Need help in assisting a senior citizen reclaim stolen money in a will that her parent left her.?
My mother-in-law's father died. He left her and her siblings a certain amount of money. This was in Texas. Eight months after he died, his wife and a lover ran off to Missouri, married and she transferred everything over into his name. She has now died and the children have still not seen any of the money that their father left them. Does she have any right to what her father left to her? Thanks for any help or websites that you can offer.
Answer:
Your MIL was certainly entitled to part of his estate if he died without a will. If he left everything to his wife, then she had no obligation to leave it to his kids when she died.
If he did leave money to his kids and the widow took off with it, you have a claim against her (now her estate) for fraud. You need to contact the executor of her will, or the probate court where she was domiciled at the time of her death to investigate this.
If she made a fraudulent transfer to her Missouri husband, in other words transferred something she did not own, you can recover that from him with proof. The problem with this being money, is that he only has to say that she spent the money she stole, and transferred her own money to him. If she just left him the money, then you only need to proceed against her estate, which is easier.
Honestly, it sounds very complicated. In Texas, you have to prove that she did not pay your MIL and her siblings as required by law. Then you have to go to Missouri and prove that she gave the stolen money to her new husband.
Unless this is a substantial sum, you will spend more in attorneys fees (in two states) than you will recover. You cannot file criminal charges against a dead woman, and the connection between the stolen money and the new husband is tenuous.
need to talk to a lawyer who does estate work in Texas to see if there was a will or other such type of conveyance or does step mother take full control of assets
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