The wild, wild will of the late Russell Edward Herman may never enrich any of the vast number of beneficiaries it lists, but it has certainly enlivened conversations, not to mention increased the mail load, across the southern half of the state.
Take the tiny town of Cave-In-Rock, which Herman, a carpenter, bequeathed a staggering $2.410 billion. “It’s an odd thing to happen isn’t it?” understated Mayor Albert Taylor Kaegi, who had no trouble coming up with uses for the money.
“One thing, I’m sure we’d increase our police force, and we always need more fire equipment,” said Kaegi, whose village can now afford only one patrolman on the payroll and not long ago had only two pair of fire pants for 15 volunteer firefighters.
When it comes to raking in billions from Herman’s estate, however, Mayor Kaegi knows Cave-In-Rock is out-of-luck, as are the scores of other would-be beneficiaries of this will that one southern Illinois official has succinctly described as “a lot of garbage.”
Garbage it may be, but what a load Herman left.
Aside from the cache to Cave-In-Rock, his beyond benevolent will bestows $2.410 billion to the impoverished community of East St. Louis, and the same amount of money in “American Gold Dollars” to each person who has lived in Gallatin County for at least ten years.
It further bequeaths:
– $1.5 billion for “projects” in southeastern Illinois.
– $6 trillion to the Federal Reserve Board to pay off the national debt.
– $6 trillion to the U.S. Treasury to get the country back on track.
– $2.41 billion for national forests.
– $189 trillion for “the rehabilitation of states’ rights.”
– Various amounts to restore the national railroad system and to dredge primary rivers in order to provide navigation and prevent flooding.
The magnanimity of the Herman will is astounding, particularly in light of the fact that apparently the only thing of any value that Herman possessed upon his death Aug. 29, 1994, was joint ownership in a battered 1983 Oldsmobile Toronado. Herman, a native of Dolton, was buried in Shawneetown. He was 67 when he died of cancer at the VA Medical Center in Marion.
His will surfaced just a few months ago.
“It’s not funny, it’s kind of crazy, you know?” said David Wood, who is state’s attorney for Gallatin County, where the will was registered with the county clerk’s office but never properly filed in.
In fact, there is no evidence that Herman himself ever lived in Gallatin County. His last known residence, a rented house in Okawville, which is about 40 miles southeast of St. Louis, is more than 100 miles away from Gallatin County, on the opposite side of the state in Washington County.
Lacking any monetary foundation, and no legal standing, the strange will probably would have excited little more than some amusing gossip in local coffee shops.
`Grandma’ and the malcontents
But the Herman will’s reach has exceeded its grasp.
Malcontent America–the conspiracy-suspecting, tax-hating, government-baiting, antisocial segment so relentlessly news-featured since the Oklahoma bombing–is on to the Herman will.
Its members believe the will is valid. They want a piece of it. And they know that you-know-who is trying to stop them.
Here is a bulletin–one in a barrage–from Herman’s aggrieved widow, Kate, who is also executor and a beneficiary ($1.5 million) of his will:
“The news medias keep screaming “WHY ARE THE MILITIA UP IN ARMS?” WAKE UP MEDIAS, WE ARE IN BATTLES FOR OUR LIVES AND OUR PROPERTYS DAILY, AND THE COURTS DO NOT PROTECT US, AND MOST LAW ENFORCEMENTS ARE DRUG PUSHERS! GOD BLESS, HELP AND PROTECT, AMERICANS” Mrs. Russell Herman aka Grandma to all of you.”
Mrs. Herman, who is known in the malcontent underground media as “Grandma,” claims that her late husband was not a carpenter, but a “deep cover” CIA agent involved in federally approved drug-running.
She believes her husband was kidnapped and murdered as part of a government conspiracy to not only cover up the drug-running but to also deny her husband and her their rightful claim to vast sums of money owed them by that same government.
Again, this might make for nothing more than amused local gossip if it weren’t for the fact that Mrs. Herman has two fax machines and knows how to use them. Via fax, she has incited thousands of like-minded malcontents to believe that what she says might be true, and that they, too, might be in line for some big money–if only the government would turn it loose.
This “Beneficiarys Network” has responded by mailing tens of thousands of claims on the Herman estate to government officials, resulting in major headaches for the recipients in Gallatin and Washington Counties and in the Illinois attorney general’s office in Springfield.
A mail carrier’s nightmare
Local and state officials–and a few innocent bystanders–have been inundated in recent months with form letters and other mailings from aspiring Herman-will beneficiaries from nearly every state in the Union. Most of the letters have been certified mail that had to be signed for, and opened.
“We got about 10,000 pieces, and the state attorney general’s office has four boxes full,” noted Wood. “At one point, it was taking two hours a day just to sign for all the certified letters. It’s crazy.”
Joshed one of his clerks, “We built a new room onto the courthouse just to handle all this mail.”
The First National Bank of Okawville, where Mrs. Herman lives, also has been hit by the mail deluge. Employees there signed for “several hundred” certified letters before finally refusing to accept any more, according to bank President Dennis Hasker. “There were as many as 30 affidavits in some of the envelopes,” he noted, adding that his bank preferred to keep a low profile on this thing.
“I don’t want to say anything to stir the pot,” he said. “We’re in the middle of this, and we don’t know why.”
Officials in the attorney general’s office are equally exasperated. They issued a press release in mid-April acknowledging that they had been receiving form letters from across the country. On one day alone–April 10–the office received 1,600 pieces of certified mail from those who would inherit Herman’s apparently faux fortune.
Efforts to convince the Beneficiarys Network that the will is bogus have failed.
“What happened here is that Mr. Herman had been in a veterans hospital in southern Illinois and . . . by his calculation we owed him several trillion dollars, and he left this will leaving billions,” said Joe McCormick with the attorney general’s office. “And then apparently, when he passed away, his wife picked up on his delusions, and apparently she has found sympathizers around the nation, and it has snowballed.”
The eye of the storm
In the driveway alongside the rented Herman home on the southwest side of Okawville (population 1,300), there sits the ’83 Olds Toronado, looking to be worth considerably less than, say, a few trillion dollars.
One recent morning, the red-haired Mrs. Herman stood on the front porch of the small, white, wood-frame house to greet a visitor. She wore a “Special Grandmother” T-shirt and a defiant scowl.
“Hi, I’m the bitch,” she told her visitor, before guiding him inside and politely offering iced tea along with a note of caution: “This thing is heavier than any of you all know.”
Packed tightly amidst substantial furnishings, framed tapestries, and several antique rifles mounted on the wall, Mrs. Herman, 60, lives with five mutts, at least three caged songbirds, and two fax machines, one of which she has nicknamed “Baby.”
She has keen blue eyes and a revolving identity. She spells “Herman” at least three ways, also goes by her maiden name, V.K. Durham, and is widely known in her native Shawneetown as “Ol’ Snooky.”
During a 2 1/2-hour visit in her home, she spewed conspiracy theories interwoven with a bewildering, but impressive, array of historical, geographical and political data.
“I used to be known as `The Computer,’ ” she boasted. “I was trained. It’s none of your business by who.”
In a brief biographical rundown, Mrs. Herman confided that she had personally stuffed pickled pepper’s for President Dwight Eisenhower’s poker parties in the White House. (“Ike dressed like such a bum you wouldn’t have him in your house.”)
She also claimed to have “guarded Jack Kennedy’s back.” (“I was privy to confidential info on his girlfriends.”)
These Gump-esque references to historical figures–not to mention specific battles in Korea, provinces in China and oil contracts in Iran–were accompanied by claims that she and her late husband had been spies and that the U.S. government, or some rogue offshoot, is trying to stop the Herman will from being enacted.
She suggested tie-ins with the gas poisonings in Japan, and offered that there might be a widespread campaign to kill and clone former CIA agents such as her late husband. She said that because of her mistrust of government, she registered her husband’s will in Gallatin County and at least one other Downstate County.
`It’s just sitting in the bank’
Her suspicions are aggressively faxed out each day to a long list of “Beneficiarys,” as attested to by a recent month’s phone bill posted on a wall: It exceeds $2,000. She says she is living on retirement benefits of about $400 a month, but only because the government has denied her access to a fortune.
Mrs. Herman believes that a $1,000 1875 Peruvian gold certificate that she found in a Bible purchased several years ago is worth $206,858,581,465,280,000 ($206 quadrillion and change). This, she says, will be the source of all the money to flow from her husband’s will, if only the government will allow her to cash it.
The state attorney general’s office, which politely disagrees, puts the value of the certificate (which Mrs. Herman now has only a photograph of because the original, she believes, was stolen) at close to nothing, but gamely estimates that her estimated value of the certificate amounts to more than “the value of the gross world product since civilization began.”
“I think it is more money than has been printed in all the nations of the world since the beginning of time,” offered Gallatin County’s Wood.
Since Herman’s death last fall, his wife, who witnessed the will and is also listed as a beneficiary (a combination not allowed by state law), has urged people around the country to file claims for a piece of the $206 quadrillion.
“It’s just sitting there in the bank. There’s a lot of prayers going on about this,” said one write-in claimant, Betty Hunt of Grapevine, Texas, who said she learned of the will from several relatives who have also filed claims.
Hunt said she is a missionary and that she would take “whatever is allowed” and use it to “promote the kingdom of God.”
Another member of the Beneficiary Network is trucker Jack Jones of Bethany, Ill., who has joined in Mrs. Herman’s fax campaign to demand that the U.S. government let her cash the Peruvian gold certificate.
Jones said he learned of the will in the anti-government newspaper Contact, which is one of several that Mrs. Herman apparently writes for, sometimes in a column titled “Grandma Writes Right.”
Jones said he, too, is convinced that Herman was murdered and that “the government” is covering up the truth. The “Zionist-controlled media” is also in on the conspiracy, he claimed.
Jones agrees with Mrs. Herman’s theory that George Bush, Alan Greenspan, Oliver North and others are in on the conspiracy. Mrs. Herman claims all three visited her husband before he died. She says she has proof of this and all of her other claims.
“They may say I’m a mental case, but I’ve got too much documentation,” she said, before heading out to fax her latest alert.
“I leave a paper trail,” she said slyly.
