Well, you can read this one all you want, but — SPOLIER ALERT — the answer to its riddle remains unknown. Enter (and never leave) Ida Wood — faker extraordinaire, and successful gold-digger. Problem is, she never enjoyed her spoils in the way Hollywood typically fantasizes. Instead, she chose the Howard Hughes meets The People Under the Stairs approach in dealing (or not dealing) with reality. What drove her to that end? The lies and coverups? Her malformed “daughter”? Greed? Guilt? It’s hard to say. I’ve met some curmudgeony seniors before, but this one…
Prof. Alex Taylor’s column originally appeared in the Gainesville Times, June 28, 1988.
Additional info and insight follow the column.
Insert Paul Harvey’s famous tagline…
And so the column ends with a few unanswered questions; mainly, what became of her estate?
If you checked the Wikipedia article, it mentions that over 1,100 people filed estate claims. What it doesn’t say is how many of those succeeded. Answer? Err…None? According to this Smithsonian article’s commentary (verifiable, certainly! ;), a group of honest bloodhounds tracked down Ida Walsh’s most immediate kin and distributed the estate among nine of them. Believable? Maybe. I suppose limitation statutes and other litigation issues may have prevented Benjamin’s family from contesting her estate on the basis of marital fraud. After all, faker Ida said she had an agreement, so her portion of his winnings were legitimate gifts.
Calling Marty Byrde…
