This is a mystery tale of hidden wealth, distant and unknown cousins, and settings including New Haven, Johannesburg, South Africa, and Old Saybrook. The central characters are a physics professor who died in 2007 without a will, a school teacher who died in 2008 with one, and two elderly sisters, still living, whose father was an out-of-wedlock child of the professor’s grandfather.

With enough intrigue to be engaging fiction, this story is true—and its surprise ending includes unexpected bequests to three public safety entities in Old Saybrook. The details are revealed in estate and probate documents shared with the First Selectman Carl Fortuna, Jr., by Middlesex Hospital. Why Middlesex Hospital? The hospital, too, had a part to play.

This tale begins with a retired teacher who lived with her husband Robert for at least a decade in Old Saybrook. Six months after Robert died in April 2003, Drusilla Ford Chatfield sold their home at 26 Cottage Place and moved elsewhere. When she died in Middletown in July 2008, her estate was so small that her will was not even probated.

With no heirs, Drusilla named several non-profit entities as the beneficiaries of her modest estate. After her executor made two payments, one at $250 to an individual and another at $500 to a Masonic Lodge in her husband’s memory, the rest of the estate was to be liquidated and divided by share to these beneficiaries: two shares to the American Lung Association, two shares to St. Luke’s Home in Middletown, one share to Middlesex Hospital, one share to the Old Saybrook Ambulance Association, one share to the Old Saybrook Fire Department, and one share to the McMurray Kirtland Memorial Fund c/o the Old Saybrook Police Department.

With three public safety entities from Old Saybrook named in the will, she and husband Robert seem to have had close ties with public safety professionals while living in town. Perhaps the connection was through her husband’s HAM radio activity. She left no letter stating the reason for her choice of beneficiaries.

City directory records place the Chatfields in Westport in 1972. The entry lists Drusilla as a teacher in the Norwalk Public Schools and Robert in communications for Pan Am Airways. By 2000, public records show the Chatfields had moved to 25 Cottage Place in Old Saybrook. An FCC license dated March 15, 2000 granted Robert an amateur HAM radio license valid for 10 years at that address. Sadly, he died in April 2003 before the license expired; Drusilla moved out of town later that year.

She never learned before her death in 2008 that the death of her first cousin Richard Nettleton in 2007 had left her with a windfall inheritance.

The South African Connection

Richard E. Nettleton, a physics professor at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa from the 1970s until he retired in 1995, died in August 2007 a wealthy man. But he had no heirs, so his various financial assets and holdings remained dormant and unclaimed.

When Merrill Lynch tagged his account as dormant in 2012, an unclaimed property/asset recovery firm was contracted to find who could claim the several hundred thousand dollar asset.

The firm began by researching Nettleton’s South African life. He’d died in Johannesburg, where he’d lived since the 1970s.

In the firm’s research, neither living relatives nor a will were found connected to his life there. Next the research brought the firm back to Connecticut where he and many of his relatives had lived. Three state residents were identified as eligible to claim. Drusilla was one of them.

Census records place Nettleton in New Haven at age 9. As a teen, he attended Amherst College, graduating summa cum laude in 1951. After earning a PhD, he’s listed as physics faculty at the Pennsylvania State University. Records of the Witwatersrand University show he joined the Physics Department faculty in the early 1970s with a research focus of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. He retired from the department in 1995.

The genealogy research completed for Nettleton’s family tree identified Drusilla as the only living paternal line relative, through her mother Grace Nettleton Ford, in August 2007 when he died. From his maternal line, two elderly sisters living in Connecticut were also alive at his death. Unlike Drusilla, these two were descended from a woman who had several out-of-wedlock children with Nettleton’s grandfather. Each of them also had a one-third claim to Nettleton’s estate.

The unclaimed property firm uncovered other assets beyond just the Merrill Lynch account. After the costs of the asset and genealogy search and legal costs were claimed, Nettleton’s remaining estate was still valued at $1.5 million—to be divided three ways. The two sisters are still alive; Drusilla’s share is distributed in accord with her original will.

What that means for several Old Saybrook public safety agencies is an unexpected windfall from her unexpected inheritance. Three entities—the Old Saybrook Ambulance Association, the Law Enforcement Fund (the McMurray Kirtland Fund’s successor), and the Old Saybrook Fire Department—all were informed this month that as Drusilla Ford Chatfield’s beneficiaries, they will receive an initial payment of $62,500 each. A second estate distribution, likely much smaller, will come later.

And so this story of the physics professor, the teacher, and two elderly sisters is one with a happy ending for Old Saybrook.