Empty Mansions

someone Huguette knew well: Don Wallace, her attorney for many years before his death in 2002 at age seventy-six.
    Wallace’s law partner and attorney was Wally Bock, who inherited Huguette as a client. And Wallace’s accountant was Kamsler, Huguette’s longtime accountant.
    Wallace’s goddaughter, Judith Sloan, said he had severe dementia in his later years, since his heart attack in 1997. He had no children, and she said earlier versions of his will had left the bulk of his estate to her and her brother, who was Wallace’s godson. This included two properties: a $1.5 million weekend house with fourteen acres in the horse country of Dutchess County, New York, where he stored the dolls that Huguette gave him, and an upscale apartment in the Dorchester, on East Fifty-Seventh Street in Manhattan.
    In a new will that Wallace signed in March 1997, a month after he returned home from a stay in the hospital, two new beneficiaries were added, to receive $50,000 each: Bock and Kamsler. In a 1999 revised will, the amounts doubled to $100,000 each, and Kamsler was also to receive Wallace’s 1995 Mercedes-Benz E300D sedan. Under law, as executors,the men were entitled to a total of $368,000 in fees for being executors of his $4 million estate. The godchildren said they were called in to a meeting in 1997, where Kamsler and Bock told them brusquely that only the country house would go to them, while the city apartment would go to Bock and Kamsler.
    If a lawyer who draws up a will receives a bequest in that will, New York law says this circumstance automatically raises a suspicion of undue influence. Theprobate court had the option to inquire into all of this, but no one challenged Wallace’s will. After Wallace died in May 2002, Bock submitted a sworn statement to the court explaining that he and Wallace were not only law partners but also good friends. Wallace treated Kamsler, his accountant for twenty-five years, “as the son he never had.” Kamsler said he had visited Wallace in the hospital and arranged home care, just as a child would do for a parent.
    Bock explained, “I said to him that he was being overly generous, that he had done enough for me with various gifts given over the years. He insisted however, stating that the people he named as beneficiaries in his Will were ‘his family’ and that is what he wanted to do.” As for the possibility that Wallace suffered from dementia, Bock wrote that although Wallace had been unable to work after January 1997, when pneumonia had led to coronary failure, “at all times, while there were limitations on his physical capabilities, his mental acumen never diminished.”
    Now, in 2010, eight years after Wallace’s death, publicity about Huguette’s empty mansions and sale of her property had put Bock and Kamsler on the radar of the district attorney. If these men had inherited money from one client, were they in line to inherit from another? What was the story behind the sale of Huguette’s paintings and violin? Bock informed Huguette of the investigation into their handling of her affairs, and she signed another statement, agreeing to pay their legal fees for criminal defense attorneys.
    Emboldened by news of the investigation, three of Huguette’s relatives went to court in September 2010, seeking to have a guardian appointed to oversee Huguette’s financial affairs. The three were Carla Hall Friedman, Ian Devine, and Karine McCall, representing threebranches of W. A. Clark’s children. They were convinced, Karine said, that Bock and Kamsler were taking advantage of Huguette. But they had no solid evidence of financial impropriety. The judge turned down the relatives without a hearing. Their hopes for a clear view of Huguette’s situation would depend on the district attorney’s office.
“THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING”

 
    A LTHOUGH H UGUETTE HAD ARRANGED for fresh flowers to be placed by the bronze doors of the mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery every week for forty-three years to honor her mother and father and sister, the last crypt had been filled in 1963 with her mother’s casket. Huguette, who in life had more houses than she could use, who had spent so many hours building dollhouses, was in death going to be without a home.
    Her attorney learned of this problem at about the time of Huguette’s hundredth birthday, in 2006, when her Clark relatives were renovating the decaying mausoleum. Other descendants of W.A. were paying to restore the mausoleum and