CRIME: Crime-of-the-Week

In Manhattan's Surrogate Court last week were held the last five hearings on the claim of Thomas Patrick Morris, 52, infirm Scottish housepainter of Brooklyn, to the $30,000,000 fortune of the late, eccentric Ella von Echtzel Wendel. Miss Wendel, last of her line, kept a succession of poodles named Tobey in a fabulously valuable side yard adjoining her lower Fifth Avenue home. She died last year leaving all her money to charity. Claimant Morris, one of some 1,800 less enterprising aspirants to the fortune, maintained that:

Miss Wendel's dead brother John Gottlieb...

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