Something like this situation is happening on a TV show Mrs. Homie watches:
A young man and his father are estranged. The father is an amoral jerk and won’t hesitate to ruin his son’s life, for sport. The father has run afoul of some bad people, and thinks he’s likely to be murdered soon. As a parting shot from beyond the grave, he takes out a huge life insurance policy on himself, naming the son as beneficiary. That way, once he’s found murdered, the police will focus on the son.
The son has caught wind of this, so he’s trying to figure out how to prevent it.
Can he get himself removed from the policy, without the insured’s permission?
That’s easy on TV, but try that in real life. I mean, I got home from work last night at 7pm and didn’t leave my house again until about 8am. No one saw me that entire time.
I’m lucky that I paid a few bills online, surfed the internet and interacted with my TiVo and all those records could be pulled with a warrant. But if all I had done was sat at home, read a book and went to bed, I’d have no way to prove I didn’t slip out the back door and do something nefarious.
For a few days, I might be able to keep up an alibi, but when you don’t know if something’s going to happen this week or this month or in the next year, it’s going to be tough to make sure you’re always surrounded by friends and witnesses all the time for the rest of his life.
I don’t know of any way to force someone else to remove you as a beneficiary. However, someone who is bequeathed an item via a will can disclaim (refuse to accept) the inheritance, so I would expect that something similar can be done with an insurance payout.
Donate all the money to some charity the father hated, after making every overt and well documented effort to have his name removed, even if it’s not possible.
I should think if he did so it would go a long way to clearing him of suspicion.
“Well officer here is evidence of how hard I tried to NOT be his beneficiary and here’s my pre arrangements for having the proceeds donated to the United Negro College Fund.”
If he does not want to receive the money he simply does not go through the steps to claim the insurance. You do not automatically get the money.
Even though the insurance company knows that the insured is dead, they don’t just send out a check. They will ask the beneficiary to provide a death certificate or certified copy as a bare minimum, and probably certain identification from the payee.
My sister died recently. There is about $1600, split between me and my brother, I can claim from the Teamsters Union if I can provide within 180 days: a death certificate for her, a death certificate for my mother who was the major beneficiary but also died the same week (both were sick, long story), a copy of my sister’s Social Security disability letter, (disabled due to cancer).
I am somewhat estranged from my brother who probably has the SSD letter and I am not going to try to get a copy from him. Death certificates are public record so I think I could get those if I desired but I’m going to let old feuds die with them.
Point being that there are steps that a person must go through to get an insurance payout. Nobody is going to show up at your door with a check in their hand unless you make a claim for the money.
In the OP’s scenario the son simply makes no attempt to claim the money and after a certain period of time that the insurance company is required to attempt to contact the beneficiaries, the insurance company keeps the money.
If the point of buying the policy is to implicate the son, wouldn’t the father have to somehow trick the insurance agent and company into thinking the son is the one who had set it up? You would think that it would be recorded somewhere in the policy if who bought and paid for it.
Just because the son is beneficiary, it doesn’t follow he’s the murderer. The police are likely to question him as a matter of course, but unless other evidence is planted (not easy), they’ll be looking at other suspects fit the facts better and there will be plenty of things that will pointe elsewhere.