Court Opinion

ID: 9554114
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 19:42:03.271418+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:33:02.750362
License: Public Domain

WILLIAMS, Vice Chief Justice
(dissenting).
The majority has approved the finding by the trial court -of effect that testator was justified in publishing to the world in his will for all time that contestants were not his children.
In my view the only admissible testimony of rational basis for testator’s belief that Rudolph, Edward and Evelyn were not his children was that Lipsett most every day for years got water at testator’s farm home,, leaving his team standing hitched to the wagon; that the physical appearance of the children was not similar to testator’s; that there was no close family relationship between Dolezal and his children after his wife divorced him; that, as to Rudolph, the elder of the children, his birth occurred 35 days after the marriage of his parents.
Proponents did produce two former neighbors who said Dolezal told that Dol-ezal caught Lipsett in bed with his wife and kicked her out.
The attorney who drew the will testified Dolezal told him that Mrs. Dolezal told Dolezal that none of the children were his.
But the fact's remain that Dolezal lived with his wife some fourteen years after the first child was born. And any discovery he made did not occur until immediately before the separation and divorce at which time the younger 'child was some two years old.
There is no admissible evidence to show that Mrs. Dolezal ever had illicit relations with Lipsett prior to the trouble immediately culminating with the divorce.
That there might have been opportunity had she been of a criminal mind, did not warrant testator in assuming actuality.
In Kaven’s Estate, 279 Mich. 334, 272 N.W. 696, 698, the court said:
“We are not in- accord with appellee’s contention that because there is testimony from which it may be inferred that Dr. Kaven had an opportunity to indulge in immoral conduct, if he saw fit, therefore it may be reasonably inferred he was guilty of such misconduct and hence there was some foundation in fact for the erroneous belief of the testatrix. * * * ”
Assuming for the moment that testator’s wife told him none of the children were his, such statement might well have been induced by duress, or by his cruelty, or might have been a reckless overstatement *864made at the time, if he in fact did find her in a compromising situation.
That he had more regard for property values than human values was well demonstrated in his turning the children out of his home and for the wife to rear without help from himself and again by his having told a neighbor that because she spent too much for clothes he was not leaving anything to his daughter-in-law, the one in whose home he lived while her husband (his son) lived and in whose home he continued to live after the son’s death, so that her mother had to come and live with her, and in whose house he continued to live even after she had re-married, and even after she had removed from Oklahoma City to Canadian County.
Apropos at this point, I feel, is a statement made in In re Russell’s Estate, 189 Cal. 759, 210 P. 249, 254. The Supreme Court of California there said:
“Evidence that the testator, in his later years, told this story to several persons was competent for the purpose of proving that he then believed such to be the fact, but it is pure hearsay and wholly valueless for the purpose of proving that such an incident had in fact occurred. This story as told by the testator may have been either a delusion or an insane delusion, or it may have been true, or it may have been a plain falsehood. The conclusion that it was a falsehood is rebutted by the presumption of honesty, which is but an application of the presumption ‘that a person is innocent of crime or wrong.’ The conclusion that it was true is rebutted by the presumption of chastity, which is but another application of the same basic presumption of innocence. This leaves open only the conclusion that it was either a delusion, that is to say, a fixed belief that a thing is true which is not true, or which is not true in the manner in which it is believed, or an insane delusion, that is to say, such a belief entertained without any basis in reason or evidence and adhered to against reason and evidence. At any rate there is no basis at all in the evidence for a conclusion that any such incident as related by the testator ever occurred.”
I respectfully dissent.