In this video, we explore the battle over Howard Hughes’s estate, an empire popularly estimated at $2.5 billion whose owner died without an authenticated will, leaving relatives, executives, alleged heirs, charities, and fortune hunters to fight over what remained.

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Howard Hughes spent a lifetime building one of America’s most complicated private empires. After inheriting control of his father’s oil-tool business, he expanded into Hollywood, aviation, defense technology, airlines, real estate, casinos, and biomedical research.

He produced Hell’s Angels, Scarface, and The Outlaw. He set aviation records, flew around the world in 91 hours, survived the near-fatal crash of the experimental XF-11, and piloted the enormous H-4 Hercules, better known as the Spruce Goose, on its only flight.

Hughes acquired a dominant interest in TWA, founded Hughes Aircraft, bought RKO Pictures, and transformed his inheritance into a web of companies few outsiders understood. After selling his TWA shares for more than $500 million, he accumulated Las Vegas casinos, hotels, land, and aircraft through the company eventually known as Summa Corporation.

One major part of the fortune had already been separated from his personal estate. In 1953, Hughes created the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and made Hughes Aircraft its principal asset. The aircraft company was therefore not simply personal property for his relatives to divide.

During his final years, Hughes retreated into near-total isolation. He lived behind darkened hotel windows, communicated through a small circle of aides, and became increasingly dependent on medication. Former friends and relatives went years without seeing him.

On April 5, 1976, the 70-year-old billionaire died aboard an aircraft carrying him from Mexico toward a Houston hospital. The man who demanded control over nearly every detail of his businesses had apparently failed to leave the document needed to control what happened after his death.

The size of the estate became part of the mystery. Contemporary reports placed the fortune as high as $2.5 billion, but court appraisals and later estimates ranged dramatically lower. His assets were difficult to value, corporate structures were tangled, and Hughes Aircraft belonged to the medical institute rather than the probate estate.

Then the alleged wills began appearing. Courts ultimately dismissed roughly 40 documents attributed to Hughes. The most famous was a handwritten document anonymously delivered to the Salt Lake City headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The so-called Mormon Will divided the fortune among charities, Hughes associates, his former wives, the medical institute, the LDS Church, and several universities. Its most astonishing beneficiary was Melvin Dummar, a Utah gas-station operator promised one-sixteenth of the estate, potentially more than $150 million.

Dummar claimed that years earlier he had rescued a disheveled stranger from the Nevada desert and driven him to Las Vegas, learning only at the end that his passenger was Howard Hughes. The story captured the public imagination and later inspired the film Melvin and Howard.

But the document presented serious problems. Its wording and spelling seemed unlike Hughes, forensic examiners disputed the handwriting, and Dummar’s fingerprints connected him to both the envelope and a library book containing examples of Hughes’s writing. After a seven-month trial, a Nevada jury unanimously ruled in 1978 that the Mormon Will was a forgery.

With no authenticated will remaining, Hughes was declared to have died intestate. Courts then had to determine who counted as his legitimate family. Hundreds asserted blood relationships while investigators reconstructed generations of genealogy using certificates, letters, family Bibles, census records, and testimony.

Texas, California, and Nevada also disputed Hughes’s legal residence because taxes and jurisdiction depended on where he had legally lived. Meanwhile, his relatives and Summa executives maneuvered for control of companies that could not wait years for probate litigation to end.

By the early 1980s, courts had recognized groups of maternal and paternal cousins as heirs. Twenty-one cousins reached an agreement to divide the estate, while descendants of deceased relatives inherited additional shares. The empire Hughes had controlled alone was dispersed among people he had rarely seen and, in many cases, barely knew.

This is the story of how Howard Hughes built an empire spanning oil, movies, airplanes, casinos, and medical research, then left its future to courts and distant relatives.

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