A judge rejected a couple’s claim to a $3 million estate because black ink blobs on the will obscured their names

• An Australian judge ruled that a 75-year-old man had died intestate — or without a will — even though a document was found.
• That’s because the names of beneficiaries on the will were obscured by black ink splodges.
• The man’s will was found on his kitchen table two months after his death.

A judge in Australia ruled that a 75-year-old man had died without a will after the names of his beneficiaries were obscured by black ink on the document, according to a recent court filing. 

The deceased, Howard Edwin Thomas, was a former banker who died in July 2021. He had earlier bequeathed an estate worth nearly 4.5 million Australian dollars, or $3 million, to his long-term friends Richard and Deborah Nightingale — who were also executors and trustees of his estate, a June 22 filing at the Supreme Court of Victoria in Australia showed.

Thomas had drawn up the three-page will in 2011 and had kept the original document, according to the judgment for the case that was first reported by the Australian Financial Review, or AFR, on Thursday.

Two months after his death, Thomas’ will was found “in a pile of dirty papers on the kitchen table” in his house in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, according to the filing.

The will was the original that was prepared by Thomas’ law firm in 2011, but the names of the beneficiaries were “largely blanked out by black ink applied by hand” in two key clauses, according to the court document.

“Assuming the markings on the will were made by the deceased, I am satisfied from the state of the will that the deceased intended to revoke it,” ruled Steven Moore, a judge at the court, per the filing.

“The markings effectively obliterate the names of the executors and beneficiaries, on its face stripping the will of its essential elements,” he said.

Moore said he was satisfied that the markings were made by Thomas based “on the balance of probabilities.”

“Although it is barely possible to discern the Nightingale’s names under the ink, the effect of the markings is in the nature of redactions executed by hand to the typed text of the will,” Moore ruled. There were no other markets or alterations to the will.

The judge added that the ink markings and “their emphatic expression” on the document showed Thomas had meant to revoke the will in its entirety and ruled that Thomas had died intestate — meaning he died without leaving formal instructions about how to distribute his assets.

Thomas’ estate will now be distributed according to the law, per AFR.

Thomas wasn’t married or in a domestic relationship, did not have any immediate relatives, or left any records of alternative beneficiaries.

The case came about as one of Thomas’ surviving six cousins applied for intestacy.