DR. BILL’S UNINTENDED GIFT TO THE SISTER HE HATED.

Bill was a physician.  He did not get along with his sister Betty.  They fought over their mother’s estate and didn’t speak to each other during the last 20 years of Bill’s life.  Bill signed a will that gave everything he owned to Wilma, who was his wife of 60 years.  The will proclaimed that neither Betty nor any other blood relative of his was to get a dime.

When Bill died in 2004, all of his property passed to Wilma.  Wilma died six months later.  Because she left no will and she and Bill were survived by neither descendents nor parents, California’s in-law inheritance statute applied to Wilma’s estate and directed half of it to Bill’s heirs.  The court accordingly ordered that Bill’s only sibling Betty was entitled to one-half of Wilma’s estate - which included everything that Bill had owned. 

Under California’s in-law inheritance statute, a significant portion of an intestate decedent’s estate may pass to her in-laws rather than her blood relatives:  “It is based on the feudal doctrine of descent of ancestral property which distributes the intestate’s property according to its origin or source of acquisition.”  Estate of Newman (1994) 25 Cal.App.4th 472, 477. 

Where there is a long-term marriage and a short interval between the spouses’ deaths, and no evidence of any separate income of the survivor, the court can infer that all property in the last estate is community property.  Estate of Bryant (1935) 3 Cal.2d 58, cited in Estate of Nereson (1987) 194 Cal.App.3d 865, 873.  Where, however, there is evidence that one spouse had separate property, the court properly looks to its source and accordingly apportions the last estate.  Nereson, id., 194 Cal.App.3d at 875.  Property that is traceable to community property is allocated equally between the heirs of decedent and those of the pre-deceased spouse; property that is traceable to separate property goes to the heirs of the spouse who was its source.  Newman, id., 25 Cal.App.4th at 486.  This is the result even when the spouses hold title as joint tenants.  Estate of Luke (1987) 194 Cal.App.3d 1006, 1012-1013.  Even if separate property is transmuted into community property or given by one spouse to the other, the source rule of Probate Code § 6402.5 nonetheless requires allocation to the blood heirs of the source spouse.  Newman, id., 25 Cal.App.4th at 475, 484. 

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