“As I understand it, Mrs. Cool, you want to know the legal effect of a partial forgery.”
“That’s right.”
Doolittle took up the first page of the will. “Let us suppose that this is genuine,” he said, “and that the second page containing the purported signature and the attestation clause is a forgery.”
“No chance of that,” Bertha said.
“I understand but I am going to consider the problem in order. Now, a will may be revoked in any one of several ways. One of these ways is by destruction of the will on the part of the testator. But bear in mind, Mrs. Cool, that an unauthorized destruction by any other person does not invalidate the will. Therefore, let us assume that the first page of this will is genuine and that the second page is a forgery. In other words, the first page has been taken from a genuine will, the remaining portions of which have been destroyed; and a forged and fraudulent second page has been added.”
“You’re going all the way around your elbow to get to your thumb,” Bertha said. “You’re taking the same thing I told you and wrapping it up in a lot of words.”
“I want to be certain that you understand the situation,” Doolittle said.
“I do.”
“Under those circumstances,” Doolittle went on, “the will has been destroyed, but its destruction was not a revocation. Therefore, the entire contents of the will could be proved by independent, oral evidence if we could find such evidence. Now, if the first page of the will is genuine, it is the best proof of the contents of the first page of the destroyed will. We wouldn’t need to care what was in the rest of the will, once we prove the first page genuine.”
“In other words, Christopher Milbers gets ten grand. Is that it?”