Empty Mansions

Huguette’s distant relatives could have been anticipated. The defects were many. The will had been drawn up by one of the beneficiaries, attorney Bock. Another beneficiary, accountant Kamsler, was the only person who had any discussion with Huguette about her wishes, and he was a felon. At least one of the beneficiaries, Hadassah, apparently was in the room and, by one witness’s account, was helping Huguette hold the pen. The ceremony was not videotaped or photographed. Though the patient was elderly with failing eyesight, the will was in regular-size type. The lawyer overseeing the signing, Bock’s colleague, said he hadn’t read the document and had no idea Bock was receiving a bequest. No independent doctor examined Huguette and swore to her competence. There was no discussion of the provisions of this will, or the existence of prior wills, or the fees that her executors would receive. The witnesses had no way of knowing whether Huguette knew what she was signing, or even whether this was Huguette, not an impostor.
    Despite this slipshod handling of the procedure, the standards are so low that even an incompetently handled document could meet the minimum standards to be legally executed.
    Second, the family could try to prove that Huguette was unduly influencedby her caregivers, that the will didn’t represent her true wishes. The family argued that Huguette was so scared of going back to her apartment, so dependent on her nurses and advisers, that she couldn’t resist their efforts to shape her decision.
    Not all influence, however, is undue influence. To prove undue influence under New York law, the family must show almost to a certainty a “moral coercion, a powerful moral force that cannot be resisted,” depriving the person of her own free will. If there are facts to show that the will was parallel with Huguette’s wishes—love of her nurse and goddaughter, a desire to preserve Bellosguardo, a history of great generosity—it would be hard to distinguish undue influence from extreme eccentricity.
    Even if the family could prove undue influence, that didn’t mean they would get any money. A jury could throw out the will entirely, which would benefit the relatives. As an alternative, though it rarely happens, a jury could just as well excise only those beneficiaries it decided were taking advantage of positions of trust—possibly the nurse, doctor, attorney, accountant, and hospital. It’s hard to see how any claim of undue influence could be leveled against the goddaughter, Wanda, who hadn’t seen Huguette since 1954, or the Bellosguardo Foundation, which didn’t even exist when Huguette signed the will. If other beneficiaries were knocked out, that would increase the shares going to Wanda and the foundation, not to the family.
    Third, the relatives could try to prove that Huguette was incompetent, that she lacked the mental capacity to sign a will. If Huguette were incompetent, the relatives would win everything. The nineteen told the court, though none of them had seen her in more than forty years, that they were sure Huguette “was not of sound mind or memory and was not mentally capable of making a will.”
    One of the relatives assigned to Huguettea specific diagnosis. This half-grandnephew, Jerry Gray, is a psychotherapist, a licensed clinical social worker, and the founder of nonprofit groups that work around the world to help survivors of political torture bring their torturers to justice. Jerry saw Huguette only one time, the glimpse at a family gathering during World War II, when he was about nine and Huguette about thirty-seven. He was the one who said Huguette stared at him, sayingnothing. Now, based on what he read in the media and in court papers, Jerry reduced his great-aunt to a diagnosis, which other Clarks said they found persuasive.
    “Huguette was a schizoid personality disorder,” Jerry testified, naming a mental condition in which a person has a lifelong pattern of social isolation and indifference to others, “possibly complicated later by paranoid ideation,” he said, so she was “compelled by mental illness to isolate herself.” He ticked off criteria inthe diagnostic manual, saying this diagnosis clearly fit because Huguette “chose the solitary activity of playing with dolls all her life, apparently didn’t have a sex partner, had no close friends as we measure friendships, and did not appear to want or need human relationships.” Jerry contended that