SANDUSKY, Ohio (AP) — The handwritten pages were sealed in a
wine bottle when they first floated into Diane Roepke Riedel’s life,
launching a mystery she hasn’t been able to solve — or completely let go
of — for decades.
Riedel was swimming with a friend at a northern
Ohio beach in July 1976 when she spotted the bottle in the water, she
recently told the Sandusky Register (http://bit.ly/LwgvQd ). The pair shattered it and
discovered what appeared to be a will for
eccentric billionaire and aviation pioneer Howard Hughes, who had died
earlier that year.
"I was 15 years old. My Mom and my Dad said it wasn’t real," Riedel said. "I went on with
my life."
But she kept the document for decades because she couldn’t shake the thought: What if it were real?
"Stranger things have happened," she told the newspaper. "I didn’t write it."
The
document, which her family filed in local probate court, begins: "I,
Howard Robard Hughes, being of sound mind & body, do hereby declare
this to be my last will and testament…" It is dated Feb. 3, 1976,
about two months before Hughes died, and makes some unusual bequests:
$500 million each to a daughter and son he purportedly fathered
overseas; $200 million to save two ships; $50 million to a John C.
Whitworth, whom Riedel researched and found to be a Sandusky man and
head of the American Crayon Co., who died in the 1950s, and $10 million
each for a Russian violinist, the Academy of the Performing Arts, the
Smithsonian Institution and the person who found the bottle.
Riedel
said she put the document out of mind and out of sight for years,
tucked away in her underwear drawer. Now the Huron real estate
professional keeps it outside her home for security reasons, hoping to
finally confirm whether it’s authentic.
In all likelihood it’s fake, Hughes biographer James B. Steele said.
"People
claiming to be Hughes’ children or beneficiaries of his will are legion
and have been a cottage industry since he died in 1976," Steele, who
co-authored the book "Empire: The Life, Legend and Madness of Howard
Hughes," wrote to the newspaper. In one higher-profile case, a Utah
delivery man named Melvin Dummar unsuccessfully tried to claim a piece
of Hughes’ fortune using a hand-scrawled document that a court
determined wasn’t authentic.
Steele noted that there was lots of
evidence that Hughes refused to execute a will after the 1920s and that
Hughes would’ve been unlikely to leave money for the arts.
"It is
amazing to me, but probably not surprising, how many people still keep
coming forward 35-plus years after his death claiming a connection,"
Steele wrote
There’s also a matter of geography. The once-bottled
document indicates it was written in Quebec, Canada, meaning it likely
would have had to somehow travel along on the St. Lawrence Seaway to
reach the beach where Riedel says she found it.
Riedel remains unsettled on the topic of its authenticity.
"I don’t know what to think about it," she said. "It baffles even me how it came into my
care."
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.