Document in bottle appears to be will

Associated Press

SANDUSKY

The handwritten pages were sealed in a wine bottle when they first floated into Diane Roepke Riedel’s life, launching a mystery she hasn’t been able to solve — or completely let go of — for decades.

Riedel was swimming with a friend at a Northern Ohio beach in July 1976 when she spotted the bottle in the water, she recently told the Sandusky Register. The pair shattered it and discovered what appeared to be a will for eccentric billionaire and aviation pioneer Howard Hughes, who had died earlier that year.

“I was 15 years old. My Mom and my Dad said it wasn’t real,” Riedel said. “I went on with my life.”

But she kept the document for decades because she couldn’t shake the thought: What if it were real? “Stranger things have happened,” she told the newspaper. “I didn’t write it.”

The document, which her family filed in local probate court, begins: “I, Howard Robard Hughes, being of sound mind & body, do hereby declare this to be my last will and testament...” It is dated Feb. 3, 1976, about two months before Hughes died, and makes some unusual bequests: $500 million each to a daughter and son he purportedly fathered overseas; $200 million to save two ships; $50 million to a John C. Whitworth, whom Riedel researched and found to be a Sandusky man and head of the American Crayon Co., who died in the 1950s, and $10 million each for a Russian violinist, the Academy of the Performing Arts, the Smithsonian Institution and the person who found the bottle.

Riedel said she put the document out of mind and out of sight for years, tucked away in her underwear drawer. Now the Huron real-estate professional keeps it outside her home for security reasons, hoping to finally confirm whether it’s authentic.