Old - Fashioned Notions

The lawsuits and legal battling that took place within the family in the years after Seward Sr. set up his trusts make some people glad that they don’t have as much money and as many problems as the Johnson & Johnson heirs.

This may be part of the reason that some very rich people most notably, investor Warren Buffett and software mogul Bill Gates have said publicly that they intend to give most of their billions to charity. They want to avoid the generations of money battles that have beset families like the Johnsons.

But most people don’t have so much money to worry about. And they do want to leave what they have to children, grandchildren or other family members without creating small-scale versions of the Johnsons’ problems.

The main lesson learned from the fight over Cookie Johnson’s legitimacy is that legal status matters a lot when it comes to money matters. Although American society judges out-of-wedlock births less harshly than it did before the 1960s (there’s less “social opprobrium,” as the New Jersey Supreme Court called it), the fact remains that outof- wedlock or illegitimate births do make money issues more complex.

When out-of-wedlock births occurred primarily among poor people, these complexities didn’t much matter. But, as single-parenting becomes more common among middle-class and wealthier people, the problems become a bigger issue.

This is tough work. It’s easy for television writers to make fun of social conventions and single motherhood in a show like Murphy Brown. But real life deals with harder truths. Not all single mothers are as wealthy as that TV show’s lead character and, in the real world, children born outside of marriage have no immediate status as heirs of their fathers. This was part of the reason the New Jersey Parentage Act was designed to support children trying to establish paternity not deny paternity, as Cookie Johnson’s cousins were trying to do. Not all fights over legitimacy involve hundreds of millions of dollars. More often, courts have to grapple with more mundane families and more ordinary financial matters. The January 2001 Ohio Supreme Court decision Estate of Vaughan dealt with more mainstream but no less agonizing facts. The case actually started 20 years earlier. In 1980, Deborah Ferrante filed a paternity suit against William R. Vaughan in juvenile
court. Ferrante wanted to establish that Vaughan was the father of her daughter, Angel Vaughan. At a hearing in October 1980, Vaughan entered a plea denying that he was Angel’s father. Several months later, in early 1981, Angel’s parents reached an agreement about the child. Vaughan entered a plea acknowledging paternity. Based on this, the juvenile court determined Vaughan was Angel’s father and ordered Vaughan to pay Ferrante expenses for pregnancy and childbirth as well as previous and current child care costs.

Vaughan died in May 1981. As a result, the juvenile court entered an order canceling its award of child care maintenance and support costs to Ferrante. In July 1981, Vaughan’s mother, Jacqueline Bradshaw, filed an application to administer her son’s estate. She identified Angel and herself as heirs to Vaughan’s estate. The court appointed Bradshaw as administrator and ordered that a fiduciary’s bond be posted. Safeco Insurance Company of America, as surety for Bradshaw, provided bonds in the amount of $71,000.

Surety bonds play a big role in estate management especially when the estates are complicated. In short, a surety bond is a kind of insurance policy against mismanagement or malfeasance related to monies that may be distributed among several people. Courts require these bonds in certain situations.

In September 1981, Ferrante filed paperwork requesting that the probate court appoint her as Angel’s guardian for the purposes of negotiating with Vaughan’s estate. This was normal procedure. Then, in March 1982, she didn’t want to be the guardian anymore so the probate court terminated the guardianship. A few days after that, Bradshaw Vaughan’s mother asked the probate court to amend the list of heirs, making her her son’s sole heir. Vaughan’s estate was quickly settled and the probate court discharged Bradshaw and Safeco.

Did Ferrante and Bradshaw make some kind of deal to remove Angel from the estate? The court papers, of course, didn’t say anything about that. But it would seem to be a logical inference.

Almost 16 years later, in May 1998, Angel Vaughan having reached legal adulthood filed a motion to reopen the estate of William Vaughan. She petitioned the probate court to vacate its judgment of March 1982, amending the list of heirs. She also asked the court to hold Bradshaw and Safeco liable for monies that should have been paid to her. The probate court rejected Angel’s motion. So did a trial court. She appealed and the Supreme Court of Ohio agreed to consider the case. The supreme court’s main issue: whether a juvenile court admission of paternity is the equivalent of a probate court legitimation. In other words: We are asked to decide whether William Vaughan’s juvenile court admission of paternity conferred rights of inheritance upon and thereby established her as the sole heir of Vaughan’s estate. Angel claimed that Vaughan’s open-court admission that he was her biological father resulted in the establishment of the natural parent-child relationship, which would vest her with rights of inheritance by and through him.The supreme court disagreed, and noted those circumstances under which a child born out of wed

lock could inherit from the natural father. Those circumstances included:
1) when the natural father designates the child as his heir at law;
2) when the natural father adopts the child;
3) when the natural father provides for the child in his will;
4) when the natural parents of a child born out of wedlock marry; and
5) when the natural father, with the consent of the mother, formally acknowledges in probate court that he is the father of the child.
William Vaughan had done none of these things his admission in juvenile court didn’t meet any of the law’s requirements.
The Ohio court held that Vaughan’s admission of paternity during a juvenile court proceeding didn’t constitute a legal admission of parent-child relationship “sufficient to vest [the] child with rights of inheritance.” Angel was out of luck.
Clearly, the law can be pretty harsh when it comes to determining who’s family. That’s why it’s important especially for people with blended or nontraditional families to make a clear statement of inheritance. And, as we saw in the Charles Bronson case, this doesn’t have to be a formal legal document. (We will consider the mechanics of wills in Chapter 3.)

Posted in: C H A P T E R 1