Whipped Cream Difficulties

Melvin Dummar, historical footnote, passed away last Sunday at the age of 74.

I’m not sure how many of my readers remember Mr. Dummar and his saga. To summarize: one night in 1967, Mr. Dummar picked up a drifter by the side of the road and gave him a ride. The drifter told him that his name was Howard Hughes. Mr. Dummar forgot about the incident until nine years later, when Mr. Hughes died…

…and a will turned up at the Morman Church headquarters that left 1/16th of the Hughes estate to the church…

…and 1/16th of the estate to Mr. Dummar. (This was about $156 million in 1976 dollars.)

Of course there were legal cases.

But after his fingerprints were found on the envelope, he testified that a stranger had given it to him at his gas station and that he had taken it to the church headquarters.
A jury decided that the will was forged, and while no one was ever officially charged, Mr. Dummar was found guilty in the court of public opinion.

…

By the time the Hughes inheritance was settled by a probate court jury in Texas in 1981, more than 600 people had made claims to the fortune, and 40 wills, all supposedly written by Mr. Hughes, had been produced and rejected. Mr. Hughes’s money was divided among descendants on both his mother’s and his father’s side.

Jonathan Demme made what is supposedly a pretty good movie (haven’t seen it yet) out of this story, “Melvin and Howard“.

Thing I didn’t know: there’s a revisionist movement, apparently led by a retired FBI agent, that claims Mr. Dummar’s story was true, and he was cheated out of his rightful inheritance by a vast conspiracy “replete with acts of obstruction of justice, witness intimidation and possible jury tampering.” Yeah. Gonna take some convincing to get me to buy that.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 13th, 2018 at 9:24 am and is filed under History, Law, Movies, Obits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.