Personal Trust Services
The Perils of Keeping Money Under the Mattress
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following Hull & Hull law blog. The blog and this article, in part or entirety, may not be reprinted
without the prior written permission of Hull & Hull LLP and Concentra Financial.
The Perils of Keeping Money Under the
Mattress
Often, beneficiaries of an estate allege that
the deceased had a large sum of money
kept in cash in his or her house. Upon
death, it often turns out that this money is
not to be found. Suspicions are immediately
raised, and the allegations fly.
Courts have a difficult time in dealing with
these types of claims. The burden is on
those alleging the existence of the “money
under the mattress”. That burden is on a
balance of probabilities. However, to meet
that burden, those alleging the existence of
the money will have to lead substantial,
convincing evidence. Those denying the
allegation have the difficult time of trying to
proving the negative.
Such a claim was considered in Barrick v.
Lilliste, 2011 ONSC 1847 (CanLII). There,
the deceased died at the age of 102,
leaving 4 children. The court heard that the
deceased was “distrustful” of banks.
Following the deceased’s death,
approximately $96,000 was found in a sock
in the deceased’s home: a sock described
as “sooty, grey, dirty and about one-and-ahalf feet long with a knot closing it”.
However, three of the four children alleged
that there was more; that the deceased had
a box in his house that contained $210,000
or $230,000. The fourth child denied this.
The trial judge carefully weighed the
evidence of all of the witnesses; and raised
a number of questions about the credibility
of the claim of the existence of the box. He
queried, amongst other things, whether the
deceased could have amassed such a
fortune based on his known income and
expenses; and whether, in any event,
$210,000 could possibly fit into a box that
was, at various points, described as a
cardboard box, a shoe box, a wood box, a
metal box or a “Watkins” box.
In the end, the trial judge found that he
could not, on the evidence, find that the
deceased had a box containing $210,000 in
his bedroom, and consequently, could not
find that the one child had wrongfully taken
the money.
However, as the judge noted in the opening
paragraphs of his decision, there will never
be any happy resolution to the issue. “[The
deceased’s] once happy family is torn
asunder by the very thing he did not care
about – money – or perhaps the very thing
he cared [too] much about to protect his
children from their fate of being siblings
squabbling over money he may have had”.
Paul E. Trudelle
801-032 (03/13)
© 2013,
Concentra Financial
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