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Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, was the husband of Queen Elizabeth 2. He passed away in 2021.  He was educated in both Germany and England. Like others of royal standing, he was blessed with the privileges of the best education as possible. He married Queen Elizabeth in 1947. 

He’s had a distinguished career and enjoyed a long life, dying at the age of 90 in April of 2021. 

What’s in his Will? Are you curious to find out? You may have a long..90 years to wait. 

The mainstream media in the U.K. has engaged in a legal battle to seal Prince Philip’s Last Will and Testament. The Guardian, a major British publication, filed a lawsuit against Queen Elizabeth 2’s attorney general. The publication was trying to argue that  arguing that the  decision to ban the press violates the “principle of transparent justice.”  In September of 2021,  the British High Court ruled the Will of Prince Philip should not be “accessible to the public for 90 years.” Typically, f a person dies in England, his/her Will is automatically made public. This is done to ensure that the Will is properly executed. The Royal family is exempt from this. 

You can read more about this here. 

In 2017,  77-year-old Heinz Sommerfeld quietly passed away in a nursing home. You may think that a man who died in a nursing home passed away without a penny to his name, but that’s not the case; in fact, his Will was forged to gain access to his money. 

It was probably not known that this man was extremely wealthy, until his estate and assets were all funneled into the bank account into someone who was not his heir. The correct heir to the money ($800,000) was Sommerfeld’s younger half-brother. Instead, it wound up in the bank account of police officer Robert Konashewych.

Konashewych  filed a false affidavit with the courts and had forged Sommerfeld’s Last Will and Testament. Konashewych conspired with a senior client representative at the Office of the Public Guardian and Trustee to ease the way for this fraud. He had essentially The police officer in question, had a an annual salary of $120,000. How did they think this would work? People would be curious as to why such a large sum of money wound up in the bank account of someone unrelated to the Testator. It is similar to the article we posted about Karen Williams, who became the Executor of a woman that their loved ones didn’t know. 

You can read more about the case, here. 

The loveable actress who played Mary Ann on the hit show, Gilligan’s Island, passed away in December of 2022, due to complications because of COVID-19. Wells was a much-beloved actress who appeared in the show as Mary Ann Summers. Wells had the foresight to create a Last Will and Testament. Much like other celebrities we’ve written about, she left a lot of items and assets from her estate to her family and loved ones. The Last Will allows her to dictate where her assets, items, charitable donations, etc., will go after their death. Good on Dawn for creating a Will. 

Curious to know what’s in her Last Will and Testament? You may be surprised to know that despite being a popular character on a hit television show, Dawn passed away with very few assets left in her name. This is surprising, because it is assumed that being on a hit television show like Gilligan’s Island, you would have assumed that she would have racked in millions. However, she believes that she was the lowest-paid cast member on the show, only earning about $700 a week. Taking into account for inflation, that would be around 5,000 as of 2023, according to this.  It still wouldn’t be enough to live on. If this account is true, then perhaps it’s not too surprising that she didn’t have much to leave behind. You can read about her Last Will and Testament here:

The Last Will and Testament of Dawn Wells