My boss just told me this today. 100% true.
About 20 years ago, my boss, who is a probate lawyer, was handling the estate of a woman who had died in a hotel owned by her brother on an island off the coast of Spain (I can't remember the name, something with an M). She died by hitting her head on a table while very drunk. The coroner was her uncle. He signed off on the cause of death, and the body was sent in a closed casket to be buried in Puerto Rico.
Back in Miami, the decedent had a boyfriend. Shortly before her trip she had purchased a new truck for him and a condo which she put in both their names. He was also the beneficiary of her life insurance. The problem was, the insurance company refused to pay. They claimed she was not dead. The judge in the case says that there's a death certificate, so what more can he do? So the insurance company presents the following as evidence:
The alleged decedent was a buyer in the jewelry business. She would go on trips to Europe for a few weeks at a time and would make lots of purchases and have them shipped back to her business partner on a regular basis while she was continuing to buy. Whenever she made a shipment back to him, she would speak to him and relay all the details about what she was sending him and how everything should be priced. The day she died, she had an hour long conversation with her business partner about the latest shipment. (They knew this due to the hotel's phone records.) From the business partner's notes, they knew that she was just as explicit in her instructions as she always was. Half an hour after the phone call ended, she supposedly was so inebriated she fell, hit her head, and died. The insurance company said that there was no way she could have been drunk during the phone conversation and half an hour was not long enough to get that drunk afterwards.
After the hearing, my boss got a call from the boyfriend. He said, "She's not dead." He knew this because he was ex-CIA. He told my boss that the alleged decedent was a mafia currency mule. She had false bottoms in some of her suitcases where she would hide cash from the various countries she visited on her buying trips. The problem was, she had been skimming for a while now, and the mafia had figured it out.
The woman was able to run off using her Italian passport, which she had due to her brief marriage to a member of the Italian royalty. She also had at least three US passports, plus most likely several other countries' passports. She had four US social security numbers, and just trying to locate all her money in the US was impossible. She had accounts across the country under various names. She had several post office boxes, at least one of which they only discovered because they got a notice at one of the other PO boxes that they needed to renew, so who knows how many they never discovered. She was never heard from again, and the insurance company never did pay out that policy.
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