Tales from Kentucky Lawyers

21. Illegitimacy

21 ILLEGITIMACY Like stories regarding sex crimes, those about illegitimacy are seldom shared by lawyers and judges; only six were obtained for inclusion herein. 258. "WHEN A MOTHER Is NOT A MOTHER" One of my most interesting cases is about the case in which I was involved after I had been a lawyer for only about fifteen minutes. A young man walked into my office and said, "My father died without a will. I'm one of his illegitimate children, and I would like to inherit from his estate." At that time, which was in 1975, Kentucky statutes said that an illegitimate child could inherit from the mother but not from the father . Obviously, it's a little easier to show who your mother is than it is your father. Being a brand-new lawyer, and not having any cases to do anything else with, I thought, "That doesn't sound fair to me," especially since he'd been raised by his father in his father's home. He actually had his father's name, and he was a junior. Robert Rudolph was the man in this case. So I said, "Robert, you don't have any money, and I don't have anything else to do, so we'll try the case." Sure enough, we lost at the local circuit court level. That had been the law in Kentucky for one hundred years. We appealed the case to the Kentucky Court ofAppeals, and while our appeal was pending there, the United States Supreme Court in a ILLEGIT~CY 215 case that originated out of Illinois ruled that an Illinois statute that was identical to the Kentucky statute was unconstitutional. So we happened to be in the right place at the right time, and our court of appeals followed the United States Supreme Court decision and ruled that the Kentucky statute was unconstitutional and held that he could inherit from his father. He probably didn't inherit $1,000 or $2,000 worth of property, which was totally inconsequential. Fifteen years later, Robert Rudolph finds himself back in my office, and he says that his brother so-and-so died without a will. He owned about $150,000 worth ofrental property around here. A lady has shown up claiming that her son is the sole illegitimate son ofRobert's brother. So the very law that he had changed as unconstitutional was coming back to bite him in the rear end on this one, because if that child could establish that he was the child of the decedent, he would inherit the entire $150,000 to the exclusion of my client, because the child would be closer kin. The only problem was the mother of the child that was claiming paternity didn't raise her head for two years and eleven months after the brother died. So it made it a little bit difficult to get a blood test since he was already dead, buried and gone. And the statute at that time said that you can only bring a paternity suit within three years following the death of somebody. So they got in just under the window. All this pre-dated DNA a little bit, so I'm trying to figure out if I could get a blood test from a brother that might be reliable enough to find out if this two-year-old child really is the surviving kin. While we were looking for that, they said, "Well, there's a guy over in jail that we believe had visitation rights with the mother and we think he's the father." So I got a court order to have blood tests from the mother and the baby and this jailbird. When it was all done, I got a call from Dr. Kawas, who was the pathologist at that time. He said, "Well, I'm sorry to tell you that the jailbird is not the father of the child," and he said, "But I'm also surprised to tell you that the mother is not the mother." Of course, that had created a lot of controversy at the hospital because they thought that maybe they had a switched-baby situation. This happened to be a black couple, and there were no black babies born within four days of the date of this one, so that wasn't the case. What had happened is this mother had just grabbed a neighborhood kid and had taken that kid out to the...