A Plus for Probate

WILLS & ESTATES

If anyone might have been expected to leave a watertight will, it was Arthur S. Kruse of Grand Haven, Mich. A retired insurance executive, he devoted the last years of his life to passionate study of his own family tree. Indeed, when he died aboard a Greyhound bus in Pennsylvania last March at the age of 67, Kruse was homeward bound from a genealogical mission to the New York Public Library. He had good reason to have given considerable thought to his probable heirs. When a Grand Haven bank opened his safe-deposit box after his death, it found securities worth $1,600,000.

But Kruse left no will or any known relatives. It was almost as if he wanted the state to write his will--which is just what it must do when a person dies intestate. In a day when probate courts are widely blasted for frustrating decedents' desires, Kruse seemed to trust the law to discover his intentions.

After the local bank's skillful sleuthing, Kruse might well be pleased. In Michigan, as elsewhere, the law spells out in detail the order in which the property of a person who dies intestate is to be distributed among his surviving relatives, including spouses, children, grandchildren, parents, brothers and sisters, their children and the decedent's cousins--on past fourth cousins. Kruse had never married, and his spinster sister Ann had died years before. After long digging, the bankers finally traced his nearest kin: six cousins, whom Ottawa County Probate Judge Fred Miles duly named Kruse's heirs last June.

Primary Heir. Even after that decision, though, Judge Miles and the bankers were still curious. They found that year after year Kruse had carefully preserved all his old correspondence--and in letters dating back to the 1920s they discovered vague references to a mysterious "Eugenia," who turned out to be Sister Ann's illegitimate daughter. As Kruse's niece, Eugenia was clearly his primary heir. But was she alive? And if so, where? Further detective work in ancient adoption records located Eugenia. She was the adopted daughter of a couple who had never revealed her origin; her first name had been changed to Rosemary, and she was married to "a prosperous businessman in a small town in Michigan.

Judge Miles has just voided his June decision and assigned Kruse's estate to Eugenia-Rosemary, who had never heard of Uncle Arthur, though he obviously knew about her. Neither Eugenia's illegitimacy nor her adoption barred her $1,600,000 windfall. Those who knew Kruse suspect that he left no will because he recoiled from exposing Sister Ann's secret. If so, he gambled on the small-town probate court's ability to discover Eugenia. Fortunately for her, his gamble paid off.

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