Five years after her death, the final wishes of music superstar Aretha Franklin are still unsettled. An unusual trial begins next Monday to determine which of two handwritten wills, including one found in couch cushions, will guide how her estate is handled.
The Queen of Soul, who had four sons, did not have a formal, typewritten will in place, despite years of health problems and efforts to get one done. But under Michigan law, it’s still possible to treat other documents — with scribbles, scratch-outs and hard-to-read passages — as her commands.
The dispute is pitting a son against other sons. Ted White II believes papers dated in 2010 should mainly control the estate, while Kecalf Franklin and Edward Franklin favor a 2014 document. Both were discovered in Franklin’s suburban Detroit home, months after her death from pancreatic cancer in 2018 at age 76.
“Does it surprise me that someone passed away before they...
The Queen of Soul, who had four sons, did not have a formal, typewritten will in place, despite years of health problems and efforts to get one done. But under Michigan law, it’s still possible to treat other documents — with scribbles, scratch-outs and hard-to-read passages — as her commands.
The dispute is pitting a son against other sons. Ted White II believes papers dated in 2010 should mainly control the estate, while Kecalf Franklin and Edward Franklin favor a 2014 document. Both were discovered in Franklin’s suburban Detroit home, months after her death from pancreatic cancer in 2018 at age 76.
“Does it surprise me that someone passed away before they...
- 7/6/2023
- by Corey Atad
- ET Canada
The opening pages to our exclusive Bad Taste reunion in the January 2015 issue of Empire: (L-r) Peter Jackson, Craig Smith, Mike Minett, Terry Potter and Ken Hammon, photographed exclusively for Empire in New Zealand, on October 22, 2014. Photo: Louise Hatton.In 1987, an ill-equipped but fanatically dedicated New Zealander put the finishing touches on his first movie. That New Zealander was Peter Jackson, and over four long years his short film Roast Of The Day had mutated into Bad Taste, a Diy sci-fi epic about an alien invasion of his hometown, Pukerua Bay. To play the commandos taking on the extraterrestrial threat (as well as the intergalactic bastards themselves), Jackson drafted in his mates Ken Hammon and Pete O’Herne, Hammon’s work colleague Craig Smith, and two guys from the newspaper he worked at, Terry Potter and Mike Minett. For effects, he cooked up prosthetics in his mum’s oven and constructed a rickety flying house.
- 12/10/2014
- EmpireOnline
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