Lover Wins Custody of Dead Man’s Sperm

Nearly six years after a brilliant but emotionally troubled Los Angeles businessman committed suicide, his lover Monday finally got custody of 12 vials of frozen sperm that he willed her so she could have his child after his death.

In an odd and bitter custody battle, Deborah Hecht was pitted against the grown children of her dead lover, Bill Kane, over possession of the sperm. It has sat chilling in a Westwood cryogenics bank since Kane deposited it there in the fall of 1991.

A California Supreme Court decision late last month not to review an appellate court’s ruling in Hecht’s favor cleared the way for the sperm to be released to Hecht’s control.

“It’s an incredible feeling,” said Hecht, a gemologist and jewelry appraiser, after all the sperm vials were finally hers.

Hecht has stopped fighting the Kane family for the sperm, but she is now almost 42 and fighting her biological clock.

“I have sperm and I’m going to get preggers now,” she said in a mix of giddiness and confidence. “We’re going in vitro, and I’m excited.”

If she fails to get pregnant, her legal adversaries will have effectively won. The Kane children--Everett, 25, and Katie, 23--have always been repulsed by Hecht’s claim to the sperm. They wanted to win it simply to have it destroyed.

“The judicial process in this case has been strange and frustrating, and Katie and Everett are glad it’s over,” said Sandra Irwin, the children’s attorney.

In another soap opera-like twist, Irwin is also their mother; she has long been divorced from Kane. “I am thrilled to death that I will never have to write another document on this issue,” she said.

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Bill Kane was an author and businessman, admired for his far-ranging interests and creative mind, when he decided at age 48 to take his own life. Beset by business and financial problems, Kane meticulously began planning his suicide in the late summer of 1991 and swore Hecht to secrecy, she has always maintained.

Even though he was seeing a psychotherapist, Kane went about changing his will, making trips to a sperm bank, and writing a letter to his children in which he told them about the sperm. At his orders, the letter was delivered posthumously.

Kane finally swallowed a lethal dose of pills and put a plastic bag over his head in a room in the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas on Oct. 30, 1991. When his children found out that Hecht had known of his suicide plans all along, their distrust exploded into enmity. They accused her of manipulating a deeply depressed man to leave her his estate and unsuccessfully sued her for wrongful death.

The sperm became an issue only after Hecht agreed to a settlement that gave the children 80% of Kane’s estate and left her with 20%. Much to Hecht’s surprise, the sperm was automatically attached to the estate and the legal battles began, hopscotching between the Superior Court and the Court of Appeal three times. Along the way, a judge ruled that Hecht should at least get 20% of the 15 vials of sperm since that would agree with the previous settlement.

So in 1995, she finally got three vials. Two of those failed to make her pregnant by artificial insemination. Left with one remaining vial, and unwilling to risk it on something as hit-or-miss as artificial insemination, she decided to undergo the more aggressive method of in vitro fertilization, hoping she could win the additional vials to strengthen her chances.

The children lodged numerous arguments against Hecht’s claim on the remaining 12 vials. In addition to accusations that she unduly influenced Kane to leave her his sperm, they argued that a gift of sperm violated the state’s Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, which governs donation of body parts.

But an appellate court resoundingly rejected their arguments. “Seldom has this court reviewed a probate case where the decedent evidenced his or her intent so clearly,” reads the opinion.

The court dismissed the notion that sperm is an anatomical gift to be used only for transplantation or therapy. But even if it were, says the opinion, “the ‘therapy’ Hecht ‘needs’ is to be impregnated with the decedent’s sperm.”

The state Supreme Court declined to review the case, but then ordered it not published. In other words, the decision stands for Hecht, but it will not serve as precedent for anyone else involved in a similar legal and emotional morass.

The high court gave no reason for its action, called decertification.

“It doesn’t mean the court agrees or disagrees with the result,” said court spokesperson Lynn Holton. “There are many reasons for decertification. It could be the lower court’s analysis was misleading. It could be they misapplied a rule of law.”

But attorney Irwin takes some solace in the Supreme Court’s action.

“I think the Supreme Court read it and decided it was a very poorly reasoned decision,” said Irwin, who noted that the appellate court even chose to disagree that Kane--a man who committed suicide--was suffering from a major depression.

“It was an immoderate opinion, not well-founded and without support in the law,” Irwin said.

Though the fate of the sperm has been decided, the Kane children continue to sue Hecht for intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Meanwhile, she’ll be trying to get pregnant with the sperm of a man she says she deeply loved. Hecht has said that Kane’s suicide was not the result of instability but “a conscious decision that it was time for him to go.”

On Monday, her attorney, J.R. Nerone, personally transported the sperm in a canister of vapor nitrogen from Westwood to the Santa Monica lab affiliated with Hecht’s fertility specialist. “I must say it was a real buzz,” Nerone said, chuckling.

Once in the lab, the vials were transferred into containers of liquid nitrogen. “We brought them into the back and unveiled them,” Hecht said. “It was cool.”

Hecht’s fertility specialist, Richard Marrs, said she now has more than enough sperm to fuel her attempts to get pregnant.

“Her age and the quality of her eggs--which dictate the quality of the embryos--really dictates the outcome,” said Marrs, the medical director and managing partner of California Fertility Associates. He estimates her chances of getting pregnant from just one cycle of in vitro at 20%--about half what her chances would have been if she had started this process several years ago. With each cycle, her odds improve some--but only until about the sixth try.

“We don’t have to worry about running out,” Marrs said of the sperm. “It would have been nice to have had it three years ago, but that’s not what happened in the court system.”

Hecht, who is unmarried, is hoping that she will be implanted with fertilized eggs on her birthday, March 6.

“Nice birthday present, huh?” she said.