In 1932, a 30-year-old actress named Ella Virginia Rice married John Wendell, a 91-year-old real estate magnate, in a private room at Presbyterian Hospital in New York. Wendell was dying of kidney failure, heavily medicated with morphine, and could barely speak or sign his name. The ceremony lasted seven minutes.
He died 68 hours later.
Wendell’s holdings were worth an estimated $70 million, roughly $1. 3 billion today. The will, read eight days after his death, left everything to Ella.
His six sisters and their children received nothing. The family had built the fortune over three generations, and Wendell had never married until meeting Ella just four months earlier.
The Wendell family challenged the will, alleging forgery, undue influence, and fraud. A handwriting expert testified that 11 of 12 letters Ella produced as evidence of their courtship were likely forged. A private investigator uncovered a letter Ella had written a month before she claimed to have met Wendell, in which she mentioned securing an introduction to an elderly gentleman of substantial means who might solve her financial difficulties permanently.
The trial lasted six weeks. The daughters’ lawyers presented medical testimony that Wendell lacked the mental capacity to understand the marriage or the will. They also produced a letter Wendell had written three months before meeting Ella, stating his intention to keep the fortune within the family.
The jury found the marriage valid but ruled the will void due to undue influence. Ella received one-third of the estate, about $23 million. She moved to Palm Beach, lived under a different name, and died in 1968 with an estate valued at under $4 million.
Twenty years earlier and 3,000 miles west, another young woman was perfecting a slower, more methodical approach. Lucille, born Eva Roberts in a St. Louis boardinghouse, married Edward T.
Stotesbury in 1912. He was a 78-year-old Philadelphia banking magnate worth an estimated $90 million, with five adult children from his first marriage.
Lucille understood that those children were the only obstacle between her and total control of the fortune. She convinced Edward to purchase a winter estate in Palm Beach and a summer estate in Bar Harbor, Maine. The children, who lived modestly on allowances, could not afford to follow.
Lucille controlled access to their father, intercepting their letters and scheduling parties during their visits. She replaced the family lawyers with her own and restructured the estate into joint accounts and trusts she controlled.
The children were systematically erased from Edward’s life. His diary mentioned them 47 times in 1913, 12 times in 1918, and zero times in 1925. When the eldest son, James, traveled to Philadelphia to see his father in 1925, Lucille refused him entry.
He never saw his father again.
Edward died in 1938 at age 93. By then, his personal estate had been reduced to $12 million; the remaining $78 million had been moved into structures Lucille controlled. The will left his five children $400,000 each, less than half of one percent of the fortune.
The will’s language blamed the children for the distance, suggesting they had chosen to drift away. The children contested, but the court ruled Lucille had not exercised undue influence. She had been too careful, controlling information and access rather than forging documents or using coercion.
The children spent more on legal fees than they gained in the settlement.
The third woman in this story never married her millionaire, which made her case the most legally significant. Mary Barelli was the long-time mistress of John R. McLean, the owner of The Washington Post.
For over 30 years, she lived with him in a separate household and bore him two children, though he never divorced his legal wife, Emily. When John died in 1916, his will left Mary a small trust fund of $100,000. She contested, arguing their relationship constituted a common-law marriage and that her children were entitled to inherit as McLean heirs.
The case reached the Supreme Court in 1928. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority opinion. He acknowledged the depth of the relationship but ruled that since John had never divorced his legal wife, Mary could not claim spousal inheritance rights.
However, Holmes added that the law should not permit a man to make promises with impunity. He ruled that Mary was entitled to reasonable compensation for the domestic and emotional labor she had provided, calculated at fair market value rather than as a share of the fortune.
The court remanded the case, and Mary was eventually awarded $220,000, roughly $4 million today. It was more than the will had left her but a fraction of the $15 million she had sought. The decision established a legal framework for what would later be called palimony, creating enforceable financial claims for long-term romantic partners based on promises and reliance.
The McLean family’s inheritance wars did not end there. Evelyn Walsh McLean, John’s daughter-in-law, had married Edward McLean in 1908. She inherited $30 million from her own father, a Colorado gold-mining magnate, and used part of it to purchase the Hope Diamond.
Edward suffered from alcoholism and mental illness and was institutionalized by 1920, leaving Evelyn effectively in control of his share of the family fortune.
When her mother-in-law Emily died in 1928, her will left 60 percent of her estate to Edward, who was incapacitated. Evelyn, as his guardian, controlled that share. Her husband’s siblings contested, but Evelyn settled with them for modest payouts.
When Edward died in 1941, his will left everything to Evelyn. She retained control of the Washington Post until her son sold it to Eugene Meyer in 1933.
Evelyn’s fortune did not survive her. She spent extravagantly for decades, and by the early 1940s she was deeply in debt. In 1946, a nephew who had been written out of family wills broke into her mansion, believing she had hidden cash.
He struck her; she survived but was bedridden for the final months of her life. She died in 1947 at age 60. The Hope Diamond was sold at auction to pay creditors.
There was nothing left to inherit.
The legal legacy of these cases was profound. The McLean versus Barelli decision prompted seven states to pass legislation formally recognizing common-law marriage within two years, and twelve more modified inheritance laws to allow long-term partners to make claims against estates. By 1950, nearly 70 percent of wealthy Americans who remarried required prenuptial agreements.
The irrevocable trust became the primary mechanism for protecting family wealth from future spouses. Estate planning emerged as a distinct legal specialty.
The cultural impact was equally significant. The phrase “gold digger” entered common usage. Second marriages became objects of suspicion, and age gaps were viewed as evidence of ulterior motives.
The term “wicked stepmother” took on new resonance. Children from first marriages learned to view their fathers’ new wives as potential threats.
The personal endings for the women who won these battles were uniformly bleak. Ella Rice died alone in an unmarked grave, attended only by a nurse who did not know her real name. Lucille Stotesbury lost most of her fortune in the 1929 stock market crash, lived in a small apartment, and died in a charity hospital in 1946.
Her stepchildren ignored her pleas for assistance. Evelyn McLean died surrounded by lawyers negotiating with creditors.
The fortunes themselves did not last. Taxes, legal fees, and lavish spending consumed them. The grandchildren inherited little money but carried the weight of family scandals that appeared in law school textbooks as cautionary examples.
These three women did not invent the system that allowed them to prosper. They simply understood it better than most. They recognized that inheritance was not a birthright but a conquest, that family loyalty was negotiable, and that the law favored those who planned carefully and struck decisively.
They won their battles, claimed their fortunes, and died alone, having learned too late that some victories are indistinguishable from defeat.