New fight over will of millionaire
Family and mistress turn to state’s high court for decision on amendments Cobb alcoholic made.
Bill Rankin
April 14, 2009
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
http://www.ajc.com/services/content/printedition/2009/04/14/strother0414.html?cxntlid=inform_artr
Lawyers for the family and mistress of an enormously successful, alcoholic car dealer Monday renewed their fight over what Harvey Strother intended to do with his millions after he died.

By the time Strother died of congestive heart failure in 2004, the 78-year-old Cobb County millionaire was wearing a diaper and drinking more than a gallon and a half of wine a day. He left behind an estate valued at $37 million.

Monday, the Georgia Supreme Court heard arguments —- for the second time in little more than a year —- on the hotly contested case that pits Strother’s relatives against his lover of eight years. A ruling is expected later this year.

“Harvey Strother was a man of great wealth, great intellect, but he had demons,” former Gov. Roy Barnes, who represents Strother’s family, told the justices. “In the end, the demons won.”

Strother’s family contends the mistress, Anne Melican, took advantage of Strother, who was 30 years her senior, while he was in an alcoholic haze. She says Strother knew exactly what he was doing and that he wanted to make sure she was taken care of.

At issue are three amendments Strother made to his will in the six years before he died.

Just days before Strother died, Melican wheeled him into his lawyer’s office where he signed the third and final amendment.

It would have directed Strother’s estate to pay off Melican’s house in Cape Cod, Mass., and give Melican and her son property in Florida.

Last July, a Cobb County jury threw out that amendment. Hylton Dupree, another lawyer for Strother’s family, told the justices that Strother had been drinking before he signed it. This might explain why Strother’s signature was illegible, Dupree said.

But the jury upheld the other two amendments. These gave Melican an estimated $4.5 million, including a monthly allowance of $7,900 from Strother’s estate, lifetime health coverage and a condo in Cozumel, Mexico.

Monday, Melican’s lawyer, Douglas Salyers, asked the state’s high court to uphold the jury’s verdict on those amendments.

“The doctors of doubt have spoken,” Salyers said, referring to jurors. “They got it right. They heard all the evidence. They looked witnesses in the eye.”

Barnes said those amendments are invalid. On one, two women who signed on as witnesses did not actually see Strother sign a complete legal document. The need for at least two witnesses has been required since the 14th century, he said. “This is an elementary part of the law that has been there since the time of Edward II.”

Millionaire’s mistress battles his kin over estate
Greg Bluestein/Associated Press Writer
April 13, 2009
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
http://www.ajc.com/services/content/shared-gen/ap/National/Millionaires_Will.html?cxntlid=inform_artr
ATLANTA — Harvey Strother was a multimillionaire with a small empire of Georgia car dealerships, but when his mistress wheeled him into his lawyer’s office to change his will one last time, he was a wine-soaked shell of his former self.

Less than a month from death, he was chugging a gallon and a half of wine each day, court records say. But his mistress, Anne Melican, contends he knew what he was doing when he changed his will in December 2003 to guarantee her about $6 million of his $37 million estate, including a condo in Cape Cod, Mass., and boat slip in Marco Island, Fla.

The last-minute changes are the focus of a fierce legal fight involving some of Georgia’s most powerful attorneys. On Monday it landed before the Georgia Supreme Court for the second time.

Strother, who ran his business from Cobb County, Ga., in Atlanta’s northwestern suburbs, built his reputation as a gregarious silver-tongued salesman. But his 23-year-old daughter’s 1988 death from diabetes sent him in a downward alcoholic spiral.

His family’s attorney, former Gov. Roy Barnes, on Monday put it this way: “He was a man of great wealth, he was a man of great intellect. But he had a great demon — and that demon was alcohol.”

Strother had signed a will in 1988 leaving the bulk of his assets to his wife Betty, their children and their grandchildren. But in three amendments in 2000 and 2003, he signed over some prime pieces of his estate to the mistress.

One amendment gave Melican, his mistress of seven years, a monthly allowance of $7,900 and a second gave her a Marco Island, Fla., condominium and health insurance. A third gave her a condo in Cape Cod, Mass., a Florida boat slip and a Florida property for her son.

As Strother aged, his alcoholism worsened. A friend testified that when he saw Strother in December 2003 — shortly after he made the final changes to his will — he was drunk, wearing a diaper and filling a 16-ounce plastic cup from a box of wine.

After Strother’s death in January 2004 at age 78, his grandson challenged the amendments, arguing that Strother was a fragile alcoholic who was conned into changing the will. He depicted Melican as a canny manipulator who used sex and alcohol to get her way.

Melican’s attorneys countered that the changes were legal and valid, and said the lavish gifts were consistent with the expensive diamond rings, elaborate overseas vacations, plastic surgeries and other luxuries Strother showered upon Melican over the years.

They asserted that no one could control Strother, not even his closest relatives.

When the case made its first trip to the Georgia Supreme Court last year, the justices said only a jury could determine whether Strother had been manipulated.

But a two-week trial in July 2008 satisfied no one. The jury sided with Melican on two of the three amendments and with Strother’s family on the third. Both sides appealed, leading to Monday’s return trip to the state’s top court, where they sparred over the finer points of Georgia estate law.

Barnes contends one of the amendments should be thrown out because two witnesses listed on the document were not actually present when Strother signed the changes.

Melican did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment on Monday. But her attorneys note that Strother’s family, which had wanted a jury to decide the case, now wishes to overturn parts of the verdict that displease them.

Melican attorney Douglas Salyers said the two aging witnesses may have simply forgotten they were present for the signing.

“The jury got it right,” he said. “They had all the evidence. And they looked the witnesses in the eye.”

Mistress battling millionaire’s kin again
Case is before Georgia Supreme Court for the second time
Bill Rankin
April 13, 2009
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
http://www.ajc.com/services/content/metro/cobb/stories/2009/04/13/cobb_millionaire_mistriss.html?cxntlid=inform_artr
Lawyers for the family and mistress of an enormously successful, alcoholic car dealer Monday renewed their fight over what Harvey Strother intended to do with his millions after he died.

By the time Strother died of congestive heart failure in 2004, the 78-year-old Cobb County millionaire was wearing a diaper and drinking more than a gallon and a half of wine a day. He left behind an estate valued at $37 million.

On Monday, the Georgia Supreme Court heard arguments — for the second time in little more than a year — on the hotly contested case that pits Strother’s relatives against his lover of eight years. A ruling is expected later this year.

“Harvey Strother was a man of great wealth, great intellect, but he had demons,” former Gov. Roy Barnes, who represents Strother’s family, told the justices. “In the end, the demons won.”

Strother’s family contends the mistress, Anne Melican, took advantage of Strother, who was 30 years her senior, while he was in an alcoholic haze. She says Strother knew exactly what he was doing and that he wanted to make sure she was taken care of.

At issue are three amendments Strother made to his will in the six years before he died.

Just days before Strother died, Melican wheeled him into his lawyer’s office where he signed the third and final amendment. It would have directed Strother’s estate pay off Melican’s house in Cape Cod and give Melican and her son property in Florida.

Last July, a Cobb County jury threw out that amendment. Hylton Dupree, another lawyer for Strother’s family, told the justices that Strother had been drinking before he signed it. This might explain why Strother’s signature was illegible, Dupree said.

But the jury upheld the other two amendments. These gave Melican an estimated $4.5 million, including a monthly allowance of $7,900 from Strother’s estate, lifetime health coverage and a condo in Cozumel.

On Monday, Melican’s lawyer, Douglas Salyers, asked the state high court to uphold the jury’s verdict on those amendments.

“The doctors of doubt have spoken,” Salyers said, referring to jurors. “They got it right. They heard all the evidence. They looked witnesses in the eye.”

Barnes said those amendments are invalid. On one, two woman who signed on as witnesses did not actually see Strother sign a complete legal document.

The need for at least two witnesses has been required since the 14th century, he said. “This is an elementary part of the law that has been there since the time of Edward II.”

Life’s final chapter to play out in court
End: Jury to decide if millionaire was capable of changing will.
Tom Opdyke
July 13, 2008
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
http://www.ajc.com/services/content/metro/stories/2008/07/13/strothermet.html?cxntlid=inform_artr
In the days when cars had fins and AM radios, Harvey Strother was king of the road.

A lawyer who decided he’d rather be an automobile man, as this breed called themselves, Strother eventually owned five car dealerships in Marietta and Valdosta.

By the 1970s, he controlled millions —- back when a top Ford Mustang sold for about $3,400 and a million dollars was worth seven digits.

In less than a decade, he sprinted from service manager at a Chevrolet lot in Atlanta to owner of a Ford dealership, which he moved from downtown Marietta to the top of the hill on Cobb Parkway. Other dealerships followed, including Marietta Toyota in 1975, which the family still controls.

With a house in one of Marietta’s best neighborhoods, a half-interest in a Beechcraft Queen Air aircraft, country club memberships in Kennesaw and Marco Island, Fla., and a silk touch with car buyers, every lane on the highway of life was open and green-lighted for the Decatur-born son of a railroad engineer.

But Strother, a middle linebacker type with a hearty grin and firm handshake, was being pursued by a disease that had more horsepower than he could buy and an engine so silent he never heard it closing on him.

His struggle filled the final chapters of his life with Faulknerian pages of love, loneliness, family spats and tragedy.

Harvey Strother, who hunted in Canada, fished the oceans and could crush a golf ball 260 yards off the tee —- with a persimmon driver —- started sinking into depression that his family says led to alcoholism.

It began in the mid-1990s after the leukemia death of a Marietta woman with whom he had a 20-year affair, court documents say.

A bourbon man for most of his years, Strother in his twilight was drinking up to 1 1/2 gallons of vin de gouttiere —- the wine in the box with the plastic spigot —- each day.

His doctor said Strother’s blood-alcohol level at the end of a day approached .40, a near-comatose state for most people, but that quitting drinking probably would kill him. Continuing probably did.

When he died in 2004, a week after his 78th birthday, Strother was worth about $37 million. He left it to a wife, three children, grandchildren —- and an estimated $6 million to a mistress who had accompanied him to a lawyer’s office in Naples, Fla., when he changed his will three weeks before his death.

Including that last visit, Strother had amended his will three times in four years, each change bestowing more and more of his estate on Anne Melican, a psychological counselor and Strother’s mistress of seven years.

Described in court papers and by Marietta friends as a driven man who got his way, Strother added a stringent penalty clause to his will in his final days: Any heir who contested the changes would be disinherited.

Final days

Beginning Monday in a Cobb County courtroom, a jury will be asked to decide whether Strother was independently capable of knowingly making those changes to his will or was addled by alcohol and unduly influenced by Melican, his junior by three decades.

Melican and her attorney declined to comment about the case. Members of the Strother family, through their attorney, declined interview requests.

Family members, through sworn statements and their attorney’s court filings, have attempted to portray Melican as crafty woman who craved expensive gifts —- court documents indicate Strother spent nearly $200,000 on her jewelry alone —- and used alcohol and sex to manipulate him.

Melican said in a sworn statement that when she met Strother on Marco Island in late summer 1996, he said he was a widower.  Several months later, he said he had not shared a bed with his wife in 20 years, but admitted he was still married.

Melican recalled the moment and how it struck her in a January 2006 sworn statement: “So I knew. … But you know something? It’s almost too late then. I was completely captivated by Harvey, and I think he by me.”

At stake for Melican and her adult son: a $7,900 monthly allowance, a Marco Island condo last estimated at $1.3 million, a 53-foot Carver yacht called “The Lady Anne,” a yacht club slip, three cars and the payoff on a $575,000 Cape Cod condo.

Although cases about wills rarely attract attention in a county-seat town that has plenty of raw politics and widely regarded lawyers handling their own high-profile cases, those who know the Strother family are keenly aware the fight is coming to trial.

They are saddened that some potentially embarrassing chapters in Strother’s life will be aired.

“It’s horribly unfortunate because it brings a different ending to what we all pictured Harvey being,” said Wally Gresh, a golfing buddy and occasional co-pilot who knew Strother for 40 years.

“He was the last person that I would have thought of who would have gone this way,” said Gresh, whose family operates S.A. White Oil Co.

Gresh said Strother was a strong financial supporter of the Salvation Army and that he suspected Strother had a large role in financing the Water Street building where the local chapter has its headquarters.

Three weeks before Strother died of congestive heart failure, he was in a lawyer’s office in Naples at 8:30 a.m. to make the final changes to his will. He sat in a wheelchair and was tended by Melican in a “very caring” way, one of the witnesses to the changes said in a sworn statement. The session also was videotaped.

James Karl, the lawyer who drafted the changes, said in a sworn statement that he was certain Strother was not under the influence of alcohol at the time.

“I wouldn’t have allowed him to execute this if I thought he had been drinking,” Karl said.

A few days later, one of Strother’s friends, a veterinarian, visited him at the condo he shared with Melican.

In a sworn statement last year, Dr. Walter Young provided the grim account of what he saw:

“Harvey was sitting in a chair in the dining room. Harvey was drunk and had a box of wine on the table with a faucet coming out of the box. He had a 16-ounce plastic cup that he would fill with wine from the box. Harvey was wearing a diaper.

“The night that I left the condominium … my personal observation was that Harvey was not competent to handle any business in an effective manner,” he said.

Young also said he believed drinking led to Strother’s death.

Shortly after that visit. Melican sent Strother back to Marietta. Young said she and her son were planning a ski trip to Vail, Colo., and that she was sending Strother to Marietta because he was too ill to go to Vail.

He died at WellStar Kennestone Hospital, on a hill that overlooks downtown Marietta and the brick buildings where the story of Harvey Strother’s success began.

Georgia Supreme Court:  Jury to decide will’s payout to mistress
Bill Rankin
February 12, 2008
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
http://www.ajc.com/services/content/printedition/2008/02/12/strother0212.html?cxntlid=inform_artr
The Georgia Supreme Court ruled Monday that a jury should decide whether the mistress of a Cobb County millionaire should receive an estimated $6 million of his estate.

The jury would be asked to determine whether Harvey Strother, who made a fortune as a car dealer, was unduly influenced by the woman he loved for more than seven years when he amended his will on two occasions —- once six months before he died and the other three weeks before his death. During this time, according to court testimony, Strother’s health was ravaged by heavy drinking.

In 1988, Strother signed a will leaving half his estate to his widow and the rest to his three children and grandchildren. But he amended that will three times, leaving Anne Melican of Naples, Fla., a small fortune after his death. This included $7,900 a month for the rest of her life, a $1.3 million condo and a boat slip at a South Florida yacht club where they docked their boat, the Lady Anne. Strother also left a Florida property to Melican’s son.

After Strother died in January 2004, leaving a $37 million estate, Marietta lawyer Sidney Parker, executor and trustee of Harvey Strother’s estate, and one of Strother’s grandchildren contested the three amendments to the will.

In a unanimous opinion, the state Supreme Court said a jury should decide the strongly contested —- and much-litigated —- dispute.

The court upheld rulings by Cobb Probate Court Judge David Dodd, who will preside over the trial.

Writing for the court, Justice George Carley cited evidence that Strother was “in an incapacitated state, vulnerable and easily manipulated” when he signed the last two amendments.

Strother, according to testimony and court records, was drinking up to 1 1/2 gallons of wine a day. On the day after he signed the second amendment, in June 2003, Strother was heavily intoxicated and incapable of any mental or physical exertion, the ruling said.

In December of that same year, Melican pushed Strother’s wheelchair into an attorney’s office where he made the final change, the ruling said. Strother was also seen that month “in a completely intoxicated state, drinking from a large cup next to a box of wine containing a faucet,” the court said.

“I’m pleased with the decision,” said former Gov. Roy Barnes, a Marietta attorney who represents Parker in the dispute. “I think the court followed the law and common sense in reaching this decision. We look forward to the doctors of doubt —- the jury —- deciding this issue.”

Douglas Salyers, an attorney for the Melicans, did not have immediate comment.