wills

This page considers forgery of wills - documents that dispose of a person's assets following their death.

It covers -

• introduction
• incidents
• law
• studies

Background information about the Australian probate regime is here.

     introduction

Forged wills are the stuff of legends and, like bogus Picassos or Vermeers, seem to be central to popular conceptualisation of forgery. They are a useful plot device, in for example Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley.

In practice disputes about wills typically involve claims regarding lack of testamentary capacity (if a person is incompetent at the time of writing or signing a will it may be considered invalid, even though the decedent actually did author or sign the will), duress or undue influence.

     incidents

Lawyer Albert Patrick busily forged the will of US university founder William Marsh Rice (1816-1900), arranging to have the inconvenient philanthropist murdered so that he could enjoy the loot

UK serial murderer Dr Harold Shipman (1946-2004) appears to have forged the signatures of the decedent and witnesses in a will - later characterised as a "poor, crude forgery" - that left him £386,000. Sydney personality Ludwig Gertsch - discovered strangled and wrapped in a blue doona - was revealed to left $2.6 million in a will that was forged by his lawyer, Brian Roberts. The bad solicitor went to jail for four years for the crime, discussed in Sandra Harvey's The Ghost of Ludwig Gertsch (Sydney: Pan Macmillan 2000).

In 2006 UK clairvoyant Paul Williams was jailed for 18 months after extracting £6,500 from a pensioner by claiming that her dead husband had left him the money in a will. Williams manufactured the document, secreted it behind the widow's grandfather clock and then claimed that he had been contacted from beyond the grave with instructions about where to discover the "bequest". The spirits unfortunately had not assisted him to forge a plausible signature.

Four years earlier Hong Kong property supremo Nina Wang (1937-2007) was held by a SAR court to have forged a will leaving her the fortune of late husband Teddy Wang, who disappeared in a botched kidnapping. The court awarded the estate to his 91 year old father, Wang Din-shin, named as sole beneficiary in a 1968 will. That decision was later overturned.

Blundell v Curvers 1999 WL 33122941; [1999] NSWCA 421 featured forensic examination of a typewritten Australian will.

     law

Under Roman law (the Lex Cornelia or Statute of Wills) provided penalties on anyone who wrote or sealed a forged will, substituted a forgery in place of the original or knowingly made or use a false seal. If the offender was a slave, the penalty was death. Freemen were merely deported.

That was a mild punishment: parricides for example were liable to be

sewn up in a sack with a dog, a cock, a viper, and an ape, and in this dismal prison is thrown into the sea or a river, according to the nature of the locality, in order that even before death he may begin to be deprived of the enjoyment of the elements, the air being denied him while alive, and interment in the earth when dead.

Subsequent legal regimes often featured punishments that were as severe (if not as picturesque) and English law for several centuries featured legislation specific to forgery of wills and false witness regarding their authenticity.

     studies

Points of entry into the literature regarding the Australian and UK regimes are provided by Succession: Families, Property & Death - Text and Cases (Chatswood: Butterworths 2003) by Rosalind Atherton & Pru Vines, Wills, Inheritance and Families (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1996) by Janet Finch, Lynn Hayes, Judith Masson, Jennifer Mason & Lorraine Wallis and Construction of Wills in Australia (Chatswood: Butterworths 2007) by David Haines.

For antecedents see Final Judgments: Duty and Emotion in Roman Wills, 200 BC - AD 250 (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1991) by Edward Champlin.

Prosecution of leading Australian politician Ian Sinclair, found innocent by the court, features in Justice and Nightmares - Successes and Failures of Forensic Science in Australia and New Zealand (Sydney: NSW Uni Press 1992) by Malcolm Brown & Paul Wilson,

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