My hunny and I were just talking about the Menendez boys and this came up… Erik got married and his wife is living comfortably. Could she be living on his money that he inherited from his parents deaths?
My hunny is insisting that it is not possible to inherit the money of the person you have murdered (assuming you are caught, of course), and I am arguing that there is no such automatic provision in the law, only in insurance policies and the like.
Does anyone know for sure?
If you meant Lyle, they’re http://www.crimelibrary.com/menendez/mendezafter.htm]divorced now.
Aw crap. You know what I meant.
It’s a little complicated to explain, but, no, you generally can’t kill a testator and then inherit the estate. Under the law, it would seem like you are able to, right? Dad left his money to me, I kill him. According to the law of wills, I would apparently get his money even though I killed him, since no provision appears in his will regarding me not killing him as a condition of inheritance.
To avoid so foul a result, courts have fashioned an “equitable” remedy to supplement the “legal” remedies available. To oversimplify to the point of absurdity (see the history of courts of chancery, if you’re interested), courts just plain won’t follow what would appear to be the legal conclusion if an inequitable result would follow.
To make a long story short, even though the money would appear to belong to the killer, they ain’t gonna give it to him.
Istead, they fashion an “equitable” remedy, analogizing to the law of trusts. They create a “contructive trust”; the killer holds the inherited money in trust for the guiltless next of kin. So no, even absent a statute, a killer may not as a matter of equity profit from his or her misdeeds.
Cool. I’ve wondered about this myself, since in TV murder mysteries it’s a pretty standard outcome that the killer was an heir who couldn’t wait for rich Uncle Reginald to croak from natural causes. Every time I see one of these shows, I wonder what will happen to the money that Uncle Reginald left to his murderer. So the answer is that it goes to the killer’s next of kin, as long as they weren’t involved in the crime themselves?
Not the killer’s next of kin, the victim’s. I think it’s determined by who would have inherited had the killer not been in the equation at all. For example, say me, my brother and my sister would inherit my mother’s estate in equal shares . I kill my mother. This doesn’t mean that my husband or my kids get my share of the money - it means my brother and sister each get half.
This isn’t a universal remedy. Wisconsin, for example, has a law specifically disinheriting murderers. It was adopted after a fairly controversial case in which a man who murdered his parents successfully fended off attempts to disinherit him by other surviving relatives. He’s the richest guy doing life but he inherited.
No, not universal, just one example of a court imposed equitable remedy. I’m afraid that wasn’t the clearest post I’ve ever written; I wrote it when I came in from the pub Friday night. It, ah, doesn’t show, does it? 
This brings up some interesting questions. For example, what if I knock off my parents and frame it as an accident? I inherit their vast fortune (heh), and five years later, improvements in forensic technology prove that I’m the murderer. Do I have to return the money?
What if I invest all the money, and by the time I’m nabbed, it’s grown by 10 times? Do I have to return all of it, or just the original inheritance? Or what if I squander the whole lot? Do I still owe what I inherited?