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dad did try to stop this, at least make
sure this money was going to me,” Judith told me on the phone. “But
I think these folks stepped in and had him over a barrel, saying
that we are going to expose you. There wasn’t anything that he
could do.”
    “Were they living high on the money?” I asked her.
    “That’s the catch: this is where they fooled everybody,” she
said. “To look at these people, around this area right here, you
would not suspect them in any way.”
    Bit by bit over months, Judith described to me the scattered but
tantalizing documentation she’d collected to prove that her family
was not what it seemed. Through a blend of Midwestern friendliness
and an almost frightening persistence, she had amassed a small
mountain of papers. She’d employed private investigators in Texas,
Oklahoma, and Missouri to run traces on family members both
immediate and distant. They’d found evidence, she told me, of
aliases and hidden bank accounts, of money-laundering vehicles and
strange trusts in distant states, of oil wells deeded to names that
matched up with members of her family.
    She’d pried loose some documents from Exxon, too, including one
concerning an oil field that Louise had mentioned in one of her
depositions. It was in Tomball, Texas, just outside Houston. The
field had changed hands over the years, but Judith had followed the
trail of ownership through a series of oil companies until she
found a link between one of the Tomball leases and an address
Louise Williams had once used in Coweta, Oklahoma.
    The documents indicated that some oil royalties had been sent to
that address. According to a letter she received from Exxon, the
payments had begun in the 1950s, only to be suspended sometime in
the next decade. “It dawned on me: That’s why my mother contacted
me in 1972!” she told me excitedly. “My father must have known that
the money wasn’t going to the right people, so he sent an
investigator down and stopped the payments.” She suspected that her
mother had used another relative to impersonate her—which would
explain some of the confused conversations she’d had with Wright on
the phone before he died.
    The most important document that Judith had gotten out of the
Exxon archives, however, was a handwritten letter that the company
had received back in 1958 when it was still Humble Oil. The letter
read:
Humble Oil and Refining Co
dear sirs,
m. a. wright passed away after spending 3 years in a state
mental hospital. I cashed his checks and sent him clothes until he
died the bank will no longer cash them unless they are made to me.
I am his sister the last in his immediate family the checks are not
much but I am nearly blind and I can use it I want to put a marker
at his grave. Wright’s funeral home Coweta okla could furnish death
certificate.
Ethel Williams
Coweta, OK
    Enclosed with the letter was a copy of a
half-filled-out document marked “Record of Funeral” for one Marcus
Arrington Wright. It was the name that M. A. Wright had given
Louise during their tryst at the Mayo Hotel.
    Judith and her lawyers were certain this meant that Louise
had tried to extract money from Wright’s company by duping its
executives into believing their employee was dead. It seemed like a
clumsy con, but if that’s what it was, Judith believed, it proved
that her mother had been trying to get her hands on Wright’s money
for years.
    Judith took the information she had gathered to the police
department in Carthage, hoping to secure an identity-theft claim
against her mother and half-brother. The cops didn’t laugh about
“Peaches” this time, but they were flummoxed by the complexity of
her allegations. They quickly ascertained that whatever had
happened had occurred mostly outside their jurisdiction; Judith’s
story ranged across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and New York.
    But before the police dropped the case, Judith had managed to
procure one more piece of evidence that would later