DENVER, Colorado (AP) — It’s the stuff movies are made of — literally: A delivery man says he rescued Howard Hughes after he found him face down and bloodied in the desert, so the reclusive billionaire left him $156 million in a hand-scrawled will as a reward.
A jury didn’t buy it 30 years ago, but Melvin Dummar’s attorney says the story dramatized in 1980’s Academy Award-winning “Melvin and Howard” has become a lot more believable. The attorney, Stuart Stein, told a federal appeals court Wednesday that Dummar deserves another shot at the money because of pilot Robert Diero, who came forward in 2004 to say he flew Hughes to a brothel in Nevada around the time and the place that Dummar said he found Hughes.

Stein, an estate-planning lawyer from Albuquerque, New Mexico, with a radio show, argued that Hughes’ associates knew about Diero but didn’t disclose it at the original probate trial in 1977-78. “The judgment was obtained by fraud,” Stein told a three-judge panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. Dummar is among the most famous of hundreds of people who came forward claiming to be heirs to Hughes’ estate after the eccentric billionaire’s death in 1976.

Now 63, Dummar delivers frozen food and lives in Brigham City, Utah. He says as a 22-year-old man he was driving across the Nevada desert in December 1967 when he came across a “bum” near Lida Junction and gave him a ride to the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. Dummar said the man claimed he was Hughes, but he didn’t believe it until someone he said was Hughes’ personal messenger delivered the handwritten will to the Brigham City gas station that Dummar owned. It included instructions to turn the will over to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which also stood to gain $156 million. The church never pursued a claim.

Diero said it wasn’t until years later that his memories about the flight were jogged by a newspaper article mentioning Lida Junction, a tiny community about 150 miles north of Las Vegas and six miles from the place where Dummar claims he found Hughes. Diero had been a director of aviation facilities for Hughes Tool Co. He broke a nondisclosure agreement with the company when he came forward with his account of flying Hughes from Las Vegas to the Cottontail Ranch brothel for a tryst with a diamond-toothed prostitute. After losing track of Hughes, Diero said he returned to Las Vegas without him.

Diero has said he routinely delivered Hughes on secret nighttime flights in a single-engine plane to rural Nevada brothels, a claim disputed by others familiar with Hughes.

I’ve always thought this guy got a raw deal.




  1. laxdude says:

    Even with the details that have come to light about the eccentricities, to say the least, about Howard Hughes it also calls into question his mental status to even write a valid will.

    It is a classic catch 22. It might have been Hughes, but if it was he was too crazy to compose a new will.

    That and the fact the CIA was behind it all.

  2. Ah_Yea says:

    Yea, this guy got the raw deal of the century, but as in all things legal it comes down to proof, or at least integrity.

    There is simply not enough evidence to validate the will because the people who can provide the proof are not stepping up to the plate.

  3. Ron Larson says:

    Uh huh… Hughes was a paranoid germaphobe who wouldn’t leave his penthouse… and HE would go to a brothel. With all his money, he couldn’t get a girl to come visit him.

    Smells like BS to me.

  4. glomar says:

    Try the new “touch DNA” test on the paper.
    Where there is a will, there is a way.

  5. McCullough says:

    #4. All DNA evidence on this will, was destroyed….you would think a hand written will by Hughes would be important enough to keep.

  6. Uncle Patso says:

    I think it’s entirely possible that Hughes, toward the end, wrote dozens of wills rewarding various people for such things and promptly forgot about them.

    I am reminded of W. C. Fields’ many lost bank accounts. It is rumored that Fields would often, while traveling, get off a train in some random town, walk to the local bank and open an account to safeguard whatever money he happened to be carrying. Then he would, upon sobering up, be unable to remember the exact name and location of said bank.

    Hughes was more demented than besotted, but the result is much the same.

  7. it's just an expression says:

    Smells like crop circles.


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