Battle-of-the-Wills Drama Played Out in Courtroom

In August of 1983, Ruth D. Chapman was legally blind, hard of hearing and her mind was fading. She was 96 and had no close relatives.

And her stock portfolio was worth more than $600,000.

What happened to the elderly widow before she died on July 10, 1984, and what will happen to her estate--now grown to about $800,000--was the subject of a three-week trial that concluded with little notice a few days ago in a Santa Monica courtroom.

While four courtrooms down the hall, TV camera crews, reporters and court watchers swarmed to Courtroom C for the Billionaire Boys Club murder trial, hardly anyone stopped by Courtroom G, where lawyers battled over the Chapman estate.

Yet the Chapman case proved to have a drama and intrigue of its own, including handwriting experts and a “psychological autopsy.” Most of all, it offered glimpses into the lives of Ruth Chapman and those who knew her as she moved over the years from Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills to classy apartments in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, to a Laguna Hills retirement home and, finally, to a small house in Pacific Palisades. She was a small woman, cultured, carefully groomed, charming and religious, whose life was increasingly dominated by fear as old age tightened its grip on her.

True, for anyone who dropped in on Superior Judge Irving Shimer’s courtroom for a few minutes, as some did, the testimony out of context probably made little sense.

But for the 14 jurors (including two alternates) for whom the drama was played out, it was--as more than one remarked--”like a novel.”

I happened to be one of those jurors and I shared that view.

The case focused on the validity of a will dated Feb. 23, 1984, that, aside from minor bequests, left one-sixth of Ruth Chapman’s estate to a nonprofit Colorado foundation for homeless children and five-sixths to the 76-year-old woman who cared for her in the last 11 months of her life.

The plaintiffs, four charitable or religious groups, said the 1984 will was a phony.

And they accused Ruth Chapman’s caretaker, Anna Maria Reiter, who stood to gain well over $500,000, of forging the will.

Reiter, a white-haired, grandmotherly woman who walked with an orthopedic cane clamped to her forearm, spent hours on the witness stand tracing her life from Southern Bavaria through 2 1/2 years of imprisonment in the Netherlands at the end of World War II to becoming an American citizen in 1962.

“I have never had a life of myself,” she testified with anguish, adding that she had “pleased and pleased and pleased” others as a housekeeper, baby sitter and practical nurse. “I have never asked anybody for anything.”

“My life hasn’t been easy,” she said at another point. “It’s just been terrible.”

Divorced, she said she worked at whatever job she could find to raise her son and daughter. In 1972, she worked for Ruth Chapman’s cousin, Harriet Robbins, at Ocean Towers, a Santa Monica apartment building overlooking the ocean. Ruth Chapman, who had been an original resident of the Park La Brea apartments in mid-town Los Angeles, took an apartment down the hall from Robbins.

It was here that the lives of two women, one in her 60s, one in her 80s, became so closely intertwined and yet were so different.

Reiter in a way became part of a group of affluent elderly women, sometimes joining them for shopping trips or lunch in department-store tearooms. Other times, she drove them to beauty shops or church services. She had her own room, a car and was paid about $250 a month. But she was also the servant. “I did everything I could to be of service,” she testified.

By other accounts, Anna Maria Reiter did more than serve. A fastidious and strong-willed woman, she took increasing control of the lives of the older women, to the point of ordering Ruth Chapman to bathe at certain times, and Reiter bickered endlessly with Harriet Robbins, some witnesses testified.

“We had our differences once in a while,” Reiter said, but at another point she remarked, “I liked Harriet very much and I had love for her.”

Friends of Ruth Chapman testified that she became so unnerved by Anna Maria Reiter’s domineering ways that she moved out in 1978 and took an apartment at Villa Valencia, a Laguna Hills retirement home.

“If I ever get to the point where I can’t take care of myself, never, never let Anna Maria take care of me,” Chapman told a friend, Marie Kennedy Kahn of Palm Springs, Kahn testified. Others recalled similar comments.

But Reiter insisted theirs was “a friendly relationship.” Chapman was “a very sweet person, very gentle, but she can be sturdy, she knew what she wanted.”

In the five years after she left Santa Monica, Ruth Chapman’s health declined sharply. She had two hip operations and an unsuccessful cataract operation. She became legally blind, seeing only vague outlines, her hearing was failing and she needed around-the-clock care. By 1983, she had moved to a small Laguna Hills apartment and was being tended to primarily by Rosa Salas Reyes, a former nun from Guam who had become a practical nurse and had vowed to remain with Chapman for the rest of her life.

But Salas, whose own story made an interesting subplot, was involved in a bitter divorce. She testified that her husband was threatening her with a gun, and in August of 1983 she decided to flee to Guam.

Garner Called In Reiter

Who would care for Ruth Chapman then became the responsibility of Ruby Garner, a Pacific Palisades woman who for years had been secretary and bookkeeper for both Chapman and Harriet Robbins (now deceased).

Garner called in Anna Maria Reiter, who was in retirement in Colorado. Within two months, Reiter had moved Chapman to a rented house on Fiske Street in Pacific Palisades, leaving no forwarding telephone number. Chapman had been “spirited away,” argued Paul D. Copenbarger, attorney for the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, one of the plaintiffs. Nonsense, said Reiter’s attorney, Lawrence J. Galardi, it was just more convenient and more economical to be near Ruby Garner.

Reiter said that within days of arriving in the Palisades, Chapman asked to see an attorney, but not the attorney who had handled her often-revised wills for many years, just some local person Reiter may have met in church. Reiter called in Jay Vaughn Lake, whom she had known for years as a fellow Mormon.

And on Oct. 23, 1983, the first of two wills was signed. Ruby Garner would have received about $200,000 and Reiter an equal amount, but four days later Garner died of cancer. Four months later, the final will was signed.

Much of the most important testimony at the trial came from Jay Lake and his wife, Sandra, who witnessed the signing of the wills and described with reenactments how Reiter held the old woman’s wrist or hand in helping her sign. Reiter did a similar re-enactment, struggling to stand before the jury without her cane.

But two handwriting experts, one hired by each side--but both called to testify by the plaintiffs--came to the same conclusion:

The signature of Ruth D. Chapman bore the handwriting characteristics of Anna Maria Reiter.

Attorney Galardi, however, was not about to quit. Because the old lady was so weak--and the housekeeper relatively strong--the housekeeper’s signature characteristics showed through even though she was merely trying to help, he contended.

Question of Cooperation

“Isn’t this really a question of cooperation?” Galardi would argue later, following days of detailed questioning of Reiter, the Lakes and the handwriting experts. “Isn’t this evidence of the highest form of cooperation?”

The argument might have worked. Inside the jury room, at least two jurors said it might not be fair to reject it as beyond probability even though the handwriting experts themselves were dubious, if not incredulous, when questioned about the possibility. Perhaps real love had developed between Chapman and Reiter; perhaps the old woman, so fearful of being left alone, was grateful that she was being cared for and wanted to reward Reiter.

There was clear sympathy for Anna Maria Reiter in the jury room. She herself was now an old woman in poor health (once, during her testimony, a recess was called when she clutched her chest and was unable to continue). Day after day, she had showed up in court, walking with obvious pain, but always neatly dressed, her curly white hair framing an even-featured, bespectacled face as she sat, sometimes alone, in one of the 48 spectator seats in Judge Shimer’s courtroom.

Now it was the jury’s task to decide if this woman, who had led such a hard life, would finally get the riches that had surrounded her but were never hers.

The jury included seven men and five women, some employed by major corporations such as IBM, Northrop, AiResearch, Hughes, Panasonic and General Telephone. There were an accounting supervisor, a computer programmer, a plating department supervisor, a retired Food and Drug Administration supervising chemist, some clerical workers, a lawyer’s wife, a telephone installer.

Some had contended when jury selection began that they couldn’t be away from work for three weeks. Judge Shimer declined to humor them, although he was not a man without humor. “You may take your pointer and go,” he said in excusing one handwriting expert from the witness stand.

Deliberations had begun late on the afternoon of March 2, and when the jury adjourned for the night, it appeared a battle might be brewing.

But a majority of the jurors (and it only takes nine out of 12 to decide a civil matter) clearly were convinced the signature had been coerced or forged. There were other reasons to raise suspicions:

--Mountain Meadows Foundation, which was going to get one-sixth, had been incorporated only two days before the will was signed. It was established by Anna Maria Reiter’s son and had no assets or existing program--or homeless children, as far as the jurors could tell.

--In a deposition in 1985, Reiter said that she held the paper, not the wrist or hand of Ruth Chapman during the signing. That testimony changed after the handwriting experts concluded Reiter had, at the least, dominated the signing.

--In demonstrating the signing procedure, Reiter used her left hand to show how she had directed Ruth Chapman’s right hand. Reiter is right-handed.

--Chapman, widow of a financier and Mason, had told friends that she would abide by his wishes that money go to his favorite charities, the Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children and the Salvation Army. These bequests had been in a series of wills she wrote from 1972 to 1981 but had been deleted in the latest wills.

Psychologist’s Testimony

--Some witnesses, including a psychologist who never met her, testified that Ruth Chapman had become incapable of writing a will, that in her final months, after suffering a series of strokes, she couldn’t even remember her husband’s name or her own birth date.

And one juror was truly outraged by another event. Ruth Chapman, a devout Presbyterian whose final pleasures included listening to the televised sermons of Dr. Lloyd Ogilivie of First Presbyterian church, had left written instructions for a Presbyterian funeral. When she died on July 10, 1984 at the age of 97, only one of her old friends was notified about the funeral that would be held at Forest Lawn. The brief service was conducted by attorney Lake and Mrs. Reiter’s son, both Mormons.

“I’m a Catholic,” the woman juror commented, “and when I die I’d better be pushing up daisies as a Catholic.”

The jury took only 45 minutes more to reach a decision on the second day of deliberations. At 11:15 a.m. on Tuesday, March 3, the verdict was delivered. The vote was 12 to 0 that the wills of 1983 and 1984 were invalid.

Ruth Chapman’s estate, it appears, will go to the Salvation Army, the Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children, the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood and Forest Home Christian Conference Grounds in the San Bernardino Mountains.

For years I had heard that attorneys never let newspaper people serve on juries. So when I reported with my jury summons to the County Building in Santa Monica, I brought along plenty of reading matter and figured it would be two weeks down the drain. But within three hours, I was shuffled off to Courtroom G for what turned out to be a hard-fought case, with more than a dozen witnesses and scores of exhibits, including photo enlargements of signatures and a large chart tracing Ruth Chapman’s many wills written in her latter years.

The attorneys, including Timothy A. Gravitt for the Salvation Army and Shriners Hospital and Norvin L. Grauf for Forest Home, were meticulous in their questioning and intense in their summations.

The judge, who spiced his comments with criticisms of everything from the sagging acoustical ceilings in the county building to the lack of judges’ parking in the public lot, at times appeared to doze on the bench. But when there was a lull or a bit of confusion, his eyes snapped open and he proved to have a remarkable memory, quickly reciting the last question or recalling an obscure bit of testimony before the court stenotypist could look it up.

The jurors, who were kind enough to elect me foreman, were a conscientious group. We all followed the judge’s instructions and resisted the temptation to chat about the case as it unfolded. Some jurors drove from the Valley, others from the South Bay and some came from nearby, but all were on hand well in advance of the twice-a-day sessions. Even when I arrived a half hour early, I found other jury members already there. We all knew that to miss a minute of testimony would mean instant disqualification--not to mention the possible wrath of Judge Shimer.

But more than that, I think there was a real sense of pride and responsibility in what we were doing. The system really does work.

And that’s something you don’t get to say every day.