Holy crap!
Assuming it IS a crime to falsify info on a death certificate, if it were me, I’d call the sheriff’s office and inquire about having her arrested.
And yeah, I third that. Open the damn safe already.
The locksmith is coming tonight. If you don’t hear back from me, I have moved to Monaco with the piles of cash we found. If not, I will give you all the update on Monday as to the contents.
What a cut and runner! 
Somewhat more seriously, which is it? In this situation, as re: your marriage, you send some pretty mixed signals. Yes, we can all agree that this woman sounds like an unreasonable bitch. And your FIL was quite the fuck-up. But I’m not quite sure I understand your investment on behalf of your possibly soon-to-be ex-husband who doesn’t seem as concerned about this as you are.
It doesn’t need to be a terribly consuming mess. Your options include letting it drop and moving on with your life, or hiring a pitbull attorney and instructing him to go nuts.
BTW, it is “quit” claim.
Foxy, if I may, your husband may need you to be the strong one right now. He’s deep in grief, plus probably in shock over the GF’s shenanigans. You’re the one thinking clearly.
If you’re planning to divorce him anyway, go ahead and let him deal with it. But if you want to reconcile, have his back for this. He needs you, because you don’t have a dog in this fight and you can be objective and do what needs to be done.
I would normally say hell yeah, dude needs to stand on his own two feet, but I agree with Ivylass - he’s had a hard blow recently, and now may not be the best time for teaching him life lessons. I think the best call for you right now, Foxy, is to be supportive but not enabling. For example, help him make arrangements and stuff, but if he blows off appointments, too bad for him.
The girlfriend sounds like an incredible piece of work. Why hasn’t your husband gotten MAD over her lying and what looks like attempted theft? Does he have no self-esteem at all?
Foxy40 I feel for you and yours. Nothing that anyone can say will make you feel better but I would like to take this opportunity to say something I feel is related to the misfortune that has befallen you. Everyone needs to realize that they are going to die. It’s not always easy to think about it but it will happen as sure as the sun will rise. Planning ahead is the adult thing to do because your family will have enough grief to deal with without having to worry about the stupid things you should have been adult enough to take care of while alive. I am 42 years old and I have a will, approximately 850,000 dollars of life insurance and called a mortuary 2 weeks so I could pay for a simple cremation. I know my wife. She would have a huge headstone and she would go there and weep and once I’m gone I don’t want her wasting anymore of her time on me. My point is death is a part of life . Not the best one, not the worst one, but the last one. Plan on it.
Note: Alabama is one of the few states that still recognizes common-law marriage. I’m not sure you can rule out the possibility that she is his wife, legally speaking.
And the requirements for attaining common-law-marriage status don’t seem very onerous, according to this site:
IANAL or any kind of authority on marriage law, but to my lay mind it seems that if this woman was living with your late FIL for five years, then unless you have some kind of recent and conclusive documentary evidence that FIL did not consider the relationship the equivalent of marriage, you might have a very hard time proving that she is not in fact his common-law wife.
From what I understand, she was collecting benefits from her ex husband as a divorced single woman. We are good over the common law wife thing. Unless she wants to pay back alimony and medical benefits she wouldn’t be entitled too.
This is an excellent question and one I think I should be dealing with in therepy.
What is my investment in this? Well, I have nothing personally to gain although I don’t want to see him screwed. If I were smart, I would have offered my sincere heartfelt condolences and sent a mass card. I am not smart. I am either a very good person or a total fucking idiot depending on whom you talk to. My husband needs me. I am not ‘forcing’ him to need me but he keeps asking for guidence and I am giving it the best I can. He has no money to speak of so I am funding and planning the memorial. If he could afford to do it, he would be emotionally unable to anyway. He doesn’t handle life very well. I really don’t want to get into more details than that but I will always feel very protective of him no matter if we are husband and wife or not. Call me an enabler or whatever but when this happened it never occurred to me for a moment to just set him afloat. However, I am not going to give my advice and research other’s advice to have him be undecisive about what he wants to do. If he wants to let it all go, commit to that, if not, talk to the people I refer him to. I really don’t want to see him screwed but it is time consuming and annoying.
To end the “suspense” the safe contained no will and nothing of value. Probably why she didn’t care about it being opened.
My husband was seeking some sentimental items and is disappointed. I was not the least bit surprised.
When my father died, I opened his bedroom closet, and there on the floor was a large banker’s box. In it was EVERYTHING I needed to settle EVERYTHING. He had created a trust, sold/transferred everything (bank accounts, car, house, dog (I kid) ) to the trust and named me Trustee. Upon his death, I essentially “became him” and was able to do things quickly and uninterrupted aside from some minor newspaper filings. His will was in there (I was the Executrix), his car titles, house deeds & papers, land deeds & papers, bank account numbers, checkbooks, doctors’ names & information, insurance policies - it was amazing. I was even able to be paid on an insurance policy he bought in 1948 because of his amazing record-keeping…it took me about 5 minutes on the internet to find the current company and get it taken care of.
I marveled at it then, and after reading these stories I am even more grateful. It made me come home and do the same things so that my brother can step in and take care of things with little or no hassles.
I hope your husband can get this worked out and I hope it inspires him (and everyone else who read this thread) to get their affairs in order - NOW.
VCNJ~
I am in my 40s and have had my will handles for at least 15 years. I know have an appointment to update it. I just can’t understand why people don’t make their wishes known in writing and give copies to people they trust.
In the meantime, I may have to start a new thread pitting my FIL girlfriend for one of the nastiest things I can imagine saying to a son who just lost his father. “I could tell you some bad things your father said about you, but I won’t”
Is there any reason that your husband is having any contact with this woman outside of your lawyers? She sounds terrible. I think it’s time to cut off contact with her and let the lawyers earn their pay.
I don’t have a will. It is not a big problem, in this country there is mandatory inheritance, meaning you can’t disown your spouse or children. You can only dispose of a certain percentage of your estate via a will. I am not leaving anything to anyone else but husband and child, and everything of importance is in both our names. I keep records of everything I do (I am the Home Finance Manager 
) and inform my husband, even if he doesn’t want to hear it.
Now, my father, that is another matter entirely. I think I dread the idea of his demise as much because of the mess he’ll leave as for the grief of losing my dad. He has a lot of properties but I doubt he has his shit in order. Nobody knows anything about his finances and where his accounts are and what his properties are. Not even my mom, to whom he’s been married nearly 40 years. To make matters worse my dad has a child that is not my mom’s and a few relatives that will be flying like vultures at the funeral and I will not be surprised if they counterfeit documents to make it appear as if my father has sold properties to them.
I told my mom a few weeks ago that as soon as my father dies I will hire a lawyer to protect *her *rights and to cut me off entirely from the estate. If my father does not have the simple courtesy of making sure that his mess is sorted out before checking out, it means that he really doesn’t want me to have any of his stuff. For all I care we can just stuff everything in his casket and bury it with him.
I love my dad, but I think it is incredibly assholish of him to refuse to deal with this now.
This reminds me of a true crime story I read recently.
Great book, horrible perp. My sympathies on the loss and having to deal with someone like this.
My father’s estate was in order (everything to Mom), but when one of my uncles, an attorney, offered to do the paperwork, Mom said yes. Sadly he’s one of those people who leave things to the last possible minute - things that I would have had solved within a month of Dad’s death took almost a year 
While I’m sure most people have been in the situation of being the family expert on something, when that something involves money oooh boy, it’s definitely wiser to do as you - “me not know nothing, honey.”
You should see my mother and aunt trying to deal with my grandparents’ estate, where the decisions have included whether to prosecute their brother under California cattle rustling laws.
Ok, it isn’t fair not to expand on THIS story!
My uncle has run his parents’ cattle ranch for many years, and he had a mixed herd of their cows and his. He was demanding that the estate pay for the maintenance of “barren cows” that he was unable to sell because the trust that owned them was forbidding him to do so. :rolleyes: When asked for documentation of the existence of these barren cows, he produced transaction records that seemed to show that he had sold his parents’ cows and pocketed the money himself. When this was pointed out (as well as the quadruple damages provision of California law for stealing cattle), he dropped the maintenance claim.
(In fairness to my uncle, I don’t think he meant to steal the cows - I think he just had sloppy record-keeping and couldn’t remember whose were whose.)
But that was actually a minor escapade in the overall context of the estate disposition, which is not yet complete, two and a half years after my grandfather’s death and a year and a half after my grandmother’s.