Geoff Dougherty

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War of the will comes to court

By Geoff Dougherty | St. Petersburg Times Staff Writer

When Mary Froemke died in 1996, the retired seamstress left behind two wills, a million dollars and more than a dozen people with an interest in her money.

The resulting battle in Pasco-Pinellas Circuit Court has turned into something worthy of a television soap opera.

There is intrigue – one of the beneficiaries to Froemke’s second will was murdered while sitting in a parked car on a Las Vegas street corner.

There are accusations of wrongdoing involving prominent Pasco lawyers. Three of them, Robert Altman, Wayne Coulter and Hugh Umsted, have accused a fourth, Donald Kaltenbach, of filing false papers that helped a client dole out a third of the Froemke estate.

And there is a black sheep – Denis DeSousa, a nephew of Froemke’s. He has said squabbling relatives shouldn’t get the money. Instead, he has begged others to use the money for charity.

That plan might have appealed to Froemke, who labored most of her life in New York’s garment district, weathered the Great Depression and saved as though she expected history to repeat itself.

She drove an aging economy car and lived in a barren Las Vegas mobile home park. She cared so little about material goods that neighbors thought she was poor. They saw only her old-fashioned dresses and shoes so tattered that a concerned neighbor once bought her new ones.

“Money,” neighbor Jerry Elmore said, “just didn’t seem to be her main interest.”

Those Froemke left behind hold money in higher regard. None besides DeSousa has taken up the idea of ending the dispute with a donation to charity.

Instead, a stack of court documents more than 3 feet high tells a story of a 93-year-old woman whose thrifty ways served not as an example to others, but as an inducement to greed.

“There was a feeding frenzy,” Kaltenbach said. “And now it’s the lawyers milking it. It’s shocking.”

Leaving Las Vegas

The problems started in a lawyer’s office.

In April 1992, two of Froemke’s neighbors checked her out of a Las Vegas nursing home and took her to the office of an attorney. Once there, Froemke signed over her estate to the neighbors.

Froemke and her husband, who was near death, had no children. The attorney who wrote Froemke’s new will was skeptical at first about her desire to disinherit her relatives.

But Froemke told him the neighbors, Fernando and Loretta Paredes, had helped her around the house and given her rides to the hospital. And she loved their two children.

That was enough to convince Jack Pursel, the attorney.

“The two children – they were just little tots – ran up to her and threw their arms around her legs,” Pursel said in an interview. “She looked at me and said: “These are my children.’ “

Although Pursel concluded that Froemke was capable of making decisions about her money, others disagreed.

The Nevada Public Guardian, fearing that she was senile and being hoodwinked by the Paredes, already had sought permission to take over Froemke’s affairs.

Psychiatrists who saw Froemke in the days after she signed her new will agreed. She didn’t know what city she was in, thought bread was selling for 15 cents a loaf and insisted she had less than $ 2,000 in the bank.

Over Froemke’s protests, Nevada authorities declared her mentally incompetent. Later in 1992, they sent her to live with her niece, Lenoir Kessler of New Port Richey. Kessler then became her guardian.

Distant relatives

Kessler, 53, was not named in Froemke’s most recent will. Nor was she mentioned in a previous will, signed by her aunt in 1978.

That document left Froemke’s money to more than a dozen people, including some of her husband’s relatives and her great-nephew. Those beneficiaries are scattered throughout the country, with some living in Michigan and Canada.

Pursel said in an interview that Froemke had intended that her closest relatives, who weren’t mentioned in either will, would get nothing from her estate.

“There was no contact for years. She was not close to them,” Pursel said. “She had made a previous will and specifically cut them out of it.”

Despite those provisions, Kessler sought court approval to pay herself and 10 other Froemke relatives $ 10,000 each year from her aunt’s bank accounts. As Froemke’s guardian, Kessler said the gifts would help reduce Froemke’s holdings to less than $ 600,000, thereby avoiding the federal government’s estate tax.

$385,000 in gifts

Court documents say the attorney, Thomas Mitchell of New Port Richey, told her those gifts would be improper. Froemke’s will, he said, made no provisions for the relatives Kessler wanted to pay.

Kessler fired Mitchell and found a new attorney. And in July 1994, she filed papers in court requesting permission to take $ 110,000 from Froemke’s bank accounts and give it to relatives who weren’t named in the first will.

The documents were signed under penalty of perjury by Kessler and Kaltenbach, her new attorney. And they said that Froemke, who had signed at least two wills in her lifetime, had no will.

“The ward has no will and the natural beneficiaries of the estate would be the brother and sister . . .” said their proposal.

The judge approved it. In the next two years, judges would okay a pair of similar requests, meaning that a total of $ 385,000 went to Froemke’s relatives, including Kessler.

Request for charity

As Kessler distributed the money from her aunt’s estate, other relatives – even those who received payments – accused her of avarice.

Kessler’s sister, Linda Cerrone, was one of them.

“There are repeated examples that prove the Kesslers are driven by control and greed,” she wrote to one of the judges handling the case.

And Kessler’s brother, Denis DeSousa, urged the court to stop the distributions. DeSousa, who was on the list of those who received $ 10,000 payments, balked when Kessler wanted to increase the distributions. From his home in Bellvale, N.Y., he mailed letter after letter to Judge Marsha Glisson. His notes, riddled with misspellings, urged charity.

“I think I know what would make my aunt very happy,” he wrote in 1996. “Give a figure of, let’s say $ 150,000-$ 250,000 to St. Jude’s Hospital for Terminally Ill Children.”

Froemke died in September 1996, setting into motion the fight for her estate. Her death was followed two months later by another one.

On Dec. 23, Fernando Paredes left his mobile home in Las Vegas, telling his wife he needed to pick up some beer. Instead the 40-year-old construction worker went to a corner near his house where drugs are often sold. As Paredes sat in his parked pickup truck, somebody walked up and shot him through the side window. Nobody has been arrested in the crime.

Detectives in Las Vegas considered whether Froemke’s Florida relatives were connected to the slaying, but later concluded Paredes was killed by a robber.

Contest of wills

In the year after Froemke’s death, the attorneys came. There were seven of  them: attorneys for Loretta Paredes; attorneys for the relatives favored under  the old will; attorneys for Kessler and the others who would win if both wills  were voided.

The three groups swapped allegiances and positions as though playing a game of cutthroat pool. Joseph Comazzi, Froemke’s great-nephew, brought forward the old will and joined with Kessler to accuse Paredes of duping an old woman into signing away her life savings.

Paredes joined with those named in the old will to accuse Kessler and her attorney of raiding the estate by filing false papers in court. And Kessler joined with Paredes in trying to throw out the 1978 will.

The court began to sort through those allegations in 1997, when it decided to remove Kessler as the administrator of her aunt’s estate. The reason: A judge ruled that Kessler had known about at least one of Froemke’s wills, but filed court papers denying the will existed.

The decision came after testimony by Thomas Mitchell, Kessler’s former attorney.

“He did not think the gifts should have been made and that he thought there might be a will,” said the minutes of the hearing. “He was fired by Mrs. Kessler shortly thereafter.”

Friend vs. Friend

One of the attorneys who represented Paredes’ claim was Bob Altman, the brother of New Port Richey Mayor Peter Altman. The attorney appointed to replace Kessler as the supervisor of the Froemke estate was Wayne Coulter, the son of a longtime Pasco tax collector. And the attorney arguing for the old will was Hugh Umsted, treasurer of the West Pasco Bar.

Their next step was a painful one, because it involved personally attacking another prominent lawyer.

Donald Kaltenbach is a west Pasco lawyer who cuts a high profile. He is a prostate cancer survivor who wrote a book about his experience fighting the disease. Along with prominent developer James P. Gills and others, he started a local bank. And in the late 1970s, his lavish lifestyle was the subject of a Times story that featured a photo of his custom-built home in Hidden Lakes.

He also attends church with Bob Altman.

Despite those ties, the three asked a judge to hold Kaltenbach, along with Kessler, liable for the $ 385,000 that was taken out of the estate.

Kaltenbach, the motion said, “knowingly participated in the solicitation of misleading reports,’ and had filed “known false pleadings,’ ” in court, which allowed the money to be disbursed.

The decision to go after Kaltenbach did not come easily for Altman.

“We did a lot of thinking about this,” Altman told the Times. “This puts me right in the middle of an ugly situation.”

Just the other day, Altman ran into Kaltenbach at a social function. And he’s almost guaranteed to see Kaltenbach every Sunday.

“I’m going to have a problem with it at church,” Altman said.

An honest lady

There is little chance that Kessler will receive anything more from Froemke’s estate. If the 1992 will is eventually discredited because of Froemke’s mental state, the court ruled, the 1978 will prevails. And that will, like the one that postdated it, gives no money to Kessler.

That decision leaves Paredes and the beneficiaries of the 1978 will to slug it out in court.

Kaltenbach believes he and Kessler will eventually work out their dispute with the other attorneys. Although Kaltenbach acknowledged that he and his client were told Froemke had signed a will in Las Vegas, he denied filing false papers in court. And he has appealed the ruling that found Kessler knew about the 1992 will and filed papers stating there was none.

Froemke’s will was invalid, he said, because she was incompetent at the time and therefore not capable of legally writing a new will. Kessler never misled anyone or took money from Froemke, he said.

Kessler is “just not that kind of person,” he said. “She’s a very honest lady.”

Kessler, who owns a New Port Richey janitorial company, did not return telephone calls requesting an interview.

This week, Altman and the others agreed to withdraw the papers accusing Kaltenbach of filing false documents.

“This will all get worked out,” Kaltenbach said. “They didn’t have their facts right.”

Altman said the case against Kessler still is active. And if the three attorneys are unable to recover the money from her, Altman said, they may renew their attempts to hold Kaltenbach responsible for disbursements from the estate.

“If we don’t prevail or get the money back, we will consider our other options,” he said.

Last wishes

Each of the attorneys involved in divvying out the proceeds of Mary Froemke’s 93 years of scrimping says he is trying to ensure that her desires are honored.

In that process, the court file has grown so thick with accusations and bitterness that clerks at the West Pasco Judicial Center dread putting their hands on it, as though touching it would somehow stain their fingers.

And the attorneys, after two years, are beginning to realize that the dispute over what Mary Froemke wanted has become, in the end, a subversion of her wishes.

“I doubt there is anyone who would want to see a fight like this,” Altman said. “I’m sure she wouldn’t have wanted this.”

Oct. 11, 1998