For anyone interested in Houston lore, a subscription to the Wall Street Journal is a must today as WSJ reporter Jonathan Karp weighs in with this front page article on the latest lawsuit of Melvin Dummar, the former Utah milkman who unsuccessfully claimed during a highly-publicized trial in 1978 that a handwritten “Morman Will” from reclusive billionaire and former Houstonian Howard Hughes entitled Dummar to over $150 million from the Hughes estate (Hughes died while flying to Houston in 1976 for medical treatment). Dummar claimed that the handwritten will was a reward for saving Hughes’ life after Dummar found him lying alone one night on a desolate Nevada desert roadside about 150 miles north of Las Vegas. Dummar’s story about the Mormon Will is the basis of the clever 1980 movie, Melvin and Howard.
Amidst that rich backdrop, Karp reports that Dummar is again after a chunk of the Hughes estate, albeit indirectly through two beneficiaries of the Hughes estate, Houstonians William Lummis and Frank Gay. Dummar’s new lawsuit alleges that Lummis, a Hughes cousin and the main family heir, and Gay, a former Hughes executive, conspired to withhold information from the court in the 1978 trial in order to discredit the validity of the Morman Will. The 77-year old Lummis currently serves as a trustee for the nonprofit Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the 85-year old Gay was also a member of medical institute’s board of trustees until recently.
Dummar’s latest lawsuit is based largely on the testimony of a former Hughes pilot, who allegedly corroborates Dummar’s allegation that Hughes had left Las Vegas to visit a brothel — appropriately named the “Cottontail Ranch” — near the spot where Dummar allegedly found Hughes in the Nevada desert. According to the pilot, the purpose of Hughes’ visit to the brothel was to renew a regular tryst with “Sunny, a redhead who had a diamond in an upper incisor. ‘You couldn’t see it unless she smiled broadly,’ [the pilot] recalls. ‘She was the class of the field.'”
Read the entire article. New movie to follow.