My brother’s attorney served me at my father’s wake, in the room with the casket. He was claiming a promissory note, saying Dad lent me sixty thousand dollars in 2018 and it was owed back to the estate. He produced the note. One page, typed, with Dad’s signature. The note was dated June 3rd, 2018 and referenced an account number ending in 4471. That account was closed in 2016. The bank’s letter confirming the closure was in Dad’s own files, dated March 2016, and I’d had it for seven years.
I gave the closure letter to my attorney. Eleven days later, the other side asked for a continuance, and then they asked for copies of every financial record Dad had kept from 2016 through 2019. My attorney objected, because they already had access to the estate records. Then the judge asked one question: “If this loan existed, where is the disbursement?” They had no answer. There was no withdrawal, no transfer, no check, and no deposit into any account belonging to me.
Then my brother changed his story. He said Dad must have given me the money in cash. My attorney asked why a man who supposedly loaned his daughter sixty thousand dollars in cash would have a typed promissory note referencing a closed bank account. Nobody answered. Then Dad’s accountant produced something from an old backup file—an email from 2018 in which my brother had asked Dad for the account number ending in 4471 because he was “updating the family paperwork.”
The final piece came from Dad’s safe. There was an original copy of the supposed promissory note, but Dad had written across the bottom in his handwriting: “VOID — never signed by me.” The signature on the version my brother produced was real, but the document itself wasn’t. My attorney sent it to a forensic examiner, who found that the signature had been lifted from another document and placed onto the typed note. Then we discovered who had printed the fake note. It was my brother’s attorney—and the print job was dated three days after Dad died.
