which half of this five million was added over the next two years.
The remaining half was transferred, as it came in, directly to Graham Franklin, who invested the money prudently and successfully, largely in real estate (a gold mine in California), and who continued to invest Ellie’s money-regular payments from her trust-in community property and investments over the years. Though he made a very high salary as a successful lawyer, Graham had no family money, and his enormous estate-owned in common with his wife-at the time of his death was the result of his skillful use of her inherited money.
There is considerable evidence that Graham resented his wife, and resented his emotional as well as financial dependence upon her. He could not have possibly supported his life-style-yachts, sports cars, extravagant vacations, a palatial modern house in Tiburon-on his salary. And he funneled enormous sums of Ellie’s money directly out of their joint account into the hands of various mistresses over the years.
Several of these women have told our investigators that Graham was a vain and slightly sadistic man. Yet they found him irresistible, giving up on him only when they realized that he really loved Ellie. It wasn’t just her money. He couldn’t live without her. “He has to get back at her from time to time, and that’s the only reason he cheats.”
Graham once explained to a young airline stewardess whom he subsequently put through college that his wife swallowed him, and that he had to have “something on the side” (meaning a woman) or he was nothing and nobody at all.
When he discovered that Ellie had fatal cancer, he went into a panic. Legal partners and friends have described in detail his “total inability” to deal with Ellie’s sickness. He would not discuss the illness with her; he would not listen to her doctors; he refused to enter her hospital room. He moved his mistress into a Jackson Street apartment right across from his office in San Francisco, and went over to see her as often as three times a day.
He immediately instigated an elaborate scheme to strip Ellie of all the family property-which now amounted to an immense fortune-and was in the process of trying to declare Ellie incompetent so that he could sell the Tiburon house to his mistress when he himself died suddenly-two months before Ellie-from a stroke. Ellie inherited his entire estate.
Graham’s last mistress, Karen Garfield, an exquisite young fashion model from New York, poured out her woes to one of our investigators over cocktails. She had been left with half a million and that was just fine, but she and Graham, had planned a whole life together-“the Virgin Islands, the Riviera, the works.”
Karen herself died of a series of massive heart attacks, the first of which occurred an hour after Karen visited Graham’s house in Tiburon to try to “explain things” to his daughter Rowan. “That bitch! She wouldn’t even let me have his things! All I wanted were a few keepsakes. She said, ‘Get out of my mother’s house.’ ”
Karen lived for two weeks after the visit, long enough to say many unkind things about Rowan, but apparently Karen never connected her sudden and inexplicable cardiac deterioration to her visit. Why should she?
We did make this connection as the following summary will show.
When Ellie died, Rowan told Ellie’s closest friends that she had lost her best and only friend in this world. This was probably true. Ellie Mayfair was all her life a very sweet and somewhat fragile human being, beloved by her daughter and her numerous friends. According to these friends, she always evinced something of a southern belle charm, though she was an athletic, modern California woman in every way, easily passing for twenty years younger than she was, which was not uncommon with her contemporaries. Indeed, her youthful looks may have constituted her only obsession, other than the welfare of her daughter, Rowan.
She had cosmetic surgery twice in her fifties (facial tightening), frequented expensive beauty salons, and dyed her hair continuously. In pictures with her husband, taken a year before her death, she appears to be the younger person. Devoted to Graham and completely dependent upon him, she ignored his affairs, and with reason. As she told one friend, “He’s always home at six o’clock for dinner. And he’s always there when I turn out the lights.”
Indeed, the source of Graham’s charm for Ellie and for others, other than his looks, was apparently his great enthusiasm for living, and the easy affection he lavished on those around him, including his wife.
One of his lifelong friends, an older lawyer, explained it this way to our investigator. “He got away with those affairs because he was never inattentive to Ellie. Some of the other guys around here should take a lesson from that. What women hate is when you turn cold to them. If you treat them like queens, they’ll let you have a concubine or two outside the palace.”
At this point, we simply do not know how important it is to gather more information about Graham Franklin and Ellie Mayfair. What seems relevant here is that they were normal upper-middle-class Californians, and extremely happy in spite of Graham’s deceptions, until the very last year of their lives. They went to the San Francisco Opera on Tuesday nights, the symphony on Saturday, the ballet now and then. They owned a dazzling succession of Bentleys, Rolls-Royces, Jaguars, and other fine cars. They spent as much as ten thousand dollars a month on clothes. On the open decks of their beautiful Tiburon home, they entertained friends lavishly and fashionably. They flew to Europe or Asia for brief, luxurious vacations. And they were extremely proud of “our daughter, the doctor,” as they called Rowan, lightheartedly, to their many friends.
Though Ellie was supposed to be telepathic, it was a parlor-game type of thing. She knew who it was when the phone rang. She could tell you what playing card you were holding in your hand. Otherwise there was nothing unusual about this woman, except perhaps that she was very pretty, resembling many other descendants of Julien Mayfair, and had her great-grandfather’s ingratiating manner and seductive smile.
The last time I myself saw Ellie was at the funeral of Nancy Mayfair in New Orleans in January of 1988; she was at that time sixty-three or four, a beautiful woman, about five feet six inches in height, with darkly tanned skin and jet black hair. Her blue eyes were concealed behind white-rimmed sunglasses; her fashionable cotton dress flattered her slender figure, and indeed, she had something of the glamour of a film actress, to wit a California patina. Within half a year, she was dead.
When Ellie died, Rowan inherited everything, including Ellie’s family trust fund, and an additional trust fund which had been set up-Rowan knew nothing about it-when Rowan was born.
As Rowan was then, and is now, an extremely hardworking physician, her inheritance has made almost no appreciable difference in her day-to-day life. But more on that in the proper time.
Nonobtrusive surveillance of Rowan indicated that this child was extremely precocious from the beginning, and may have had a variety of psychic powers of which her adoptive parents appeared unaware. There is also some evidence that Ellie Mayfair refused to acknowledge anything “strange” about her daughter. Whatever the case, Rowan seems to have been “the pride and joy” of both Ellie and Graham.
As already indicated, the bond between mother and child was extremely close until the time of Ellie’s death. However, Rowan never shared her mother’s love of parties, lunches, shopping sprees, and other such pursuits, and was never, even in later adolescence or young adulthood, drawn into Ellie’s wide circle of female friends.
Rowan did share her parents’ passion for boating. She accompanied the family on boat trips from her earliest years, learning to manage Graham’s small sailboat,
By the time Rowan was sixteen, Graham had bought her her own seaworthy twin-engine full displacement hull yacht, which Rowan named the
For years it was Rowan’s habit to come directly home from school and to go out of San Francisco Bay into the ocean for at least two hours. Only occasionally did she invite a close friend to go along.
“We never see her till eight o’clock,” Ellie would say. “And I worry! Oh, how I worry. But to take that boat away from Rowan would be to kill her. I just don’t know what to do.”
Though an expert swimmer, Rowan is not a daredevil sailor, so to speak. The
