William E. Terrill always knew he would eventually inherit his grandparents’ estates. He was, after all, the only grandchild, and he was certain that he had actually been named to receive one third of the estate when his grandmother died—though he believed that his uncle destroyed her will so that the estate would instead pass to the uncle and to Mr. Terrill’s father.

According to Mr. Terrill, his father told him not to raise any issue about the alleged destruction of the will, and his uncle and aunt assured him that "what comes from the Terrills will go back to the Terrills." In fact, after the death of both his uncle and his father, his aunt actually deeded her husband’s one-half interest in the Terrill family farm to William. He expected he would receive another $400,000 as his share of the inheritances his uncle (and then his aunt) received from Mr. Terrill’s grandmother and great-aunt. After his aunt’s death, he was surprised to learn that her will left him nothing.

Mr. Terrill filed a claim against his aunt’s estate for the $417,766.39 (plus "ninety seven silver dollars dated between 1839 and 1935") he figured should rightfully have come to him. His aunt’s executors denied the claim, and Mr. Terrill then filed a lawsuit against the estate. He claimed that the property in his aunt’s estate really belonged to him, and asked that a "constructive trust" be imposed on her assets.

If Mr. Terrill could show that his aunt’s estate would be "unjustly enriched" by retaining the property to which he was properly entitled, the court could find that her estate held the property for Mr. Terrill’s benefit and order that it be distributed to him. The constructive trust theory thus allows the court to treat the property as being held in a sort of judicially-created trust—a constructive trust. Unfortunately for Mr. Terrill, the trial judge decided that he had no right to his grandmother’s property.

The Kentucky Court of Appeals agreed. Mr. Terrill did not claim that he had any direct entitlement to a share of his aunt’s estate—any competent individual is allowed to disinherit relatives altogether, and any promise to write a will (or, for that matter, not to write a will) must itself be in writing. Mr. Terrill’s novel argument—that he was actually the owner of the Terrill family property—also failed, according to the appellate court. His claim that property should generally stay in one family to enforce family loyalty was simply not supported by the law or the facts in his case.

Even Mr. Terrill's alleged agreement not to make trouble over his grandmother’s will was a deal he had struck with his father and not his aunt. If his grandparents had intended that the property pass to William Terrill after the death of his father, uncle and aunt, wrote the judges, "any moderately skilled estate planning attorney could have helped them accomplish that result." Terrill v. Estate of Terrill, October 6, 2006.

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