Death Provides No Insight Into 85 Years of Life

By some measures, Dorothy Duncan’s life didn’t add up to much.

For 85 years, the slight woman who spoke so softly you had to strain to hear her did things she could do alone. She sewed her own dresses and stitched intricate quilts. She tended her garden and took vibrant bouquets to church, where she sat up front in the widows’ row.

She never married. At her parents’ insistence, she left school early, caring for them until they died.

But when she died last spring, Dorothy Marie Duncan counted for a lot more. In her will, she left everything she owned--six rental houses and her own home, worth more than $600,000--to Faith Community Church and to the small Santa Paula hospital that cared for her in her last, sickly years.

With that bequest, Dorothy Duncan ended a solitary life with an act of remarkable consequence to two small-town institutions that embraced her when she needed them, and that she can now help in turn.

“This gift is immensely important,” church elder Keith McLain said. The $275,000 to $300,000 that the church is likely to get from the sale of Dorothy’s houses will nearly pay off a construction loan used to build the modest, one-story stucco church five years ago, he said.

Or, the 135-member congregation--a social cross-section including working-class families and the city’s mayor--could use some of the money to recruit and pay a permanent minister. The last one quit over the summer, taking a teaching job.

Ten miles down Highway 126 toward Ventura, tiny Santa Paula Hospital can also use Dorothy’s help. It has lost money on operations for years, and the donation will help the hospital stay in business.

Even including the area’s most prominent families, Dorothy’s gift is one of the largest ever received, administrator William Greene said. “Obviously, this is a major gift for a small hospital like Santa Paula.”

That such a quiet, self-effacing woman could emerge as a major benefactor to two struggling institutions is remarkable enough. But there is more to Dorothy’s story.

When the executors of her estate inventoried her possessions, they found almost no money in the bank.

Everybody assumed she had a bundle stashed away. Her six rental houses each earned her $700 to $800 a month. And she was frugal. She drove a 1964 Dodge Dart, made her own clothes and furnished her home simply. Her only extravagance was a computerized sewing machine she bought new in 1992.

So, in death, Dorothy Duncan became both a blessing and an intriguing mystery for those she left behind.

No Sight of a Money Trail

“Where is the money? That’s what we want to know,” Greene said. “Frankly, we’re mystified. We’re at dead ends.”

Born in Fresno in 1913, Dorothy was the daughter of Claude and Ethel Duncan, migrants from rural Bolivar, Mo. The family moved to Fillmore about 80 years ago. Like Dorothy, her mother was quiet; a homemaker and dutiful wife to a laboring man who rose to foreman at a packing shed.

The Duncans built small wood frame houses along a half-block of sycamore-lined Saratoga Street, close to downtown. Dorothy’s grandparents moved in, so did two of her aunts and an uncle.

Peggy Myers, who rented one of the houses from the Duncans in 1942, said Dorothy learned personal reserve from her parents.

“They were such nice people, but they were very different in the way they all lived together,” Myers said. “They didn’t seem to socialize. They stayed home.”

On their rare outings, the whole family packed themselves into a single car. Neighbors remember them taking just one trip--back to Missouri.

Claude could be sociable on occasion. Sometimes, he joined other men for a game of snooker after work. Everybody in town brought him their lawn mowers, hoes and shears for sharpening.

But where Dorothy was concerned, Claude and Ethel were obsessively protective. Even as an adult, when she fetched the mail, her mother emerged from their little white house to make sure no harm came to her full-grown child.

Tommy Whiteley, a neighbor since 1955, remembers asking Dorothy if she wanted to walk across the street to watch a new house being built.

“She was in her 50s, but she said, ‘Let me go ask mama,’ ” Whiteley recalled. “I thought that was terrible. And she never went to town by herself until after they all died.”

In fact, several of Dorothy’s acquaintances said they never knew her at all until her father died in 1978. And even then, she remained an abstract, self-contained presence.

“I knew her for years and years, and she always looked the same,” remembers Pat Rees, a church friend. “She wore a net on her hair, just like her mother and her auntie. She wore her own dresses. And she was always made up.”

Church elder McLain knew Dorothy at two different churches, but never really penetrated her inner world.

“She liked to be her own person,” he said. “She had a lady who took care of her. That’s who she wanted at her house. And that’s it.”

When she did talk, he said, it was usually about her aches and pains. “She was so quiet-spoken you really had to tune in to hear.”

Keeping Up the Wall

Yet everyone liked the parts of Dorothy she allowed them to know. Each Sunday, her red hair neatly combed and netted, she appeared at Faith Community with an armload of flowers from her garden.

“She just loved flowers,” recalled Ila Hudson, a friend for 20 years. “She had the most beautiful violets. She’d just take a leaf and repot it and make it grow.”

But her reserve never really fell away.

Next-door neighbor Vicynthia Stephens, who rented a house from Dorothy for the last dozen years and shared her interest in gardening, could never quite pierce the wall between them.

“She was my Dorothy,” Stephens said. “But as long as I’ve been here, the only time I could get her in my house was when she had it re-carpeted. And I practically had to pull her in.”

An enigma in life, Dorothy remains a mystery in death.

For even as her church and her hospital count their blessings, they scour the records of Dorothy’s finances to find what happened to all those rental checks she had received since her father died two decades ago.

When the church organized an estate sale to dispose of Dorothy’s things, everyone was on alert.

“The Realtor said, ‘Be careful. Who knows what might be stashed in a book or in a mattress,’ ” Rees said.

Church treasurer Walter Moore helped with the sale. “We were wondering,” he said. “Did she stash money under the house? We went through the attics. We didn’t find anything.”

The estate has hired an accountant-investigator to track them down, said Greene, the hospital administrator.

“I can’t believe she didn’t have any money,” said Whiteley, Dorothy’s oldest friend. “She told me she had savings. And she didn’t spend a whole lot on anything. She’d always give me her purse to keep when she went to the hospital. One time she had $1,400 in it.”

But those who have investigated Dorothy’s finances say it’s possible that age took advantage of her.

In her final months, she would sometimes fail to collect rent and sometimes forget to cash checks. She spent thousands of dollars on home repairs.

“In the last year of her life she probably spent $16,000 to $20,000 on those rental houses,” treasurer Moore said. She also spent a lot on them in 1994 after the Northridge earthquake, he said.

Leaving No One Behind

Rose Corteza, who looked after Dorothy after she became frail in the last three years of her life, said her boss’ finances were a jumble. Her handyman got free rent. Housing repairs seemed to cost more than they should, Corteza said.

“My background is in construction, and I think some construction people took advantage of her the last seven or eight years,” elder McLain said. “They’d put things in she didn’t need. And just the quality of the work was something else. I’m sad I didn’t know what was happening.”

Not that people weren’t willing to help. Corteza said she asked Dorothy if there was anything she could do. The old woman’s lifelong insularity intervened.

“I’d ask her if she wanted some help, and she’d say, ‘That’s not your job,’ ” Corteza said. “She was a very quiet person. She would never give information about herself. But she was a very good woman. In all that time, she never raised her voice at me.”

When Dorothy Duncan died, friends said they felt a special sadness, because she left no survivors to claim her small personal treasures.

No one was left to cherish a black-and-white sepia picture of Dorothy when she was young and pretty. There was no one from the family to pick through the closets of handmade dresses, no one to sort quilts so elaborate, collectors say they are worth hundreds of dollars each.

“Normally, when someone dies, relatives take this and take that, and everything carries on,” Moore said. “But with Dorothy, a lifetime of memories were just sold off. Strangers came to her estate sale and took it all home.”

Her solitary life has left questions about whether her family smothered her and robbed her of something important.

But around Fillmore, where Faith Community will hold services Sunday, Dorothy Duncan is not remembered as an isolated spinster.

She became in death larger than she was in life; a philanthropist who left her community better than it was. That is probably the epitaph the primly proper Dorothy, who resented prying questions and snooping into her life, would prefer.

“For a small church like us,” Moore said, “this is a tremendous blessing.”