RIVAL CLAIMS

Southland Times, Issue 20949, 5 December 1929, Page 6

RIVAL CLAIMS

WIFE AND UNMARRIED CONSORT. POSSESSION OF ESTATE. (Per United Press Association.) Hamilton, December 4. The rival claims of a wife and an unmarried consort to the estate of Richard Stevens, a deceased farmer, of Te Kuiti, was decided by Mr Justice Herdman in the Supreme Court to-day. He granted a declaration that Stevens’s farm was held by the Public Trustee in trust for Amelia Alice Harwell, with whom deceased lived as her husband since 1909, having two daughters by. Stevens. While in the Navy, he married a Malta girl in X 892. She and her son still survive. He had not communicated with her since 1909. The money with which the farm was bought was taken from Harwell’s savings bank account, representing partly her own money and partly profit on a home which they bought and sold at Wanganui. The widow at Malta had already received Stevens’s £2OO life insurance, but the Judge decided that Harwell was entitled to the farm property, Stevens’s died intestate.