Plot Thickens in Case of Disappearing Estate Funds

This is a prime example of why proper planning is important. If you do not make the decisions in advance about who is to benefit from what you leave behind and who will be in charge of following your instructions, then the state will decide for you. This story, reported at MySanAntonio, illustrates the disastrous results of the state's decisions in one such case.

Plot thickens in case of disappearing estate funds
By Graeme Zielinski - Express-News

At the front end of this fractious thicket — after it became evident that the reclusive investor John Robert “Bob” Bonner, 72, had died without a valid will in the spring of 2005 and left a fortune of millions of dollars — San Antonio lawyer George Adams wrote prophetically, if grammatically lacking, to a Bexar County probate judge.

Bonner, an only child who was never married and childless, had been dead weeks at his home in the Gardens of Oak Hollow development before anyone noticed. His final company amid stacks of newspapers and other errata was a stray cat he had taken in.

Adams, who later heard Bonner compared jokingly to as a “street person” at his funeral by an old friend, had stitched together some of the facts of Bonner’s life. The search uncovered a valuable nine acres off U.S. Highway 28; a cotton farm in Nueces County; and day-trading accounts and bonds valued at upward of $706,000.

A 2006 analysis valued the estate at $2.38 million.

When Adams was writing Probate Judge Tom Rickhoff, in September 2006, he was referring to possibly crackpot claims of distant cousins against the estate generated by a Mormon-affiliated genealogical search group that had retained a Dallas lawyer.

Prompting Adams to write, “As someone once said, “De Plot Thickens ...”

Two years past, the plot not merely has thickened but has darkened considerably.

The strange story now pivots on a retired nonagenarian ballet teacher, Bonner’s maternal aunt, who in January 2006 was ruled his sole heir, and allegations that her troubled granddaughter who effected the heirship has been bleeding her fortune and the Bonner estate of hundreds of thousands of dollars for personal benefit.

Michelle Valicek, 50, a recently divorced San Antonio criminal defense and family lawyer and mother of two young children, eventually would take  over the administration of the Bonner estate in 2006 on behalf of her grandmother, Margaret Lorenz, 94, an aging but drifting beauty whose estate she also oversaw.

But Rickhoff stripped Valicek of these responsibilities after allegations of elderly abuse surfaced this spring in the form of a Texas Adult Protective Services (APS) investigation that was revealed in a letter to the court asking that a guardian be appointed for Lorenz. (One was.)

The letter bore allegations that Valicek had taken out credit cards in Lorenz’s name, gifted $150,000 to other family members and had engaged in “exploitations” against Lorenz’s investments, “in excess of $400,000.”

Granddaughter stays mum

The probe is ongoing and Valicek has invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in recent hearings in the typically sleepy probate court. She faces not merely the loss of her law license but the loss of her freedom.

On Oct. 31, she was chained by a bailiff and sent for a night in the Bexar County jail after being found in contempt of court after months of foot-dragging in providing an account of just what she’s been doing with the Lorenz and Bonner fortunes. (The badly written bond was voided and Valicek later was freed.)

Valicek, a 1987 St. Mary’s Law School graduate and one-time applicant to be a Bexar County judge-at-large, slammed the door beneath the cupolas of her $500,000 Near Northwest Side manse on an Express-News reporter seeking comment Thursday evening.

Records show she has been equally opaque with a passel of lawyers appointed by Rickhoff to look after the Bonner estate and the interests of the incapacitated Lorenz, founder of a Northwest Side ballet school who spends her twilight in a residence adjoining the studio with full-time caregivers and a Chihuahua named Chiquita.

After what one lawyer in the case called a jolt of “jail therapy,” Valicek was as cooperative as at any point on Thursday, when she signed over five properties worth about $1 million — some bearing thousands of dollars in back-tax claims — over to the Lorenz and Bonner estates.

The contempt charges haven’t been purged and she still has to account for hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets, though the temporary overseer of the estates, William Bailey, took a conciliatory tone in an interview Friday, deeming the property transfers “a very significant good-faith effort.”

Still, she faces a serious reckoning.

Spending $25,000 a month

A court investigator, citing Bailey, wrote in a report to the court that one of the estate’s bank accounts that had $475,000 last July was depleted to $121,000 recently and that Valicek was spending at a rate of $25,000 a month off the Bonner fortune.

Where’d it go?

According to an inventory prepared for the court, Valicek used money from either the Bonner estate or her grandmother to purchase a $25,000 Lexus, a $13,500 Steinway baby grand piano, a pool table, the mansion on Mary Louise where she rebuffed a reporter’s questions, another house on Kampmann Boulevard (where her mother apparently was living), and to pay $20,000 in back child support for her younger brother, who was killed in an accident near the City Cemetery in August.

According to lawyers familiar with the case, he had been released from the penitentiary weeks before.

‘A lot of personal tragedy’

His death, coupled with the recent fatal drug overdose of her boyfriend at a downtown hotel, underlie some of Valicek’s problems, said Larry Souza, her current lawyer who at a hearing Thursday raised questions about her competence.

This is not to mention the strained relationship with her father, Richard Lorenz, retired from the Southwest Research Institute, with whom she has jockeyed over power of attorney for Margaret Lorenz, court records show. (He has his own lawyer in the matter and declined comment when approached at Thursday’s hearing. He also rebuffed an apparent attempt at reconciliation by Valicek in the courtroom pews.)

According to the APS letter, he has soured on Valicek’s handling of his mother’s affairs, which records indicate could date back to 2000. State investigators contend that Valicek, “has been uncooperative,” with the APS investigation and has refused to turn over records.

“All I can say is there are some problems that I’m going to have to face in the immediate future,” the defense lawyer Souza said in a subsequent interview. “(Valicek) is carrying an awful lot of personal tragedy with her right now.”

Adams, the original administrator of the Bonner estate, sounded a cheerless tone when pondering what had become of it.

“I thought about writing a book about this case,” he said. “But I decided there’s too many things I needed to find out. And too many things I’d like to forget.”

Bonner’s, Lorenz’s life

Bob Bonner grew up in a quirky but joyful family that ran a dance school on Belknap and Woodlawn, said Rex Mounger, a Wimberley lawyer who first met Bonner in the fourth grade at Travis Elementary.

Bob and Rex belonged to the “Phosphor” fraternity while at Thomas Jefferson High School and matriculated together to the University of Texas.

Recalling the last time he saw him, a holiday visit in 2004 that featured toasts of chocolate milk, Mounger said that in his ultimate days, Bonner’s mind was sharp as a rapier but he had become “confined by pain” with kidney stones.

Mounger said that Bonner remained a thoughtful friend, mailing him videotapes of such movies as “My Cousin Vinny,” though shunning medical attention for his ailments.

“He was fairly independent,” Mounger said.

How close Bonner was to his aunt was not apparent in interviews and court records, but they do show that Margaret Lorenz had staked out an independent life of her own, moving from Corpus Christi in the 1960s after a divorce and founding the Performing Arts School of Classical Ballet on what at that point was the boondocks edge of the city, on Northwest Military Highway.

Billie Fielden, who took over the school’s operation in 1992, said that Lorenz, who taught the Vaganova technique and had a dwindling clientele, had “lit up” when Fielden revived the business.

Just when Lorenz drifted into what a court-appointed doctor has deemed dementia in a July report will be key to determining the lawfulness of her granddaughter’s actions on her behalf.

Lorenz’s current life in decline is described prosaically in the court record.

She favors the carrot salad and fish from Luby’s as well as the opera “Don Giovanni.” She has skin cancer in her ear and nose and wears flowing hair. She screams when bathed. Pictures in the court file of Lorenz show stark beauty shining from beneath the veils of age.

According to a July investigator’s report, she is fond of visits from her granddaughter.

The interview eventually dragged on for Lorenz, the report said.

“She became annoyed and bored after about a half hour and had her attendant help her to bed, where she closed her eyes.”