found its main treasure ten…The galleon San José sank off Cartagena in 1708 with nearly 600 people, and Colombia,…A Spanish frigate blew up in 1804 with Captain Alvear's wife and seven children aboard, and…Insurers paid for the SS Central America's gold in 1857 and claimed it again when it was…Trustees holding a dead man's bank shares for his daughters were made personally liable…The British Museum bought the Broighter gold boat for £600, and the Crown sued the Museum…On Yap, a family stayed rich for generations on a stone coin lying at the bottom of the seaThe Wittgenstein siblings gave the Reichsbank their Swiss-held fortune in 1939 for…A ploughman and his employer kept the Mildenhall Treasure at home for four years, used the…Spain's gold went to Moscow in 1936; when Negrín died, his son gave Franco the receipts,…A jeweller's daughter found ten 1933 gold double eagles in his safe-deposit box, handed…The Staffordshire Hoard paid a jobless detectorist and a farmer £3.285 million between…Venezuela's 31 tonnes of gold have sat in the Bank of England through two rival…Merneith ruled for her young son Den, was buried at Abydos in a king's tomb ringed by…The hidden tomb of Khufu's mother Hetepheres held her organs in a sealed chest, but her…Herodotus says Queen Nitocris drowned the men who killed her brother the king at a banquet,…Amenemhat I was attacked by his own guards after supper, and his son raced back from a war…King Seqenenre Tao died with his hands tied and his skull broken by Hyksos weapons, and his…Amenhotep III promised the king of Mittani solid-gold statues for his daughter, and after…The Nefertiti bust left Egypt in 1913 listed as a plaster princess, and Berlin has kept it…A king's coffin in tomb KV55 had its gold face hacked off and its names cut out, and the…DNA tests in 2010 found that Tutankhamun's parents were brother and sister, and that the…Howard Carter's team cut Tutankhamun's body apart to free it from his coffin in 1925, and…Ay had himself painted burying Tutankhamun and took the throne, and Horemheb then erased Ay…A mummy sold in Luxor around 1860 spent over a century in a Niagara Falls curiosity museum…Seti I's empty sarcophagus was sold to the architect John Soane in 1824, and Soane obtained…Ramesses II outlived his first three crown princes, his thirteenth son succeeded him, and…Chancellor Bay put a boy king on the throne and was given a tomb among the kings, and a…The Abd el-Rassul brothers sold royal mummies from a hidden tomb for a decade, until the…The last native pharaoh fled the Persians and never used his sarcophagus, and the British…Arsinoe II married her half-brother Ptolemy Keraunos to protect her sons, he had two of…Courtiers hid Ptolemy IV's death, killed his queen, read out a will naming themselves…French soldiers found the Rosetta Stone in 1799, General Menou claimed it as his own, and…Ptolemy VIII married his sister Cleopatra II and then her daughter, and when his sister…Sulla sent Ptolemy XI to marry Queen Berenice III, he had her killed within three weeks,…Berenice IV took her father's throne, had one husband strangled within days, and was…Cleopatra's sister Arsinoe IV fought Caesar, walked in chains in his triumph and was killed…Cleopatra filled her tomb with treasure and torchwood so Octavian could not take it from…Cleopatra's grandson Ptolemy inherited Mauretania from his father Juba, and Caligula…Philip IV's treasurer was hanged on the Montfaucon gallows he had built, and the king who…The sultan had his viceroy of Syria arrested, killed and stripped of his fortune; three…France's grand master was beheaded and hung at Montfaucon; his son won back his name and…The eunuch who ran the Ming government was searched in front of the emperor, who found…Captain Kidd buried treasure on Gardiners Island to bargain for a pardon, and the governor…The British refused the last Peshwa's adopted son his father's pension, and after 1857 dug…Switzerland made bank secrecy a crime in 1934, and the night guard who took bank files from…Al Capone went to prison for tax evasion and paid every cent, a live TV search for his…God's banker was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge with bricks in his pockets, and the…The FBI believed Meyer Lansky had $300 million hidden; he died in Miami with less than…A couple put their Ponzi commissions in a Cook Islands trust that locked when they were…A Qatari prince's letter said Nawaz Sharif's father had willed his Gulf profits to a…A UBS banker told the US how the bank hid Americans' money, went to prison for 31 months,…Switzerland's oldest bank took the American clients UBS dropped, pleaded guilty in New…Switzerland's top court ruled that Baby Doc's family could have his frozen millions hours…Whitey Bulger hid $822,000 in the walls of his Santa Monica flat, and the Marshals sold his…El Chapo was ordered to forfeit $12.6 billion, and two of the sons who inherited his cartel…Switzerland froze 700 million francs tied to Mubarak's circle in 2011, and after 11 years…Bernie Madoff died in prison, his sons' estates gave up their fortunes, and the trustee…Matteo Messina Denaro owned nothing on paper when he was caught after 30 years on the run,…Najib Razak's stepson made The Wolf of Wall Street with money from Malaysia's state fund,…The Talmud says Kalba Savua disinherited his daughter for marrying the shepherd Akiva, then…The Talmud says a dying man left everything to his one true son out of ten, and a rabbi…Rome stripped the last patriarch of the house of Hillel, let no son succeed him, and took…The exilarch Mar Zutra II ruled a Jewish state at Mahoza for seven years and was crucified…The exilarch Bostanai married a Persian princess; after his death his other sons claimed…Joseph ibn Naghrela inherited his father's place as vizier of Granada and was killed in the…Wuhsha the broker was thrown out of synagogue on Yom Kippur for her son by a lover, and her…Isaac Abravanel lost an inherited fortune in Portugal, offered Spain 30,000 ducats to stop…Bismarck's banker Gerson von Bleichröder left a fortune to his sons; his son's painting…Herzl's testament asked for his children to lie beside him; Israel buried his suicide son…Göring took over "the Petschek question" in 1938, Flick's companies got the mines, and the…Moïse de Camondo left his Paris house to France in memory of his son; the Nazis deported…Fritz Grünbaum died at Dachau owning about 70 Schieles; his heirs won them back in New…Thessaloniki destroyed its 450-year-old Jewish cemetery in December 1942, used the stones…The Gestapo took the Ephrussi palace in Vienna in 1938; the family says a maid hid the…Iraq hanged its richest Jew, Shafiq Ades, outside his own house in Basra in 1948 and took…Yuli Ofer's last will gave most of his empire to his daughter; his son said he was no…Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky's youngest son agreed to sell his manuscripts for $7 million; his…Genesis says the Philistines filled Abraham's wells with earth after he died, and Isaac dug…The Han Feizi says two kings cut off Bian He's feet for calling a stone jade, and the Shiji…Nicias rented 1,000 slaves into Athens's silver mines, Syracuse executed him, the Thirty…An iron magnate swore his widowed daughter would get not one coin after she eloped, then…Pliny says Cleopatra drank one of the two greatest pearls she inherited from eastern kings,…Tacitus says Tiberius had Spain's richest man thrown from the Tarpeian Rock and kept his…Cassius Dio says Dacia's king buried his gold under a diverted river and killed the…Al-Bakri wrote that Ghana's king took every gold nugget and his heir was his sister's son,…The Ōshū Fujiwara grew rich on northern gold, the fourth lord turned on the fugitive his…Count Stephan Schlick minted the first thalers from his silver mine, vanished at Mohács in…Tokugawa Ieyasu's mine magistrate died rich in 1613, and the shogunate made his seven sons…The Dutch East India Company executed 44 Banda chiefs in 1621 and gave the nutmeg groves to…A Falun copper miner vanished in 1677, his body came out of the mine 42 years later, his…Hawaiʻi's young king inherited the chiefs' sandalwood debt, and the governor who sailed to…Maniram Dewan, the first Indian to plant tea commercially in Assam, was hanged in 1858, and…Eilley Bowers took mining claims for unpaid board, became one of the first Comstock…Gold was found on John Sutter's land in 1848, his son built Sacramento on it against his…Diamond magnate Barney Barnato went overboard from a mail steamer in 1897, a blackmailer…Comstock heir Clarence Mackay cut his daughter out of his will for marrying Irving Berlin,…The Transvaal bought the largest diamond ever found as a birthday gift for Edward VII, the…Britain barred Seretse Khama from his chieftaincy for marrying an Englishwoman, and as…Navajo uranium miners died of radiation, and their widows had to prove marriages made by…Claimants to Hagnias's estate in Athens produced a forged will, lost, and then took the…A Roman wrote his will for a son who was never born, and Rome's two leading lawyers fought…A Roman soldier came home from war to find that his father, told he was dead, had willed…Publius Annius Asellus left everything to his only daughter, and the praetor Verres wrote…Septicia married an old man to spite her sons and left them nothing, and Augustus gave them…Full brothers left with nothing asked the caliph Umar to treat their father as a donkey,…Alfred the Great's will answered his nephews' claim to their father's land, and one nephew…Nun Abutsu travelled to Kamakura in 1279 to claim her son's inheritance, died waiting, and…Robert Aske's rebels demanded the repeal of the law that stopped landowners leaving land by…The Earl of Arundel's heir went insane in Padua, his younger brothers fought over the…John Banks believed devils and a dead man were pursuing him, left his cottages to his…Caroline Norton's husband claimed her book earnings and her inheritance from her mother,…Dr Crippen was hanged for killing his wife, and the court refused to let his mistress take…Senator Bacon left Macon a park for white people only; when the courts opened it to all, it…A colonel took the trousers off the solicitor who wrote himself into a client's will, went…Cecil Harris lay pinned under his tractor for 10 hours and scratched his will into the fenderRobert Kaufmann left his fortune to the man he lived with, and two New York juries gave it…Mary Roy's brother told her to leave their father's cottage, she sued, and the Supreme…A German mother disinherited the son who attacked her, he killed her a month later, and two…A dying man in Luzhou left his savings and his ashes to the woman he lived with, and the…Melita Jackson left £486,000 to animal charities and nothing to the daughter who left home…A Greek Muslim left everything to his wife by notarial will, his sisters invoked sharia,…Edith Windsor paid $363,053 in estate tax because the United States did not recognise her…Maurice Jarre left his estate to his widow through a California trust, and France's highest…Tunisia's president proposed equal inheritance for daughters and sons, died before…An Egyptian papyrus says the gods argued for 80 years over whether the dead king Osiris's…The Zuo zhuan and the Shiji give two accounts of how Jin destroyed the Zhao clan and gave…Beowulf says a dying king won a dragon's hoard with no son to leave it to, and his people…The Shahnameh says King Faridun gave Iran to his youngest son, and the two elder sons…The Tale of the Soga Brothers says a guardian took his ward's estate, the ward killed the…The Nibelungenlied says Hagen sank a widow's bridal treasure in the Rhine, and she had her…The Sundiata epic says the king wanted his crippled son to rule, the council crowned his…In the Yuan play The Chalk Circle, a wife poisons her husband and claims his concubine's…The Gest of Robyn Hode says a knight pledged his lands to an abbot for £400 and Robin paid…Malory says Uther's heir was raised in secret, the lords refused the boy who pulled the…A 1636 chronicle says the heir of Guatavita fasted six years in a cave and was covered in…The Popol Vuh says twin boys found their dead father's ballgame gear hidden in the roof,…In Shakespeare's Hamlet, an uncle kills the king, marries the widow and is chosen king over…Legend says a monk cursed the family given Battle Abbey's lands to end by fire and water;…A Highland prophecy says the last Seaforth chief would be deaf and outlive his sons, Lord…The peerage records Lord Glamis's first son as born and dead on 21 October 1821; a legend…An 1885 pamphlet says a buried treasure in Virginia belongs to 30 men and their heirs,…Jamaican legend says the mistress of Rose Hall murdered her husbands; the records say her…The Korean tale of Heungbu and Nolbu says the elder brother took the whole inheritance and…A rumour said Kaspar Hauser was the stolen heir to the throne of Baden; he was stabbed to…In The Count of Monte Cristo, a cardinal poisoned for his money left his heir only a…In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff takes both families' estates through a mortgage, a…In Dickens's Bleak House, the Jarndyce will case runs for generations until the legal costs…In Great Expectations, Pip's secret fortune comes from a transported convict, and the Crown…Thérèse Humbert borrowed for 20 years against an inheritance from an American millionaire…Jacob Waltz died in 1891 and his carer sold maps to his supposed gold mine; searchers have…In Brewster's Millions, a man must spend a $1 million inheritance in a year with nothing to…The Hope Diamond's curse story was sold with the stone in 1911; its owner's will put it in…In Kind Hearts and Coronets, a disowned daughter's son sets out to kill the eight relatives…In Knives Out, a novelist leaves everything to his nurse, his grandson frames her so the…In HBO's Succession, the children's veto over the family company sat in their parents'…Theseus forgot to change his black sail, his father Aegeus threw himself down from the…The tribe of Dan lost the coastal land the lot gave it, stole a household's gods and…King Pygmalion of Tyre killed his sister's husband for his buried gold, and she sailed away…A merchant died owing money on a Black Sea wine voyage, and his brother, a pupil of…Pompey's son held the sea, feasted Antony aboard his flagship, called it the only family…The Koran says a servant of God holed a poor family's ship and rebuilt a stranger's wall…Jang Bogo ruled the seas between China, Korea and Japan, tried to make his daughter a…The saga says Freydís Eiríksdóttir had her partners killed in Vinland, axed their five…Hamburg beheaded the pirate Störtebeker, legend put his gold in a church spire, and a skull…Andrea Doria's chosen heir was shot at a Genoa gate in the Fieschi coup, the coup's leader…Gaelic law gave Gráinne O'Malley nothing from two husbands, so she sailed to Elizabeth I…Henry Morgan left his plantations and 131 enslaved people to his wife and nephews, and four…Zheng Yi's widow took command of his pirate fleets, married his adopted heir, and…George Hudson inherited £30,000 from a great-uncle in "suspicious circumstances," became…The Navy declared Franklin's crews dead in 1854 while his wife paid for the search, and the…One wave took a Manchester family off the wreck of the Dalhousie, and their estates went to…George Pullman's will cut his twin sons to $3,000 a year for lacking "a sense of…A shipowner's widow reportedly tore up a will leaving her £1 million, inherited about £5.5…After the Sewol sank with 304 dead, the man prosecutors called its real owner fled, was…Plutarch says Solon's friends borrowed to buy estates before his debt cancellation, and…Spartan king Agis IV gave his estate and 600 talents to a land division, and was strangled…Tiberius Gracchus tried to enforce a 500-iugera cap on public land, senators clubbed him to…The Han shu records that Wang Mang took the throne from a Han child, declared all land the…Prince Naka no Ōe cut down Soga no Iruka at court in 645, Iruka's father burned the court…Domesday shows Count Alan holding 33 of the 40 estates of Edith the Fair, and in 1094…The last Babenberg duke died without sons in 1246, his widowed sister of about 47 married a…Conradin, the last legitimate Staufer, willed his lands to his Bavarian uncles and was…The last Stuart heir lost his fortune to the French, lived on a pension from George III,…Patrick Sellar burned houses in Strathnaver for the Sutherland estate, a jury acquitted him…Under the 1913 Natives Land Act a farmer named Kgobadi was ordered off his land by sunset,…Villa's soldiers took Luis Terrazas's son from the British consulate for ransom, and Mexico…Henrietta Garrett died in 1930 with $17 million and no will; more than 25,000 people…Anti-Treaty IRA men burned Moore Hall in 1923 because a Moore brother backed the Treaty,…Japan's largest landlord told reporters in 1945 he would not regret going from 1,500 chō to…Landlord Liu Wencai died before land reform reached him, his manor became a museum of his…Taiwan's leading landlord Lin Hsien-tang left for Japan "for treatment" in 1949 and never…Arbenz's land law took 234,000 acres from United Fruit; after the 1954 coup the junta…East Germany gave Junker land to new farmers in 1945, and reunified Germany took it back…Mike Campbell won his farm case against Zimbabwe in 2008; he was beaten, his house burned,…Roman Blum left about $40 million and no will in 2012, a Surrogate's Court threw out a will…People in the old county of Lancashire who die with no will and no kin leave their estates…Chuck Feeney secretly handed his Duty Free Shoppers stake to a foundation in 1984, gave…Pythagoras's daughter Damo would not sell his writings for any price, and Plato is said to…Athens condemned Themistocles for treason, Persia gave him three cities, and his relatives…A 96-year-old Athenian moved into his brothel, tried to make a former prostitute's son his…Plato's will left two farms and three minae to a boy, the Academy went to his nephew, and…Athens executed Phocion at about 80, banned his burial in Attica, and Plutarch says his…Theophrastus left the Lyceum garden to ten men in common, Athens briefly banned unlicensed…Epicurus willed his Garden to his school for ever, and two centuries later a Roman exile…Nicomedes IV left Bithynia to Rome, Mithridates said the queen had borne him a son, and…Cato gave his pregnant wife Marcia to the orator Hortensius, and took her back as…Clodius burned Cicero's house and built a shrine to Liberty on the site, and Cicero's son…Horace's Tiresias tells Ulysses to court rich old men's wills, and Petronius's Eumolpus…Augustus's will, read to the Senate by the Vestal Virgins, barred his daughter and…Suetonius says Tiberius frightened a man worth 400 million sesterces into suicide to…Livia left Galba 50 million sesterces in figures, and her son Tiberius read it as 500,000…Claudius's will was never read in public, and Nero poisoned Claudius's son Britannicus four…Pliny says six men owned half of Roman Africa when Nero had them killed, and Suetonius says…King Prasutagus left half his kingdom to Nero to protect his daughters, and Tacitus says…Petronius's will listed Nero's sex partners by name, and Pliny says he smashed a…A senator was accused of biting the severed head of Galba's heir, and years later he swore…An orator ruined two brothers' father, made them his heirs, and the fortune passed down a…Hadrian forced his 90-year-old brother-in-law and the man's 18-year-old grandson to die,…Apuleius married a rich widow, her family charged him with winning her by magic, and he…Herodes Atticus paid out his father's legacy to Athens by deducting debts, gave his son…The praetorian guard killed the emperor Pertinax and sold the empire to the highest bidder…Severus left Rome to two sons, their mother stopped them dividing the empire, and Caracalla…Melania the Younger sold estates across the Roman West and freed 8,000 slaves, and a later…A Colonna cardinal kept his brothers' lands, the pope razed Palestrina in the fight, and a…King Robert's will left Naples to Joanna, her husband was strangled, and she sold the city…A Jewish moneylender's silver lay under his Erfurt cellar from the 1349 massacre until…Venice beheaded Doge Marino Faliero in 1355, seized his palace, painted a black shroud over…Plague estates paid for Sultan Hasan's Cairo mosque, a minaret fell and killed about 300,…Nicolas Flamel left his property to his Paris parish church, a 1612 book made him an…Richard Whittington left no children and his fortune to London; his executors rebuilt…Colleoni left Venice 100,000 ducats for a statue of himself in Piazza San Marco; Venice…A Turkish court ruled in 2020 that Mehmed II's endowment deed still bound Hagia Sophia as a…Their mother produced a letter naming the younger son, Hideyoshi removed the elder as head…Beatrice Cenci and her family killed her father at his castle, Rome beheaded them, and most…The Sabarna Roy Choudhury family sold three villages to the East India Company in 1698, and…A sea captain's son willed his Manhattan farm to retired sailors, a Loyalist's son sued as…Myra Clark Gaines sued for 51 years over her father's lost will and the New Orleans land…The heiress to the land around New Orleans's main square was shot four times by her…Sarah Althea Hill produced a marriage contract and a will from San Francisco's richest man,…California's last Mexican governor signed what he said was a mortgage, the courts called it…Singapore took the Ong clan's burial hill for a public cemetery, then dug up more than…Griffith J. Griffith gave Los Angeles a 3,015-acre park, shot his wife and went to prison,…John Wendel kept his sisters from marrying to hold the family's Manhattan land together,…Shanghai's richest landlord left everything to his Eurasian Buddhist widow, his Iraqi…The Wertheims lost Berlin's Leipziger Platz store under Nazi laws, Germany gave the land to…The Collyer brothers died in their inherited Harlem house under more than 100 tons of…A Yuen Long woman's brother drove her from their father's house, and village women made…An orphanage trust sold its Mumbai plot for Antilia in 2002, the waqf board called the sale…The heir to the Santos docks fortune spent it all and died on a state pension in the Rio…Yaxchilan had no recorded king for ten years after Shield Jaguar died, and the son of his…Bonampak's king had his heir presented on the painted walls of his temple, and the heir…The Haudenosaunee Great Law vests the chiefs' titles in the women of each family, who can…Six men leased Spiro's burial mound for $300 from the guardian of the heirs, tunnelled in,…Tezozómoc named one son heir; another son took the throne and killed him, and the cities he…The chronicles say Nezahualcóyotl had his bride's betrothed killed in battle, executed…When the last Jesuit in Canada died in 1800 the Crown took the order's estates, and 88…Settlers seized Demasduit to recover stolen property and killed her husband; their remains…Heirs of a Mexican land grant raided the Tierra Amarilla courthouse in 1967 to arrest the…John McDonogh left two cities a fortune for free schools, his heirs said Louisiana law…Napoleon annulled his brother's Baltimore marriage, and Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte's son…Joseph Davis sold his plantations to the man he had enslaved, and his brother Jefferson…James Addison Reavis forged a Spanish barony covering 12 million acres of Arizona,…The church claimed $999,000 of Brigham Young's estate, his heirs sued, and the three…Robert Lincoln had his mother declared insane the day after detectives saw $56,000 in bonds…Senator James Fair locked his fortune in a trust, a school principal produced a pencil will…Cyrus Teed's followers watched his body waiting for him to rise, until the county health…Anenecuilco gave Zapata its colonial land titles in 1909; the man he left them to was…Police raided Dan Cranmer's 1921 potlatch, and the masks surrendered to keep people out of…A US consul bought Chichén Itzá for 200 pesos and shipped the Sacred Cenote's offerings to…Calumet Farm passed to a widow for life, then to a grandson-in-law who ran up $127 million…Ranch heiress Sarita Kenedy East left her fortune to a foundation controlled by a Trappist…Two brothers spent eight years in jail for refusing to leave their grandfather's heirs'…Seymour Durst passed over his eldest son, the family bought Robert out for about $65…Hasan-i Sabbah had both his sons executed and left Alamut to a lieutenant from another castleThe last lord of Alamut surrendered to the Mongols in 1256, the Persian historian Juvayni…One Templar said under torture in 1308 that he saw a brother leading 50 horses and heard of…The Teutonic Knights could not pay their mercenaries, so the mercenaries sold the Order's…The Knights of St John surrendered Rhodes in 1522, sailed away with 4,000 islanders, and…On Luther's advice the last Grand Master in Prussia dropped his vows in 1525, made the…Spain opened sealed orders in every Jesuit town on one night in 1767, seized the order's…The Pope suppressed the Jesuits in 1773 and their Superior General died a prisoner in…Napoleon took Malta from the Knights in three days in 1798, his flagship blew up with the…Bavaria banned the Illuminati in 1785 and published their seized papers, and a duke's will…Masons took William Morgan from a New York jail in 1826 to stop his exposé, and a…The Sultan abolished the Bektashi order in 1826 and gave its lodges away, Atatürk closed…The Maryland Jesuits sold 272 people for $115,000 in 1838 to pay Georgetown's debts, and in…The Golden Dawn expelled its founder in 1900, his envoy Aleister Crowley tried to seize the…The celibate Harmony Society dwindled to eight members, the US Supreme Court refused the…Geronimo's descendants sued Skull and Bones in 2009 for the skull a member's 1918 letter…The priest of Rennes-le-Château put his buildings in his servant's name, a restaurant owner…Franco's forces seized the Masonic temple of Santa Cruz de Tenerife on 19 July 1936, used…German units emptied the French Masonic headquarters in June 1940, the Red Army took the…Aleister Crowley died with £430 and left his writings to his order, and a federal court…Skull and Bones' alumni trust changed the locks on the Tomb in 1991 when the seniors tapped…The Canterbury Shakers closed membership in 1957, refused to recognize the converts at…Police found the P2 lodge's 962 names in Licio Gelli's factory in 1981, and after he died…The Order of Malta's Grand Master fired his chancellor in 2016, the Pope forced the Grand…Alexander found Cyrus the Great's tomb robbed and the body thrown out, and tortured its…Darius passed over his eldest son for Xerxes, grandson of Cyrus, on an argument supplied by…A slave woman sent from Rome persuaded the Parthian king to send his four sons to Rome,…Persia's crown prince overthrew his father to stop a half-brother's succession, executed…Saladin left a gold ingot and 47 silver dirhams, not enough for his grave, and his brother…Soviet scientists opened Timur's tomb on 19 June 1941 over the objections of Samarkand's…Timur's will named a grandson in Kandahar, but another grandson took Samarkand and the…Ulugh Beg kept back his son's share of the treasury, and the son defeated him, had him…Mehmed II's younger son lost the throne to his brother and spent 13 years as a paid captive…The Prophet's mantle and relics passed from dynasty to dynasty as proof of title, and the…Süleyman had his eldest son Mustafa strangled in the imperial tent in 1553 after his grand…Süleyman paid the Shah of Persia to hand back his son Bayezid, who was strangled in Qazvin…Shah Abbas had one son killed and two blinded, and died with no son able to ruleThe last male of the Ottoman house would not leave his room when told he was sultan, and…Nader Shah's Indian jewels cost his blind grandson his life under torture, and a deposed…Bombay Khoja dissidents sued the first Aga Khan for control of the community's funds, and a…Revolutionaries demolished Reza Shah's mausoleum in 1980 and could not find his body, and a…Johann Strauss II gave up Austrian citizenship and his church to remarry, then left his…Scott Joplin died in a state hospital without a will, his papers were lost in a trustee's…George Gershwin died at 38 without a will, and the Gershwin trusts lobbied Congress for 20…Glenn Miller vanished over the English Channel; his widow licensed his name for $1, and his…Buddy Holly's widow charged Lubbock to use his name, and the city renamed its festival and…Edith Piaf's body was driven secretly from Grasse to Paris so her death could be announced…Three women claimed to be Frankie Lymon's widow, and New York courts had to decide who…Judy Garland's fifth husband buried her in New York; 48 years later her children moved her…Janis Joplin changed her will two days before she died and left $2,500 for her friends to…Stravinsky's widow and children litigated his estate for four years, and the dispute over…Jim Croce's widow sued his producers and their lawyer over the contracts he signed in 1968,…Duke Ellington's grandchildren beat their father's estate for his royalties, then lost to…Florence Ballard was put out of the Supremes, barred from using the name for a $139,804…Maria Callas died without a valid will, her estranged husband and mother split her $8…John Lennon's will left everything to a trust run by Yoko Ono, and his son Julian sued for…Dennis Wilson's estranged wife had him buried at sea with White House help, against his…Jackie Wilson spent eight years in a coma under a court-appointed guardian, died $300,000…Liberace's doctor signed a death certificate that hid AIDS; the coroner pulled his embalmed…Peter Tosh died without a will; his ten children fought in a Manhattan court over his royaltiesThe IRS seized Willie Nelson's ranch, studio and guitars over a $16.7 million tax bill, and…Sammy Davis Jr. died owing the IRS about $7 million, and his widow lost the rights to his…Miles Davis's will left nothing to two of his sons, and the eldest wrote a book blaming his…Kurt Cobain left no will; his widow sued his bandmates for Nirvana, sold a quarter of his…The Notorious B.I.G.'s mother and widow co-owned his catalog; after the mother died, her…Fela Kuti's brother announced he died of AIDS, he was buried in his own courtyard, and his…Aaliyah's uncle owned her masters, and most of her music stayed off streaming for 20 years…Celia Cruz left everything to her husband; one of her executors sued the other for draining…Elliott Smith's partner sued his estate for lifetime support, and a talent-agent law voided…Johnny Cash's trust sued Coca-Cola for using a tribute singer who sounds like himOl' Dirty Bastard died without a will; his widow sued the Wu-Tang Clan for royalties while…Pavarotti left three wills, and his daughters challenged the share of his second wife until…Ike Turner wrote two handwritten wills and revoked one; a judge found he died with no valid…Isaac Hayes lost his song royalties to a bank in bankruptcy; his heirs took one song back…Etta James's husband and her son fought in court over her $1 million while she was dying of…B.B. King's daughters accused his manager and his assistant of poisoning him; the coroner…David Bowie was cremated two days after he died with no one present, and his will asked for…George Michael left his £97 million estate to his sisters and nothing to his partner, who…Leonard Cohen's manager emptied his retirement fund, and after his death his children found…Lil Peep's mother sued his management company for wrongful death and settled with control…Chris Cornell's widow sued Soundgarden over his last seven recordings and called their…Avicii died at 28 without a will; his parents inherited about $25 million and sold 75…MF DOOM's widow sued a former label manager for 31 notebooks of lyrics and got them back in…Naomi Judd's will named her husband executor, and her family sued to keep the police file…Tony Bennett's daughters sued their brother, his manager and trustee, saying a man who…Brian Wilson was placed in a conservatorship after his wife died, while his first wife sued…Charles Vance Millar left his estate to the Toronto mother with the most babies in 10…Albert Einstein's publicity rights ended in 2005, a judge ruled, defeating Hebrew…Marilyn Monroe's executor told tax officials she lived in New York, so a court barred her…Martin Luther King Jr.'s estate sued his daughter in 2014 to take his Nobel medal and Bible…Howard Hughes left no valid will, a jury found the Mormon will naming Melvin Dummar a…Elvis Presley's probate judge ruled that Colonel Parker's 50 percent share "shocks the…Norman Rockwell's sons sued to stop the Berkshire Museum selling paintings he gave it, and…John Wayne's heirs ended an 11-year trademark fight with Duke University after agreeing…John Lennon's diaries and watch were stolen from Yoko Ono's home and taken to Berlin;…J. Howard Marshall II's widow Anna Nicole Smith won $474 million in a bankruptcy court, and…Sonny Bono's widow used a 2016 copyright termination notice to stop paying Cher her half of…Fred Trump's grandchildren contested his will in 2000, and Donald Trump and 2 siblings cut…Ted Williams's will asked for his ashes to be scattered at sea, two of his children had him…Barry White never divorced the wife he separated from in 1988; she became his executor, and…Rosa Parks left almost all her estate to her institute, her 13 nieces and nephews contested…Anna Nicole Smith's body went to her 5-month-old daughter's guardian after a Florida judge…Leona Helmsley left $12 million in trust for her dog Trouble and nothing to 2…Nina Wang won her kidnapped husband's estate in Hong Kong's top court in 2005, then her…Evel Knievel's family company sued Disney over Toy Story 4's Duke Caboom, and two federal…Robert Rauschenberg's art trust grew from $605.6 million to $2.2 billion, and a Florida…Michael Crichton's son was born after his death and left out of his will; in 2024 his…Michael Jackson's estate put its value at $5.1 million, the Tax Court set $111.5 million,…Michael Jackson's companies face abuse suits from Wade Robson and James Safechuck, revived…Brittany Murphy's father sued the coroner for her hair samples, then said a lab found heavy…Huguette Clark's second will cut out her relatives and left her nurse about $30 million,…Tom Clancy signed a codicil 68 days before he died, and the top court of Maryland ruled 4…Robin Williams's widow and three children fought in a San Francisco court over his…Joan Rivers's executors sued the Manhattan clinic where she stopped breathing during a…Prince died without a will, more than 45 people claimed to be his relatives, and his estate…Muhammad Ali's company sued Fox for more than $30 million over a 3-minute Super Bowl LI…Aretha Franklin's 2014 will was found in a notebook under her couch cushions, a jury upheld…Stanley Ho sued 11 defendants, including 2 of his wives and 5 of his children, hours after…Larry King's handwritten 2019 will left his estate to five children, two of whom died…Lisa Marie Presley's mother contested her trust, then resigned as trustee in exchange for…Lisa Marie Presley's trust was told it owed $3.8 million on Graceland, and the Missouri…Jimmy Buffett left his widow a $275 million trust with his accountant as co-trustee, and…Rupert Murdoch tried to rewrite his family trust so Lachlan would control his companies,…Puccini's fortune passed to his son's widow, then her brother, then reportedly a butler,…Russia's culture minister demanded Rachmaninoff's remains back from New York, and his…Lead Belly's family trust sued his publishers in 2026 over 49 songs it took back by…Patsy Cline's brother sued her sister over Patsy's stage clothes, and a judge ordered the…A cousin with only a life estate sold John Coltrane's Philadelphia house for $100,000, and…Brian Epstein died at 32 owed 25 percent of the Beatles' royalties for nine years, and his…Louis Armstrong's will said he had no children, his widow's nieces contested her will, and…Soldiers shot Víctor Jara 44 times, his widow buried him in secret, and 50 years later…Nick Drake's estate stopped the auction of six unheard 1967 recordings claimed by his…Umm Kulthum's heirs sued to pull the biopic "El Sett" from cinemas, and Egypt's…Sid Vicious asked to be buried beside Nancy Spungen; her mother said no, and his mother…Randy Rhoads's mother gave filmmakers his photos for a documentary that never came out, and…Ricky Nelson died in a plane fire owing money; his ex-wife tried to take over the estate,…Jaco Pastorius died broke after a club bouncer beat him, his estate nearly closed with…Kishore Kumar's nephew agreed to sell his childhood home for Rs 14 crore, his son published…Stevie Ray Vaughan's mother and brother sued the helicopter company; his fiancée was left…A lawyer sued KISS in the name of Eric Carr's estate, and Carr's family said they had never…Harry Nilsson's business manager stole his savings, and he died in Chapter 11 owing 75…Bradley Nowell had registered the name Sublime to himself, and his estate got a federal…Townes Van Zandt's ex-wife ran his estate, his eldest son questioned her title to the…Curtis Mayfield's manager ran his estate; his widow said the manager borrowed against the…Big Pun's widow sued Fat Joe for his posthumous royalties, saying payments stopped in 2005George Harrison's estate sued his cancer doctor for making him sign a guitar two weeks…Layne Staley's mother was paid his Alice in Chains share for ten years, then sued his…John Entwistle's executors sold his guitars, his cars, his house and its last 700 lots…Nina Simone left most of her estate to a trust for African children; the California…Dimebag Darrell was shot dead on stage with no will; his girlfriend of two decades was left…Rick James's trust was sued for $50 million by a woman who says he raped her at 15 in a…Britney Spears's father ran her money for 13 years on $16,000 a month, a judge removed him,…Bo Diddley's will gave his managers 30 percent of his songs forever, a judge let them sell…Miriam Makeba's grandchildren fought her own trustees for her music, and the state paid…Allen Klein managed three Beatles, sued them for $19 million after they fired him, and took…Wagner's grandson held a lifetime contract at Bayreuth, refused to leave when the board…Gil Scott-Heron died with no will; his daughter said a DNA test showed his son was not his,…Davy Jones's 2004 will left out the wife he married in 2009; she petitioned for half as a…Donna Summer's estate refused Kanye West permission to use "I Feel Love," sued when he used…Robin Gibb left a £93 million fortune to his wife and three children; his daughter with the…Scott Weiland's 2007 will made his ex-wife executor over his widow, and she spent years…Joni Mitchell's friend told a court the singer was unconscious while her website said she…Glenn Frey's widow sued Mount Sinai for his death and was ordered to hand over the Eagles'…Lou Pearlman built the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC on a $300 million Ponzi scheme, fled to…Chester Bennington left everything to his widow and six children, and his first wife's…Little Richard's brother emailed the buyer about elder abuse and racism, the buyer withdrew…Charley Pride's son by a flight attendant was left out of the will, barred from the…Phil Spector died in prison serving a murder sentence; his daughter sued his ex-wife,…The widow of Bob Dylan's "Hurricane" co-writer sued for a share of his $300 million song…Bunny Wailer's wife was missing when he died, his 13 children were told to take DNA tests,…Vicente Fernández's widow went to court to stop Televisa using his name for a biopic, and…Sidhu Moose Wala's parents won his song copyright in court, had a son by IVF at 58, and…Jerry Lee Lewis put his ranch in his manager's name to hide it from the IRS; after he died,…Takeoff of Migos was shot dead with no will; his mother and father are fighting over the…Bernie Worrell's widow sued George Clinton for half of 264 Parliament-Funkadelic…Harry Belafonte tried to sell Martin Luther King Jr.'s papers, King's children said they…A year after Ozzy Osbourne died, Sharon Osbourne asked the High Court to remove his…Dolly Parton's estate company sued her nephew and former security chief one month after her…Elisabetta Sirani died at 27 in Bologna in 1665; her father charged the maid with poisoning…France refused to take back Jacques-Louis David's body in 1825, so he lies in a Brussels…Goya's grave in Bordeaux was opened in 1888 and his skull was missing; he was reburied in…Thomas Lawrence died in debt in 1830 and the nation refused his Old Master drawings for…Audubon's widow sold the Birds of America copper plates in 1870 and buyers melted most of…Gustave Courbet was billed 323,000 francs to rebuild the Vendôme Column and died in Swiss…After Gustav Klimt died in 1918, the mothers of his children claimed support from his…Paul Klee's widow sold his estate for SFr120,000 two days before dying; his son sued the…The Man Ray Trust said in 2021 that 148 of 188 lots in a Christie's Paris sale of his…Jack Kirby's heirs served 45 copyright termination notices on Marvel; the Second Circuit…Willem de Kooning's Woman-Ochre was cut from a Tucson museum frame in 1985 and found in…Rodin gave all his works and reproduction rights to France in 1916, and the Musee Rodin…Max Liebermann's widow Martha killed herself in March 1943 as police came to deport her,…Armed men took Munch's The Scream and Madonna from Oslo's Munch Museum in 2004, a court…Jackson Pollock's mistress Ruth Kligman claimed he painted Red, Black & Silver for her…A forger sold about 1,300 fake Giacometti sculptures over ten years, German police seized…Nina Kandinsky was strangled at her Gstaad chalet in 1980, about $2 million of her…Thieves stole Henry Moore's 2-ton Reclining Figure, valued at 3 million pounds, from his…Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali was shot in London in 1987, Britain expelled Israeli…Robert Mapplethorpe inherited three quarters of Sam Wagstaff's $7 million estate over the…Lucian Freud left a 96 million pound estate to his solicitor and one daughter, and a High…Trustees for the family of Mondrian's heir Harry Holtzman sued the Philadelphia Museum of…Michelangelo's nephew smuggled his body out of Rome to Florence in a bale of goods in March…Legend: Domenichino died in Naples in April 1641 and was said to have been poisoned by…Gustave Caillebotte left France more than 60 Impressionist works in 1894; the state refused…Kazimir Malevich's heirs sued Amsterdam over 84 works held since 1958; in April 2008 the…Bruno Schulz was shot in the street in Drohobych in November 1942 in a feud between two SS…Pierre Bonnard's wife had four unknown nieces; a French court ruled in 1951 that he forged…Angela Merkel returned two Emil Nolde paintings to the Berlin museum foundation in April…Monet's last heir died in a car crash on 3 February 1966 and left Giverny and his father's…Jo Hopper left the Whitney more than 3,000 Edward Hopper works in 1968; a critic alleges a…Marcel Duchamp worked in secret for 20 years on Étant donnés; it was moved to Philadelphia…Barnett Newman's "Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III" was slashed in Amsterdam in…A French court gave Renoir's assistant Richard Guino co-authorship of the Renoir sculptures…Eileen Gray's furniture was removed from her villa E-1027 and sold at Sotheby's in 1991;…Zdzisław Beksiński was stabbed to death in his Warsaw flat in February 2005 by the…Zaha Hadid's business partner sued her three co-executors in London over a roughly £70…Victor Hugo left 50,000 francs to the poor and asked for their hearse; France gave him a…Lewis Carroll's diaries lost four volumes and ten pages before reaching the British Library…Ambrose Bierce vanished in Mexico in 1913 or 1914, and a priest put a plaque in a Sierra…Jack London left nearly his entire estate to his wife Charmian in 1916; she kept the ranch,…D. H. Lawrence was exhumed in France in 1935 and cremated for a New Mexico shrine, and a…Federico García Lorca was shot with three other men in August 1936, and a 2009 dig at the…Zelda Fitzgerald died locked in a fifth-floor room when fire destroyed Highland Hospital in…George Bernard Shaw's will ordered a new 40-letter alphabet; the High Court found the trust…Laura Ingalls Wilder left her book royalties to a Missouri library after her daughter's…A Lewis scholar says he saved C. S. Lewis's papers from a bonfire; a critic charged in 1988…Somerset Maugham tried to disinherit his daughter in 1962 to adopt his secretary Alan…Ezra Pound spent more than 12 years at St. Elizabeths; his wife held legal control, and…Anne Sexton's psychiatrist gave about 300 therapy tapes to her biographer after her death,…Ayn Rand's heir kept the first and last pages of The Fountainhead manuscript; the Library…Arthur Koestler and his wife Cynthia died together in 1983; his 1 million pound estate paid…Paulette Goddard inherited Erich Maria Remarque's money, properties and art in 1970 and…Voltaire was refused a Paris burial in 1778, buried in secret, moved to the Panthéon in…Robert Burns's widow died in 1834, and local men opened his tomb at night to cast his skull…Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill collection was sold off over 24 days in 1842 after heirs…Weimar buried a skull as Friedrich Schiller's in 1827; DNA tests in 2008 showed it and the…The manuscript of Sade's 120 Days of Sodom was smuggled into Switzerland in 1982, sold for…Keats's letters to Fanny Brawne were published in 1878 over objections and sold at…Walt Whitman's brain was removed at his autopsy for a brain club and was destroyed within a…Jules Verne's son rewrote his posthumous novels, and Verne's lost 1863 novel stayed in a…Ilia Chavchavadze was shot dead on the road to his Saguramo estate in 1907, and the…Mark Twain fired his secretary Isabel Lyon in 1909 and wrote 429 pages accusing her and her…Beatrix Potter left more than 4,000 acres and 14 or 15 farms to the National Trust, with a…T. S. Eliot's 1,131 letters to Emily Hale stayed sealed at Princeton for 60 years, and…John Kennedy Toole's mother got A Confederacy of Dunces published, then fought a bookseller…Jerzy Kosiński was accused of plagiarism and ghostwriting in 1982 and killed himself in…Alex Haley died owing about $1.5 million, his estate auctioned his Pulitzer for $50,000,…Patricia Highsmith left her whole estate, over $3 million, to the Yaddo artists' colony,…James Michener gave away about $117 million and left the bulk of his estate to Swarthmore…Arthur Miller kept his son Daniel with Down syndrome out of public view and left him an…Legend: Aeschylus died at Gela in 456 or 455 BC when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his headSpain announced in March 2015 that it had found Cervantes among bones of 15 to 17 people in…Molière died in 1673 after collapsing in his own play; priests refused him last rites, and…Margaret Fuller, her husband and their son drowned 100 yards from Fire Island in 1850, and…Gogol burned the second part of Dead Souls nine days before he died; in 1931 his coffin was…The 1938 Moscow trial charged Yagoda and doctors with murdering Maxim Gorky and his son; 18…Rabindranath Tagore's 1913 Nobel gold medal and 49 other items were stolen from the…L.M. Montgomery's death certificate said coronary thrombosis; her granddaughter wrote in…Eugene O'Neill disowned his daughter Oona in 1943, and his widow Carlotta released Long…Mishima's widow boycotted Paul Schrader's 1985 film, and his children won a copyright suit…A car bomb killed Ghassan Kanafani and his 17-year-old niece in Beirut on 8 July 1972, and…Pearl S. Buck left three contradictory wills, a dance instructor and her seven adopted…Tennessee Williams left his $10 million estate to Sewanee and his brother $25,000; the…James Baldwin's estate sold his papers to the Schomburg Center in 2017, with part of his…Edward Abbey wrote instructions to be buried without a coffin or permit, and friends buried…Muriel Spark left her entire estate to her companion Penelope Jardine and took steps to…Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death in a Deptford house on 30 May 1593 by a man later…Kelly Clarkson bought Jane Austen's ring for 152,450 pounds in 2012, and Britain barred…Herman Melville's widow tied his unpublished papers in bundles in 1891, and Billy Budd…A 1953 newspaper said a chimney sweep blocked Émile Zola's flue in 1902, and the Panthéon…Proust's sister-in-law burned his papers after her husband died in 1935, and a perfume heir…Thomas Hardy's heart was buried in his first wife's grave and his ashes in Westminster…Robert E. Howard shot himself in June 1936 and his mother died a day or two later; a will…H. P. Lovecraft's literary executor died in 1951, his papers went to August Derleth, and no…F. Scott Fitzgerald left an estate of about $35,000 in 1940, and the Catholic church…George Orwell married Sonia Brownell in a hospital in October 1949 and died in January…Robert Walser was found dead in the snow in 1956 after 23 years in an asylum, and his…A yardman burned Zora Neale Hurston's belongings after she died in a county welfare home in…Richard Wright died in a Paris clinic in 1960; his daughter and friends said the US…Agatha Christie gave her grandson the rights to The Mousetrap as a child, and the company…L. Ron Hubbard was cremated and his ashes scattered at sea within a day of his death in…Netflix bought the Roald Dahl Story Company in September 2021 for a reported 500 million…Hunter S. Thompson's ashes were launched from a 15-story tower at his ranch in August 2005,…Gore Vidal changed his trust in 2011 to leave everything to Harvard, and his half-sister…Maurice Sendak's foundation and the Rosenbach Museum fought for two years in a Connecticut…The FBI planted a false story about Jean Seberg's pregnancy in 1970, admitted it in 1979,…Natalie Wood drowned off Santa Catalina Island in 1981, and in 2012 the Los Angeles coroner…The IRS seized Redd Foxx's Las Vegas home, seven vehicles and bank accounts in 1989, and…Brandon Lee was killed on the set of The Crow in 1993 by a bullet fragment fired from a…Hedy Lamarr's adopted son sued in Florida in 2000 over a will that left him nothing from…Theo van Gogh was killed on an Amsterdam street on 2 November 2004, and Mohammed Bouyeri…Celeste Holm's sons sued her fifth husband over a 2002 trust, the fight ran about six…James Gandolfini's will left 80 percent of an estimated $70 million estate to his sisters…Debbie Reynolds never raised the money for her Hollywood museum, sold her 3,500-item…Caroline Flack died in February 2020 before an assault trial; the coroner found the…Kirk Douglas left most of a $61 million estate to charity and nothing to his son MichaelThe original Hermes bag made for Jane Birkin sold at Sotheby's Paris in July 2025 for 8.58…Norman Jewison's three children sued after he changed his will two months before his death…Jayne Mansfield's estate was appraised at $600,000 in 1967; by 1977 her children found…Christine Chubbuck shot herself on live television in 1974, and her station's tape has been…Bob Crane was bludgeoned to death in 1978, left everything to his estranged second wife,…A French woman sued Darryl F. Zanuck's estate for $15 million in 1980, saying his son had…A helicopter killed Vic Morrow and two child actors on the Twilight Zone set in 1982, and…Gene Roddenberry's first wife sued his estate for Star Trek profits and lost 2-1 on appeal…David Carradine was found dead in a Bangkok closet in 2009; Thai police said suicide, the…Elizabeth Taylor's jewelry sold for $137,235,575 at Christie's in December 2011, the most…Philip Seymour Hoffman left an estimated $35 million to Mimi O'Donnell, whom he never…Burt Reynolds's 2018 will named his son Quinton as intentionally omitted and routed his…Doris Day's husband died in 1968 and she learned her lawyer and her husband had lost her…Chadwick Boseman died in 2020 without a will, and his widow filed in Los Angeles to run an…Nichelle Nichols's son became her conservator in 2019 and fought her manager in court;…Julia Pastrana's husband sold her embalmed body after she died in 1860, and it was…Jumbo the elephant was killed by a train in 1885; his skeleton, hide, heart and ashes went…P.T. Barnum's will paid a grandson to take the Barnum name; sources give the sum as $25,000…Buffalo Bill's 1913 will gave everything to Louisa; Denver newspaper owners held his…Mata Hari's body went unclaimed after her 1917 execution, and the embalmed head kept in a…Max Linder and his wife died in a Paris hotel in 1925, a letter said "He will kill me," and…Houdini's great-nephew and two authors announced a 2007 plan to exhume his body to test for…Lillian Leitzel fell to her death in 1931, and her widower Alfredo Codona shot his third…Lenny Bruce died broke in 1966 with an appeal pending, and New York pardoned him in 2003Balanchine's 1983 will split the rights to about 100 ballets among a handful of friends,…Coluche left 6.1 million francs of debt in 1986, his ex-wife refused the estate, and his…Martha Graham left her dances to Ron Protas in 1991, and federal courts ruled from 2002 to…Margot Fonteyn died in Panama in 1991 after her savings went to her paralysed husband's…Benny Hill left an estate of 7,548,192 pounds to seven nieces and nephews, and his grave…Rudolf Nureyev left most of his estate to two foundations; a sister and niece contested the…Martha Raye married a man 33 years younger and left him her $2 million estate, after her…Phil Hartman was shot dead by his wife in 1998; their wills left $1.23 million to two…Johnny Carson's trust gave his foundation $156 million after his death, and no public…Antonio Vivaldi was buried in Vienna for 19 florins 45 kreuzer, and his manuscripts were…Jean-Marie Leclair was found stabbed three times at his Paris door in October 1764, and his…Giuseppe Verdi's villa was closed by a Parma court in 2022 over an heirs' fight, then taken…Alma Mahler held Mahler's unfinished Tenth Symphony for decades and first demanded a veto…Enrico Caruso's body lay in a glass-topped coffin in Naples for years, and his estate was…Alban Berg's widow kept the third act of Lulu unfinished for 41 years, and a composer…Anton Webern was shot dead by a US Army cook in Mittersill on 15 September 1945, and the…Béla Bartók's New York estate was in court for 22 years, and the trustee claimed his…Paul Gauguin died in the Marquesas with no will, the colony auctioned his paintings for a…Cézanne's 1902 will left everything to his son and nothing to his wife Hortense, and they…Sergei Yesenin was found hanged in the Hotel Angleterre in 1925, his heirs went to court…Paul Bern was found shot two months after marrying Jean Harlow, his common-law wife Dorothy…Dylan Thomas lost the Under Milk Wood manuscript in a Soho pub, his producer found it and…James Dean died without a will, his father inherited, his wrecked Porsche vanished in 1960,…After Sharon Tate's murder her mother Doris backed California's 1982 Victims' Bill of…Sartre adopted Arlette Elkaïm and made her his heir, so Simone de Beauvoir had no legal say…Fassbinder's first wife said the head of his foundation invented a marriage to him to…Orson Welles's daughter Beatrice sued his partner Oja Kodar, fought her over The Other Side…Chagall's heirs paid his death duties with 46 paintings and 406 drawings, and his…Jim Henson died during a $150 million sale to Disney, his children ended the deal and sued…Marlene Dietrich's daughter sold her estate to Berlin in 1993, about 300,000 pages, 16,500…Raymond Burr left everything to his partner Robert Benevides, and a judge threw out his…Anthony Quinn bought 29 acres on Rhodes in 1960, a Greek court cancelled the sale in 1984,…
Eras, places, the law and families
Ancient world, to 500: wills, heirs and estatesMedieval, 500 to 1500: wills, heirs and estatesEmpires and conquest, 1500 to 1800: wills, heirs and estatesIndustry and empire, 1800 to 1914: wills, heirs and estatesWorld wars, 1914 to 1945: wills, heirs and estatesPostwar, 1945 to 2000: wills, heirs and estatesNow, 2000 to 2026: wills, heirs and estatesNorth America: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesLatin America: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesMiddle East: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesAfrica: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesSouth Asia: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesEast Asia: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesOceania: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesEurope: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesIraq: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesTurkey: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesItaly: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesFrance: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesUnited Kingdom: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesSpain: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesPanama: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesMexico: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesPhilippines: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesIndia: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesGermany: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesPeru: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesGuatemala: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesUnited States: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesCanada: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesNetherlands: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesRussia: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesAustria: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesPoland: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesGreece: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesPacific islands: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesIreland: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesSouth Africa: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesBelgium: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesBrazil: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesCzech Republic: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesIsrael and Palestine: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesHungary: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesSwitzerland: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesThailand: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesJapan: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesArgentina: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesEgypt: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesJamaica: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesPortugal: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesChina: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesChile: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesSaudi Arabia: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesEthiopia: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesNorway: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesTaiwan: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesAustralia: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesMonaco: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesNigeria: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesJordan: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesSouth Korea: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesNepal: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesHong Kong: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesSweden: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesCaribbean islands: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesIceland: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesIndonesia: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesSingapore: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesUnited Arab Emirates: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesMorocco: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesGhana: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesCuba: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesMongolia: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesAfghanistan: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesPakistan: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesBangladesh: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesColombia: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesUkraine: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesRomania: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesDenmark: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesIran: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesSyria: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesLebanon: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesVietnam: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesTunisia: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesUzbekistan: famous wills, estates and inheritance casesHouse of Medici: wills, heirs and the family fortuneHouse of Borgia: wills, heirs and the family fortuneHouse of Habsburg: wills, heirs and the family fortuneHouse of Bourbon: wills, heirs and the family fortuneHouse of Tudor: wills, heirs and the family fortuneHouse of Romanov: wills, heirs and the family fortuneHouse of Hohenzollern: wills, heirs and the family fortuneHouse of Wittelsbach: wills, heirs and the family fortuneHouse of Orléans: wills, heirs and the family fortuneHouse of Braganza: wills, heirs and the family fortuneHouse of Liechtenstein: wills, heirs and the family fortuneHouse of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha: wills, heirs and the family fortuneHouse of Hanover: wills, heirs and the family fortuneHouse of Plantagenet: wills, heirs and the family fortuneHouse of Valois: wills, heirs and the family fortuneOttoman dynasty: wills, heirs and the family fortuneMughal dynasty: wills, heirs and the family fortuneAl Thani family: wills, heirs and the family fortunePahlavi dynasty: wills, heirs and the family fortuneHashemites: wills, heirs and the family fortuneChakri dynasty: wills, heirs and the family fortuneTokugawa clan: wills, heirs and the family fortuneFugger family: wills, heirs and the family fortuneRothschild family: wills, heirs and the family fortunePizarro family: wills, heirs and the family fortuneAstor family: wills, heirs and the family fortuneVanderbilt family: wills, heirs and the family fortuneRockefeller family: wills, heirs and the family fortuneMellon family: wills, heirs and the family fortuneFord family: wills, heirs and the family fortuneGetty family: wills, heirs and the family fortuneHunt family: wills, heirs and the family fortuneBusch family: wills, heirs and the family fortuneHilton family: wills, heirs and the family fortuneTrump family: wills, heirs and the family fortuneMurdoch family: wills, heirs and the family fortuneWildenstein family: wills, heirs and the family fortuneArnault family: wills, heirs and the family fortuneThyssen family: wills, heirs and the family fortuneKrupp family: wills, heirs and the family fortuneChurchill family: wills, heirs and the family fortuneTata family: wills, heirs and the family fortuneAmbani family: wills, heirs and the family fortuneNizams of Hyderabad: wills, heirs and the family fortuneLee family (Samsung): wills, heirs and the family fortuneKwok family: wills, heirs and the family fortuneMarcos family: wills, heirs and the family fortuneHouse of Kamehameha: wills, heirs and the family fortuneBonaparte family: wills, heirs and the family fortunePtolemaic dynasty: wills, heirs and the family fortuneJulio-Claudian dynasty: wills, heirs and the family fortuneAbbasid dynasty: wills, heirs and the family fortuneUmayyad dynasty: wills, heirs and the family fortuneFatimid dynasty: wills, heirs and the family fortuneFamily of Genghis Khan: wills, heirs and the family fortuneKawānanakoa family: wills, heirs and the family fortuneCommon law inheritance: cases and estate fightsCivil law inheritance: cases and estate fightsRoman law inheritance: cases and estate fightsIslamic law inheritance: cases and estate fightsJewish and biblical law inheritance: cases and estate fightsHindu law inheritance: cases and estate fightsChinese and East Asian law inheritance: cases and estate fightsCustomary law inheritance: cases and estate fightsRoyal and church law inheritance: cases and estate fightsCatholic: wills and estate casesProtestant and Anglican: wills and estate casesEastern Orthodox: wills and estate casesLatter Day Saints: wills and estate casesOther Christian: wills and estate casesJewish: wills and estate casesMuslim: wills and estate casesHindu: wills and estate casesSikh: wills and estate casesBuddhist: wills and estate casesZoroastrian: wills and estate casesShinto: wills and estate casesConfucian and Taoist: wills and estate casesAncient and traditional religions: wills and estate casesAtheist and agnostic: wills and estate casesOther: wills and estate casesWills and estate cases by religionSaint Petersburg Academy of Sciences: members' wills and estatesRoyal Academy of Arts: members' wills and estatesBrazilian Academy of Sciences: members' wills and estatesLiberal Party: members' wills and estatesForza Italia: members' wills and estatespopulares: members' wills and estatesRoyal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences: members' wills and estatesDemocratic-Republican Party: members' wills and estatesScreen Actors Guild: members' wills and estatesAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences: members' wills and estatesPEN America: members' wills and estatesIndian National Science Academy: members' wills and estatesFolketing: members' wills and estatesGray's Inn: members' wills and estatesSociété d'agriculture de Paris: members' wills and estatesSouth African Communist Party: members' wills and estatesThe Highwaymen: members' wills and estatesAtlantik-Brücke: members' wills and estatesAccademia della Crusca: members' wills and estatesPhi Beta Kappa Society: members' wills and estatesAcademy of Science for Public Utility: members' wills and estatesAmerican Academy of Arts and Letters: members' wills and estatesAcademy of Arts of the GDR: members' wills and estatesNational Academy of Sciences: members' wills and estatesCommittee of Union and Progress: members' wills and estatesAcademy of Arts, Berlin: members' wills and estatesSecond Viennese School: members' wills and estatesSerbian Academy of Sciences and Arts: members' wills and estatesFrench Academy of Sciences: members' wills and estatesThe Elders: members' wills and estatesBavarian Academy of Fine Arts: members' wills and estatesAccademia Nazionale dei Lincei: members' wills and estatesRussian Social Democratic Labour Party: members' wills and estatesCommunist Party of the United States of America: members' wills and estatesAmerican Philosophical Society: members' wills and estatesRoyal Society of London: members' wills and estatesGerman Academy of Sciences Leopoldina: members' wills and estatesPennsylvania Abolition Society: members' wills and estatesComité national de l'estampe: members' wills and estatesRussian Academy of Sciences: members' wills and estatesJusticialist Party: members' wills and estatesBavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities: members' wills and estatesFrench Communist Party: members' wills and estatesRevolutionary Military Council: members' wills and estatesRoyal Society of Literature: members' wills and estatesRepublican Party: members' wills and estatesCommunist Party of the Soviet Union: members' wills and estatesNazi Party: members' wills and estatesAccademia delle Arti del Disegno: members' wills and estatesWriters Guild of America West: members' wills and estatesindependent politician: members' wills and estatesOrder of the Garter: members' wills and estatesAccademia Nazionale delle Scienze detta dei XL: members' wills and estatesLabour Party: members' wills and estatesAmerican Antiquarian Society: members' wills and estatesAustrian Academy of Sciences: members' wills and estatesPropaganda Due: members' wills and estatesSAG-AFTRA: members' wills and estatesAlpha Kappa Alpha: members' wills and estatesAcadémie des beaux-arts: members' wills and estatesRoyal Prussian Academy of Sciences: members' wills and estatesGerman Workers' Party: members' wills and estatesFederalist Party: members' wills and estatesRoyal Geographical Society: members' wills and estatesAfrican National Congress: members' wills and estatesRoyal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities: members' wills and estatesKoninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten: members' wills and estatesNational Academy of Engineering: members' wills and estatesRoyal Society of Edinburgh: members' wills and estatesMexican Communist Party: members' wills and estatesAll-Union Society of Old Bolsheviks: members' wills and estatesGerman Democratic Party: members' wills and estatesRomanian Academy: members' wills and estatesChinese Communist Party: members' wills and estatesDemocratic Party: members' wills and estatesRoyal Swedish Academy of Music: members' wills and estatesInternational Olympic Committee: members' wills and estatesRoyal African Company: members' wills and estatesKuomintang: members' wills and estatesAcadémie Française: members' wills and estatesConservative Party: members' wills and estatesJapan Academy: members' wills and estatesGöttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony: members' wills and estatesCentre international de synthèse: members' wills and estatesNational Academy of Fine Arts (Argentina): members' wills and estatesRoyal Swedish Academy of Sciences: members' wills and estatesIndian National Congress: members' wills and estatesAmerican Abstract Artists: members' wills and estatesBerlin Secession: members' wills and estatesHungarian Academy of Sciences: members' wills and estatesFreemasonry: members' wills and estatesRussian Social Democratic Labour Party (bolshevik): members' wills and estatesTories: members' wills and estatesWills and estate cases by membershipFamily histories checked against the recordFamilies in power: dynasties across centuriesFortunes through time: inheritance chainsTimeline of famous wills and estates, 3000 BCE to 2026Inheritance law history: the cases behind estate lawFamous estates and inheritance cases by country and region