Attorney Bobby Lee Cook
For Laura Sikes Yates, the contested will of Pierce Yates has devolved into a "despicable" affair the millionaire's descendants from three marriages and multiple generations have been tangled in a civil case brought before the Walker County Court in LaFayette, Ga.
In Tuesday's opening of the trial, family members took the stand to accuse one another of marital infidelity, wire-tapping and giving alcohol to a hallucinating octogenarian on oxycodone. Some family members said they could not believe Pierce Yates left one of his sons a paltry inheritance while his siblings received much more.
The first day of the trial was dominated by questioning from attorneys representing plaintiff Allen Yates, who claims that his father Pierce Yates was not mentally competent to change his will before he died in August 2007. Late changes to the will divided his father's holdings equitably among Allen Yates's four other siblings, but left him much less.
Allen Yates is Pierce Yates' son from his first marriage. He has sued Pierce Yates' son Brewster Yates from his second marriage and Pierce Yates' third wife, Jo Anne Yates, for compensation. The family credits its fortune to Yates Bleachery, a textile company based in Flintstone, Ga.
Bobby Lee Cook, Allen Yates' lawyer, spent the first several hours of the proceedings questioning Brewster Yates, though very little of their conversation involved the father's will.
Instead, Cook questioned Yates' character, pressing him on his admitted infidelity and the dissolution of his marriage, as well as Yates' use of illegal wiretaps on his wife and his brief history of prescription psychiatric drug use.
Defense attorney Skip Patty made several objections to Cook's methods, saying that he did not allow Yates to answer questions fully and was overly argumentative, to which Judge Ralph Van Pelt replied, "It's a lawsuit, not a tea party."
For his part, Brewster Yates said on the stand, "I have taken years and years of abuse from Allen."
Cook also pressed Brewster Yates on whether or not he believed that his father had "abandoned" his first family, a charge levied against Pierce Yates by Brewster Yates's ex-wife. Brewster Yates said his father had told him late in life, "I didn't get to see them very much," but maintains that his father's will represented his honest wishes.
Laura Sikes Yates disagreed. Pierce Yates' daughter, Allen Yates's full sister and Brewster Yates's half sister contends that when she saw her father in April and May 2006, "he wasn't in his right mind."
She recalls that her father, suffering from back pain and eventually the prostate and bone cancers that would prove fatal, was hallucinating and having false memories. When he saw her husband in an orange shirt, Pierce Yates thought he was a pumpkin, she said, and he repeatedly asked who the people outside his window were when no one was there.
She added that Pierce Yates' third wife, Jo Anne Yates, gave him alcoholic drinks while he was taking prescription pain medicine.
She suggested that her father would not have knowingly signed a will leaving out her brother Allen Yates.
"Every plan my father made has been thrown out the window," she said, calling the current situation, "despicable."
Brewster Yates noted his father's mental competence by saying that his father worked six days a week until only months before his death, but Laura Yates said that when she visited him at the bleachery in his final year he was either asleep or distracted by pain.
The case continues today at the Walker County Courthouse in LaFayette.