War of the Will : 3 Sisters Brawl for Years to Get a Slice of Tomato Field Inheritance

It was all very simple in the beginning, just a routine family will drawn up almost 45 years ago to protect the heirs of a small Camarillo farm.

That was before the fighting started--when one of three warring sisters charged the estate $237 for attending her mother’s funeral and $50 an hour for driving her to the grocery store.

It was also before the unsolved murder of one of the trustees, a 73-year-old woman who tried to resolve the dispute but ended up with her head bashed in and her throat slit.

It was before the charges that all the judges of Ventura County were part of a conspiracy to steal local ranches. Before more than a decade of courtroom maneuvering.

It was before the $500,000 in uncollected penalties against two former trustees, still piling up at the rate of $1,000 a day. Before a strange public statement just last month from a new attorney in the case who said he trusts that God will protect him from possible harm.

And, last but not least, it was before the estimated value of a tomato field in Camarillo jumped above $6 million.

Margaret Gisler, the daughter of a pioneering Ventura County farm family, had no way of knowing the total bedlam that was to follow the writing of her will, which she filed in 1955, to parcel out her estate to her children and other relatives.

One of her sons, William, and his wife, Angela, were to have the little farmhouse down the road and a 22.5-acre tomato field nearby. If William died first, Angela would have the house to live in until her death. Then the house and the land would pass to their three daughters, Patricia Wise, Gertrude Hall and Barbara Kennerly.

Thus began an estate battle viewed by some of California’s top trust lawyers as one of the most bizarre and protracted probate fights in California history--one that has grown more complicated with every passing year and that could easily continue for years to come.

“This is a very unusual case,” said Martin Levine, an expert on family trust cases who teaches at the University of Southern California School of Law. “It is not rare that family members quarrel, but it is striking that the quarrel has gone on so long without the judicial system fashioning some kind of remedy.”

To manage what was then a small estate worth about $200,000, Margaret Gisler chose another son, Ralph, as trustee. She viewed Ralph as the most responsible of her three sons, and he took his duties seriously. Things went smoothly for about a decade.

Health Began to Fail

But then Ralph Gisler’s health began to fail. A new trustee, the Bank of A. Levy, was named in 1966 to manage the estate, a job essentially calling for keeping track of financial records and leasing the tomato field to the farmers who planted and harvested it. For its services, the bank charged about $2,000 a year.

The first difficulties began after William Gisler died in 1969, leaving Angela alone in the little house next to the tomatoes. After an attempt by the bank to sell the land for about $200,000, full-scale legal war broke out, with all three daughters charging the bank had not kept them properly informed.

By the 1970s, Barbara Gisler, now 50, had married a San Diego attorney named Paul Kennerly, who took over the job of challenging the bank’s handling of the Gisler estate. Kennerly suggested that he and a family friend named Frank Brucker be named trustees, with the responsibility of ensuring Angela Gisler’s financial well-being in her remaining years.

In 1977, arguing that the Bank of A. Levy had mismanaged the estate’s funds, Barbara Gisler Kennerly pledged in Ventura County Superior Court that the new trustees would essentially work for free.

“They promise to waive any and all trustee fees. Kennerly will waive all attorney’s fees for any trust work,” she said. “Also, daughter and remainderman Barbara Gisler will do the necessary accounting at no costs to the trust. By the above method, life tenant, Angela Gisler, will have more than enough to live on.”

Wife Named Co-Trustee

In 1979, citing the need for extra help in running the estate, Kennerly succeeded in having his wife named as an additional co-trustee of the estate but without a similar pledge that she work for free. About this time, the Kennerlys moved into a trailer on the tomato field, just behind the house where Angela Gisler was living with another of the three daughters, Patricia Wise.

Angela Gisler died on March 29, 1983, and the alliance among her three daughters that had pushed the Bank of A. Levy out of the picture died shortly thereafter. In 1984, in an accounting required to partition the estate, the Kennerlys submitted a document saying they felt entitled to hundreds of thousands of dollars for services rendered.

While estimating the value of the land at that point at about $500,000, the Kennerlys submitted bills to the estate for $69,877.50 for legal services by Paul Kennerly and $132,162.50 for “reasonable extraordinary” compensation to Barbara Gisler Kennerly for work in managing the estate. About the same time, Brucker filed court papers saying he thought that he too should get some money.

The response of the other two sisters, Patricia Wise, now 61, and Gertrude Hall, now 56, was a move to have the Kennerlys kicked out as trustees and an accusation of fraud that eventually became the basis of a $120-million lawsuit still slowly working its way toward the trial stage in Ventura County Superior Court.

Most outrageous, in the view of Wise and Hall, was their sister’s $237 bill for attending their mother’s funeral, particularly in view of their own recollections that she had not attended the funeral at all.

Clipping Newspapers

Also challenged by Hall and Wise were claims by the Kennerlys that they had driven 32,339 miles on estate business during their seven years as trustees and should be paid $19,115.58 for mileage. Other disputed claims included about $12,000 demanded by Barbara Kennerly for clipping newspaper stories about zoning developments in Camarillo and $11,000 for time spent discussing trust matters with her mother.

In the early stages of the escalating legal fight, one of the dozen Superior Court judges ultimately involved in the case quickly agreed that the Kennerlys and Brucker should be removed as trustees and nominated the Bank of A. Levy to replace them. The bank, however, had had enough trouble dealing with the Gisler estate and politely declined.

On Feb. 6, 1986, the courts finally found someone willing to step into the dispute as the new trustee. She was Margaret Reimann, a respected and wealthy Camarillo rancher who was a distant relative of the feuding Gisler granddaughters.

Reimann, 73, was a devout Catholic and president of the Catholic Women’s Club in Camarillo. Like clockwork, she rose early on Sunday mornings to attend Mass at a local Catholic church. It was a Sunday morning in 1986, as she headed to church, that she was attacked in her garage, savagely beaten over the head and left there with her throat cut open.

Reimann’s murder remains unsolved. But she left her own estate worth $2.5 million, and $50,000 of that was posted as a reward for information leading to the capture of the murderer or murderers. Ventura County sheriff’s investigators say that everyone connected to the Gisler estate was considered a possible suspect and that most submitted voluntarily to questioning.

2 Notable Exceptions

According to Sheriff’s Detective Bob Young, who was involved in the case, there were two notable exceptions--Paul and Barbara Kennerly. They would not speak to deputies without a lawyer, Young said. Under those conditions and in the absence of any evidence against the Kennerlys, the sheriff’s investigators looked elsewhere.

Explaining their refusal to talk to investigators, Barbara Kennerly said this week that the decision was made after newspaper stories had disclosed that Margaret Reimann had cut her out of her will six months before Reimann was murdered because she felt Kennerly had failed to “deal fairly with her sisters.” While disinheriting Kennerly, Reimann left $100,000 each to Hall and Wise.

“The newspapers were trying to frame us for the murder, and we were advised not to talk to anybody,” Barbara Kennerly said.

Meanwhile, the feud between the Kennerlys and Hall and Wise was advancing in Ventura County Superior Court, with the Kennerlys resisting efforts by opposing lawyers to turn over pertinent estate documents and appear for depositions to explain their handling of the estate while trustees. While Hall and Wise urged the court to impose fines to force compliance, judges initially took a tolerant view.

“It is clear to the court that sanctions are not going to deter such conduct in the future but will only add fuel to the already blazing fire,” wrote Judge Bruce A. Thompson in January, 1986. “From a financial standpoint, the most severe sanction is the one the parties have imposed and undoubtedly will continue to impose upon themselves, namely, they will continue to squabble until they have used up all of the assets of the trust for litigation expenses.”

While the Kennerlys continued to ignore court orders to produce documents and appear at scheduled depositions, other judges also avoided imposing sanctions. In January, 1987, Judge Alan L. Steele wrote that to do so would be pointless because “the opposing parties have demonstrated clearly and fully to this court that they have no desire or intention to comply with any of the court’s orders.”

Different View

Judge William L. Peck, who later became involved in the case, took a different view. In an early courtroom confrontation with Kennerly, he observed that Thompson’s only reason for not imposing sanctions was because he “thought he was fueling the blazing fire.”

Said Peck:

“What I am proposing to do is pour a 55-gallon drum on it. It is about time, I think, that somebody did it.”

Peck began with relatively small sanctions, finally reaching the point in April, 1988, of imposing sanctions of $1,000 a day against the Kennerlys for every day they continued to ignore court orders to turn over records.

So far, no records have been turned over. The Kennerlys have instead been busy with a legal counteroffensive of their own, including one unsuccessful bid to have the California Supreme Court remove every judge in Ventura County from the case on grounds that they are part of an unlawful conspiracy to permit Hall and Wise to proceed with their lawsuit.

While Kennerly’s appeal to the Supreme Court was rejected, it remains memorable if only for its language.

“Petitioners shall not lie down although, before these courts, it seems that rape is imminent and resistance is futile,” Kennerly wrote.

“Petitioners have always intensely disliked satanical liars. It is true that this Ventura County is an Island of Enigma in the California legal profession . . . It will take the Supreme Court of this State of California to clean out the slime bucket.”

The rhetoric in that case is matched on many other occasions in the thousands of pages of legal briefs filed by the Kennerlys over the years.

Upset With Attorneys

Arguing from the outset that they are being persecuted for saving the family farm from ranch-stealers, the Kennerlys are particularly upset with some of the attorneys who have worked for Wise and Hall--among them Francis Gherini and Frederick Rosenmund of Oxnard and Richard W. Tentler of Santa Farbara.

“These attorneys intend to eat this trust up,” Barbara Kennerly declared in 1985. “Frank Brucker and I are from old ranch families. Who are these people, Gherini, Rosenmund and Tentler, that they should be casting aspersions, vile and city guttersnipe names? We old ranch families know!”

While the Kennerlys have been notably unsuccessful in their years of courtroom maneuvering, they have succeeded in continuing to live rent-free on the estate their grandmother willed to the three sisters. In a recent interview with The Times, they also seemed optimistic.

Their latest legal tactic has been to petition for bankruptcy in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in San Diego. One move to have the estate declared bankrupt has already been denied, but the Kennerlys are now proceeding with a personal bankruptcy action on behalf of Barbara Kennerly.

One object of the latest court maneuvering by the Kennerlys is to have the man who succeeded Margaret Reimann as trustee of the Gisler estate, former Superior Court Judge Robert L. Shaw, held in contempt for trying to resign on grounds that he is 69, has had two triple heart bypass operations and no longer has the “physical or mental stamina” to deal with the feud.

Another object is to have the bankruptcy courts dismiss the more than $500,000 in sanctions that have accumulated so far against the Kennerlys.

Blocked Equal Division

Paul Kennerly said he and his wife have been trying for the last five years to have the estate divided equally among the three sisters and their husbands. But he said that lawyers for Hall and Wise have blocked any equal division of the land on grounds that they should receive a larger share for the mental anguish they have allegedly suffered.

“In January, 1988, we met with Judge Shaw. He said divide it up and take your losses. I said fine,” Paul Kennerly said last week. “The two sisters there said they wanted an extra $690,000. And that was that. It’s like having a gun held to your head.

“But I have them on the mat now,” Kennerly added. “We’re not playing in Ventura now. I have them down in San Diego with some honest judges. It’s not who can hit the hardest. It’s who can take a beating the longest. This is like a 15-round fight, and we’re in about the 13th round. I won’t show them any pity.”

A different view of the bankruptcy move in San Diego is expressed by Oxnard attorney Rosenmund, who sees it as another stalling tactic. Rosenmund said there are 46 different appeals filed by the Kennerlys in the state appellate courts that must be resolved before the case can come back to Ventura County Superior Court for final resolution.

Throughout the years of bitterness between the three sisters, Hall has remained at a safe distance from the bickering, residing in Arlington, Tex. In recent weeks, she has been completely removed from the dispute while touring the country in a motor home. The supreme irony for Patricia Wise and Barbara Kennerly is that they are next-door neighbors.

At their small house next to the tomato field in Camarillo, separated from the Kennerlys’ trailer by a locked chain fence, Patricia Wise and her husband, Jack, made it clear that they have little interest at this point in any resolution that would give the Kennerlys an equal share of the family estate.

“This is a battlefield, and I’m standing my ground,” Patricia Wise said.

‘Like a Vendetta’

“This whole thing is unbelievable,” Jack Wise said. “It’s like a vendetta, but it’s also beginning to be a farce. We’re past the point of just making up and settling now. They certainly have done their best to do us in, and we want justice.”

Ultimately, according to attorney Rosenmund, there could be a resolution of the Gisler family feud that would permit them all to end up as millionaires.

“If they live that long,” he said.

For the moment, however, there is a new legal battle to be fought next week over the appointment of Camarillo attorney Kevin G. Staker, nominated by Hall and Wise to succeed Shaw as the estate’s sixth trustee.

In a statement that would be considered highly unusual if made in connection with any other case, Staker last month circulated a press release that focused on the unsolved murder of Margaret Reimann.

“The obvious question is why would I want to undertake what some would call a risky task--taking over as trustee of a trust where a prior trustee has been murdered,” Staker said.

“The reason is that I believe in the rule of law and do not want to allow fear to vanquish justice.”

Staker, a Mormon bishop, added:

“I am a religious man. I feel at peace about my decision. Each one of us does not know where our own life will end. All I can do is trust in my God that His will will be done in my life.”