BID FOR A FORTUNE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22326, 28 July 1934, Page 21

BID FOR A FORTUNE

ROMANCE OF MILLIONS In startling fashion interest has been rekindled in the claim made by a Dundee bouse painter to a fortune in America reputed to be worth £8,000,000. ihe claimant, Thomas Patrick Morris, is at, present serving an intermediate term of imprisonment' to which he was sentenced in America last June, after being found guilty of conspiracy to defraud. This charge arose out of his endeavour to prove himself entitled to the estate of the eccentric Wendel family of New York. Fresh affidavits have been tiled in New York supporting Morris’s claim to be the son of John G. Wendel and Mary Ellen Devine, of Edinburgh, who, he asserts Were married in 1876. Morris’s case is that his birth was kept secret, and that he was sent to Scotland and brought up by foster parents in Dundee, mimed Morris. The new affidavits offered by Bernard Sanders, who acted for Morris, have been filed in an effort to obtain Morris’s release. They state that Wendel called a doctor, who was a distant cousin, to deliver the child in the Wendel home in New York, and that the infant was hidden in the attic, and later sent to Scotland to be brought up. Two of the affidavits arc sworn by Mrs Grace Miller, of Westminster, Maryland, and her sister, Mrs Vernon Frock, of Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. both of whom are sixth cousins of the Wendels, and ineligible to share in the estate. The third declaration is that of Mrs Miller’s husband. All three documents declare that Lewis J. Little, a herb doctor ■ and obstetrician, the father of the sisters) told them before he died in 1914. that he had been summoned to New York by his cousin, John Wendel, so that no outsider would have to be called in, and that after the birth of the baby, it was kept in an attic, and then secretly sent to Scotland to be brought lip by foster parents named Morris. Mrs Miller asserts: “ Father did not tell us until wo were grown up and married. ■’ He said John Wendel got a false marriage certificate and fixed everything so that the boy would never know. But father told us. to watch, and that the boy would come along some day. Then we read about Thomas Morris, and knew he was the boy.” The Wendel family consisted of John Gottlieb Wendel and his five sisters, who lived in a mansion ■in Fifth Avenue, New York, known as “The House of Mystery.” Miss Ella Wendel was the last of the family to die, leaving an-estate of about £8,000,000. More than 1600 claims were made to the fortune* ■and Morris was one of-the few recognised claimants.