By Michelle Roberts
Associated Press Writer
SAN ANTONIO — B.K. Johnson, an heir to Texas’ legendary King Ranch, lived large. He hunted big game, built a landmark hotel and drank ample amounts of alcohol.
When he died in 2001, he unknowingly left one other large legacy: a mammoth family feud over his estate, pitting his daughters and grandchildren against his third wife, a Scottish bar owner and businesswoman.
For three months, jurors in Bexar County Probate Court have listened to no-holds-bar testimony on everything from a daughter’s spending habits to a disagreement at a family Easter celebration to unflattering test results on Johnson’s cognitive function. Closing arguments started Monday, and the jury could begin deliberating Tuesday.
Over the course of his 71 years, Johnson — who everyone called “B.” — drafted two dozen wills, reflecting changes in his marital status or the birth of grandchildren or family disagreements.
The family had a long history of fights over money, going back to Johnson’s own lawsuit against other King Ranch heirs after he sold his stake for $70 million. While Johnson was trying to stave off bankruptcy in the 1980s, his children sued him over their own family ranch, the Chaparrosa. The dispute was later settled.
Before his death, Johnson set up trusts for his children, two daughters and a son who died in 1991, and for his grandchildren — all worth millions of dollars. But in his final will, the remainder of the estate, an estimated at $40 million to $60 million, was to go into a trust from which his third wife, Laura McAllister Johnson, could draw the proceeds until the time of her death.
When she dies, the will calls for at least half the money to go charity. The other half could go to her children, if Laura Johnson said so, or to charity.
His daughters, Sarah Johnson Pitt and Cecilia Johnson McMurrey, and grandchildren say B. Johnson didn’t know what he was doing, that he never would have left them out of his final will.
They argue that years of heavy drinking left the strapping Texan, who was shown in white hat and cowboy boots in a large photo in the courtroom, so impaired cognitively that he was easily manipulated and couldn’t have intended that they be left out of his will.
“B. Johnson drank so much that it damaged his mind,” said Jack Lawter, an attorney for the family contesting the will.
Lawter recounted cognitive tests done in 1990 when Johnson was being admitted for alcohol treatment that showed the businessman couldn’t do basic math.
He portrayed Johnson as a drunk, whose continuous alcohol use left him an entertaining conversationalist but unable to formulate plans or attend meetings without aid from support staff who coached him through most everything.
He and another lawyer for children and grandchildren, Jim Hartnett, accused Laura Johnson, “a canny Scotswoman,” of orchestrating investments and the estate to benefit her and her businesses, including the Mad Dogs Pub that still operates in the Johnson family Hyatt Regency on the San Antonio River Walk.
She and Johnson met in Hong Kong just days after his second wife died; they married in 1996. His children’s attorneys have painted Laura Johnson as manipulative, even noting that the vegetarian got the lifelong hunter to forgo hunting on a ranch bought specifically for that purpose.
“Her fingerprints are all over this, and she doesn’t want you to know it,” Hartnett said of the will Monday.
Without her involvement and those of advisers aligned with her, Johnson never would have left his family out of his will, he said.
“His heart was with his family. The evidence shows over and over and over that was his heart,” Hartnett said. “This is a family that loved hard.”
No one said Johnson didn’t have a drinking problem, but Joyce Moore, an attorney for the executor of the estate, said he was a functional alcoholic.
She noted that he pulled himself off the brink of bankruptcy, rebuilding his fortune and constructing the landmark Hyatt across from the Alamo after those 1990 cognitive tests that his daughters say show he was impaired.
Johnson figured that with the trust funds, he had already taken care of his children and grandchildren, Moore said. He intended to take care of his wife and to give something back to the community with the remainder of his fortune.
“We’re here for one reason, and one reason only. We’re here because they didn’t get it all,” Moore said of Johnson’s other heirs. “The children, in his opinion, had enough.”
She also disputed the notion that Johnson was incompetent starting in 1990 to make financial and other decisions, noting the children continued to accept financial gifts from him and reached a settlement in the Chaparrosa ranch case after that time.
“Until they decided to say he was incompetent, they treated him as though he was,” Moore said.
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