The Perils of Keeping Money Under the Mattress
Often, beneficiaries of an estate allege that the deceased had a large sum of money kept in cash in his or her house. Upon death, it often turns out that this money is not to be found. Suspicions are immediately raised, and the allegations fly.
Courts have a difficult time in dealing with these types of claims. The burden is on those alleging the existence of the “money under the mattress”. That burden is on a balance of probabilities. However, to meet that burden, those alleging the existence of the money will have to lead substantial, convincing evidence. Those denying the allegation have the difficult time of trying to proving the negative.
Such a claim was considered in Barrick v. Lilliste, 2011 ONSC 1847 (CanLII). There, the deceased died at the age of 102, leaving 4 children. The court heard that the deceased was “distrustful” of banks. Following the deceased’s death, approximately $96,000 was found in a sock in the deceased’s home: a sock described as “sooty, grey, dirty and about one-and-a-half feet long with a knot closing it”.
However, three of the four children alleged that there was more; that the deceased had a box in his house that contained $210,000 or $230,000. The fourth child denied this.
The trial judge carefully weighed the evidence of all of the witnesses; and raised a number of questions about the credibility of the claim of the existence of the box. He queried, amongst other things, whether the deceased could have amassed such a fortune based on his known income and expenses; and whether, in any event, $210,000 could possibly fit into a box that was, at various points, described as a cardboard box, a shoe box, a wood box, a metal box or a “Watkins” box.
In the end, the trial judge found that he could not, on the evidence, find that the deceased had a box containing $210,000 in his bedroom, and consequently, could not find that the one child had wrongfully taken the money.
However, as the judge noted in the opening paragraphs of his decision, there will never be any happy resolution to the issue. “[The deceased’s] once happy family is torn asunder by the very thing he did not care about – money – or perhaps the very thing he cared to much about to protect his children from their fate of being siblings squabbling over money he may have had”.
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Paul E. Trudelle - Click here for more information on Paul Trudelle.
