Kid Carolina

by Heidi Schnakenberg

Fred Johnson confirmed that before Dick left for Switzerland, he had helped him move several bags of gold to various hiding spots on the island. This gold, which Dick may have smuggled into Europe before he left, wasn’t mentioned in any of the wills. Dick’s European stock and countless other assets were missing, as well as an estimated $15 million in his bank accounts. And in a cruel twist of fate, the residents of Hog Hammock were left with nothing, in spite of the fact that Dick had always promised that they would be provided for when he died. The destruction of records on the island after Dick’s death made it impossible for the loyal old servants to prove that they had been employees of Dick’s for so many years. They were not even able to collect Social Security benefits. Dick’s most trusted assistant, Fred Johnson, said, “Dick would still be here if it wasn’t for that German woman.”

  Some handwriting experts Muriel hired concluded that the penmanship in Dick’s last informal written will was not Dick’s. Muriel remembered that Christian Nissen had served as a forgery expert for the Nazis, for which Hitler presented him with the Iron Cross, and speculated that he could have forged Dick’s will. Investigators discovered that “Dr.” Hans Lindemann was listed in no medical directories. When Muriel’s investigators tried to interview Lindemann, he initially avoided them, but finally gave in to a meeting and became nervous and pale when confronted with questions about Dick. He said that Lehman “has all the answers” about Dick’s death, but when they tried to interview Lehman he wouldn’t talk. Muriel’s suspicions that they’d all had something to do with Dick’s death deepened when she received an anonymous letter saying that Dick had actually died in the summer of 1964. The postmark was Bad Godesburg, Germany, which happened to be Dr. Lindemann’s hometown.

  It also turned out that under Swiss law, it was illegal to disinherit one’s children. Although Dick requested that his will be domiciled under North Carolina law—another residency trick of Dick’s, so he could legally disinherit them—this might have explained the reasoning behind the peculiar disbursement of funds among all of Dick’s boys. But would Annemarie have done it if there wasn’t a legal risk?

  Every trail leading up to Annemarie appeared suspicious to outsiders, including Dick’s isolation in his last years, their hasty and unwitnessed marriage, and her entourage of German friends who were the only people to see Dick regularly during the last two years of his life. They all seemed to know more about Dick’s death and final will than anyone else. Outsiders wondered whether they were all part of some plot to steal Dick’s millions. Annemarie had been introduced to Dick by Ilsa Lindemann (who had been introduced by Nissen) and claimed not to have known Dick until they met in East Germany. But Dick’s Sapelo Island servants said that Annemarie had been on the island much earlier. Dick had obviously hidden this fact because he was still married to Muriel, but why were they flown in all the way from Germany and under what pretenses? If that was true, Dick and many others had committed perjury in his divorce trial from Muriel.

  Finally, no one could attest to the birth of Irene. Both her birth certificate and Dick’s death certificate were filed in one of the cantons of Switzerland where unwitnessed documents can be formally registered.

  Muriel believed she had made enough of a case to at least charge Annemarie and company with conspiracy and fraud in the forgery of Dick’s last will and the willful destruction of his documents, and to contest Irene’s paternity. Dick’s son Patrick even suggested they should have Dick’s body exhumed for a proper autopsy as well—to make sure he really died the way they said he did.

  However, following her lawyer’s counsel, Muriel did not make these claims part of her case. Muriel’s famous Washington, D.C., attorneys, including Paul R. Connelly, and a criminal investigator, Thomas Lavenia, advised her to take the angle of contesting Annemarie’s marriage to Dick instead, in which she had more of a case.

  In April of 1966, Muriel filed a $10 million damage suit in U.S. federal court claiming that she was Dick’s lawful widow and had rights to his estate. She claimed that she was forced by a Georgia Supreme Court justice to accept a divorce granted to Dick, and named Annemarie and the Bankers Trust Company of New York as defendants. Muriel claimed that Annemarie “purports to be the surviving wife” of Dick and that she obtained an order from the Surrogate Court in Manhattan allowing her to act as executrix of Dick’s “many millions of dollars of assets within New York.”

  Muriel’s suit described the two divorce cases she had with Dick and said that when she appealed the case a second time, Chief Justice William Duckworth of the Georgia Supreme Court forced her attorney to settle the case without a third trial and that she signed the settlement and withdrew the appeal under duress. The goal of the suit was to reinstate Dick’s older will, which included Muriel and the boys.

  However, the court wasn’t buying it, and as hard as Muriel tried, she couldn’t make the case that Annemarie was not Dick’s lawful widow. Muriel could think of no other way to go after Annemarie or seek revenge on behalf of herself or Dick’s boys, and she was making herself out to be a money-hungry ex-wife again.

  Were Muriel’s instincts right? Was she on to something? It was a climate in which wealthy men like J. Paul Getty’s family faced kidnapping, maiming, and threats in exchange for money. Conspiracy theories abounded as the Cold War and the Vietnam War dragged on and the world dealt with the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. Did Dick Reynolds join a long line of prominent men caught up in a conspiracy?

  Muriel would never give up trying to save her ex-husband’s disappearing patrimony and uncover the truth. But she was consistently blocked by the rest of the Reynolds family and could never prove it in a court of law.

  Epilogue

  A lawsuit this week claiming R.J. (Dick) Reynolds was murdered… was filed by Marianne O’Brien Reynolds, second wife of the tobacco heir…. The suit alleged that Reynolds’ death in 1964 “was willfully and feloniously caused” by his fourth wife, Annemarie Schmitt Reynolds, who inherited the bulk of Reynolds’ estate…. The lawsuit claimed Reynolds was “kept drugged and incapacitated… in various clinics” until “a forged will” could be prepared.

  —Winston-Salem Journal, January 2, 1976

  Patrick panned the camera across the crowd. He wanted to reject the idea of a conspiracy that had done away with his father’s millions—but, in these circumstances, it was hard to do.

  —The Gilded Leaf, Patrick Reynolds and Tom Schactman, 1989

  Muriel’s friend Hutch Hutchins wasn’t her only collaborator. Dick’s second wife, Marianne, who was once Muriel’s archenemy, also contributed tens of thousands of dollars to a decade-long quest to find out what happened to their mutual ex-husband and his fortune. Both of them believed almost twice as much money had been unaccounted for when Dick died, and they suspected he had smuggled millions in gold into Switzerland. After Muriel’s failed attempts to bring the case to justice, Marianne took the conspiracy case to court on her own. She wanted to see justice done for her disinherited sons.

  It was 1975 and Dick had been dead for over ten years, but the fight over his estate raged on. On December 19, Marianne filed suit in McIntosh County Superior Court against Dick’s estate, Annemarie, Nancy Reynolds, the board of directors of the Sapelo Island Research Foundation, Sapelo Plantation, Inc., Strat Coyner, Ledyard Staples, and other associates. Marianne claimed that she owned part of Sapelo Island, based on the note scribbled on a piece of calendar notebook paper in Dick’s handwriting, which read:

  “Received of Marianne O’Brien the sum of $10 and other valuables considered as payment in full for the common stock of Sapelo Plantation, Inc.—said stock to be delivered by sunset Saturday October 20, 1945.”

  It was signed Richard J. Reynolds—twice.

  The paper was, of course, another one of Dick’s jokes, like the alcohol clause he once signed for Muriel. Apparently it wasn’t enough of a joke to keep lawyers off the case. Dick could never have dreamed that another of his broken promises
would end up in court again, ten years after his death.

  Marianne brought several counts against the defendants. She claimed that she was entitled to all the common stock of Sapelo Island. Then she claimed the estate was being fraudulently probated in Switzerland when Dick was a U.S. citizen and resident at the time of his death. Marianne explained that Sapelo Plantation, Inc., which owned Sapelo Island, was dissolved on January 21, 1950. Marianne sought to show that the dissolution was improper and designed to defraud Marianne of her rights. She accused Strat Coyner—the “cleaner”—of being a conspirator in the dissolution, along with the others named in her suit.

  According to Marianne, on October 20, 1945, Dick acquired the sixteen thousand acres of Sapelo under the Sapelo Foundation. At the time he proposed, Dick asked Marianne to give up her movie career to marry him upon his discharge from the Navy, and asked her to live at Sapelo with him. Marianne was hesitant to completely give up her career, so to further entice her, Dick offered her the handwritten agreement to give her that piece of land. Marianne accepted the offer, and Dick promised that the common stock in question would be placed in Marianne’s name. One could imagine the twinkle in Dick’s eye as he made this promise. Then, on October 1, 1949, Dick dissolved Sapelo Plantation, Inc., stating that all the stockholders agreed to the dissolution. This wasn’t true because Marianne never knew about it. The arrangement was handled by Dick’s usual entourage of Paul Varner, Strat Coyner, and Ledyard Staples, and Marianne stated that they knew about the existence of Dick and Marianne’s agreement at the time.

  On August 7, 1952, when the final divorce between Marianne and R.J. was granted, the decree made no mention of the property and, based on this handwritten scrawl on a tiny piece of paper, Marianne would argue that she still held the title.

  Then Marianne alleged in court papers that Annemarie conspired to acquire Sapelo for herself. When Dick died and Annemarie inherited everything, Annemarie later sold the 13,750 acres of the property, as well as Meridian Dock and the riverside tract on June 27, 1969, to the Sapelo Island Research Foundation for $835,000, far less than the land was worth. Marianne estimated that because of the excessive beachfront access and what was believed to be valuable, minable titanium underneath, the land was worth more like a whopping $100 million. She also stated that during his lifetime and marriage to Marianne, Dick smuggled large quantities of gold bullion—private ownership of which was illegal at the time—and jewels on private vessels to and from the island and buried it there, never to be seen again. Marianne stated this was common knowledge among Strat, Nancy, Annemarie, and Ledyard.

  Then Marianne spelled out what was on a lot of people’s minds, including Muriel’s. She stated in the suit that Dick’s death was willfully and feloniously caused by Annemarie and that she should not be allowed to inherit any portion of his estate, much of which was physically located in Georgia, and which, by law, must pass by intestate succession to Dick’s heirs. Marianne said that Nancy acted in concert with Annemarie, along with Christian Nissen, Guenther Lehman, and Hans Lindemann, who conspired together to remove Dick from his home on Sapelo and get him to Germany, where he was kept drugged and incapacitated by “German nationals at various clinics.” That, she said, was when they prepared a fraudulent marriage to Annemarie and forged the holographic last will. Marianne stated that Dick lacked the mental capacity to change his domicile at the time of the last will, and that his removal was involuntary. Marianne claimed that Dick actually died at the hands of the conspirators in Bad Godesburg in July 1964 and she ordered Dick’s body exhumed for examination.

  Marianne asserted that the will was the work of a professional forger, Christian Nissen, at the instance of Nancy and Annemarie for the purpose of defrauding Marianne and Dick’s heirs. Marianne asked the McIntosh probate court to set aside the forged will, declare Annemarie and Nancy trustees ex maleficio, and readminister the will to the rightful heirs.

  Finally, Marianne accused Irene of not being Dick’s child, but an imposter procured for the purpose of defrauding Dick’s sons.

  In Winston-Salem, people were shocked by the headlines. Gene Whitman of the Twin City Sentinel reported, “Most members of the Reynolds family were not in Winston-Salem today, but one who could be reached said the lawsuit this week claiming R. J. Reynolds was murdered came as a complete surprise.” Reporters recalled how difficult it was to obtain details of Dick’s death when he died in 1964, and how it took them two days of calling overseas to secure information. Some family members suspected that Dick’s oxygen tank administrator, Sergio Amati, was to blame for Dick’s accidental oxygen overdose and Annemarie chose not to bring a suit, but this was pure speculation. Now with these new claims, some wondered: Would they ever know exactly what happened to Dick when he died?

  Eventually Marianne’s case was dismissed on almost all counts, but not before it went to the Georgia Supreme Court. The handwritten document Dick wrote before they were married was an issue. Ultimately the courts concluded that Marianne had forfeited her rights when she divorced Dick, and again when she signed off on her sons’ inheritance in 1965. Marianne’s charges against Annemarie were never fully investigated—they were thrown out due to lack of evidence, and Marianne had to remove them if she stood a chance of winning the land grant portion of the suit.

  Both Muriel and Marianne continued to believe that Annemarie had pillaged Dick’s estate, hoarded his money in foreign accounts, and purposely cut out his sons, and may have even forged his will, had a baby by another man and claimed it was Dick’s, and faked the timing of Dick’s death to achieve it all.

  In the end, the details of Dick’s dubiously managed estate were hidden behind an impenetrable curtain of secrecy. His heritage would be swallowed up into Swiss accounts, vanished gold, and a new European child. Dick’s whole-scale abandonment of his sons proved to be a magnified version of his own sense of abandonment by the early deaths of his parents. His disinheritance of his own children, and the entire group’s failed crusade to find the answers to the mystery around Dick’s death and estate, would ultimately mean death to Dick’s legacy.

  Dick’s sons would never be allowed on any boards or in any of the companies he founded and funded. They were even forbidden access to the family documents and had to purchase their father’s heirlooms at an auction. To visit the family estates, the boys had to go through the same channels as the general public. In a heated moment in 1975, Patrick confronted Nancy on the absurdity of this, and she claimed she had no control over the island or Dick’s estates. That was nonsense—her son, Smith Bagley, had been hosting grand parties at Sapelo whenever he wished. Patrick Reynolds noted how much of his father had all but disappeared from the family-run institutions that remained.

  In the early part of 1995, Michael Reynolds also conducted an investigation into the estate, and obtained a court order to gain access to sealed papers belonging to his father and to determine if he had received his fair share of his father’s estate. He investigated portions of Dick’s stockholdings that were never accounted for, and he also investigated his cousins’ relationship to Dick—including the ones who appeared as officers on all of Dick’s foundations. It’s unclear what he discovered, but he didn’t appear to receive any more from the estate as a result of his efforts.

  Despite a glamorous Hollywood lifestyle of her own filled with dazzling parties with the likes of Joan Fontaine and Elizabeth Taylor, Muriel remained obsessed with her dear ex-husband till the end. Muriel always claimed that R. J. Reynolds Sr. came to her in her dreams, begging her to solve his son’s mysterious end. She continued to whip around the globe, spending most of her time in New York, Palm Beach, and London.

  At the end of her years, Muriel wrote melodramatic letters to her friend Hutch, having fallen into a serious depression that left her drifting from one aimless venture to another. She often tormented her servants with unreasonable demands and wasted her resources on travel and gambling. Muriel never got over Dick and talked about him endlessly for the res
t of her life.

  On October 10, 1981, Muriel died at 12:15 A.M. of respiratory failure in West Palm Beach at the age of sixty-two. She had been battling lung cancer for ten years and was admitted to the hospital one month before she died. Hard living caught up with both Muriel and her ex-husband, and their lives had ended much earlier than they should have. Muriel’s death certificate stated that she was “widowed.”

  Nancy has also since passed away, but, unlike Dick’s boys, her children have benefited richly from their access to the family funds, foundations, and legacies. Nancy spent much of her life donating money to charities and managing several foundations in her family’s name, including the Katharine Reynolds Foundation and the Acra Foundation. She was a committed Democrat like the rest of the family, even allowing her good friend Jimmy Carter, a Georgia native, to hold his preinaugural cabinet meeting at her home on Musgrove Plantation. Town & Country magazine named her one of the ten most generous living Americans in 1985. Nancy’s accomplishments and contributions to society through the Reynolds family foundations were immeasurable. However, Nancy the individual remained elusive, even to her own nephews and nieces. Ironically, she was giving and selfless to the community around her but failed to extend the same generosity to her blood relatives.

  Nancy, who remained very close to Dick later in his life, was the only blood relative to see Dick in his last year, and her behavior toward Dick’s children was at best cold and oblivious and at worst deliberately harmful. They never knew exactly what motivated her, except that she viewed the boys as living symbols of Dick’s embarrassing mistakes. It was easier to preserve the family image by shutting them out.

  After Dick died, Nancy took control of the wealthy Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation and the Sapelo Foundation, both of which were founded by Dick. Throughout the rest of her life, Nancy seemed obsessed with controlling the family’s image in the media and used money and bribery to silence family members from releasing information to the public, particularly after Dick died. Her efforts were almost completely successful—the family received little press from the 1960s to the 1980s, until after Nancy passed away.