Under the New York Estate Law there is a little known rule called the Slayer Statute. As a New York Estate Lawyer with decades of NY estate law experience this issue does rear itself from time to time. First and foremost, the New York Surrogate’s Courts are courts of equity, or try their best to be, where remedies are based on a general sense of fairness rather than strict adherence to rigid rules.
In the monumental New York estate case, Estate of Wirth, a husband who killed his wife and was subsequently found not guilty by reason of insanity was determined eligible to inherit from the victim’s estate. While the Surrogate’s Court in this landmark case ruled one could not profit from a New York estate where they are convicted of wrongdoing, this husband had murdered his wife and was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Therefore the Wirth Court allowed the husband to inherit despite having murdered his wife. However this Court did go on to state that public policy dictates that no party should be permitted to profit by their own fraud, wrong or crime perpetrated on another. In the end the Court adopted the New Jersey Surrogate’s Court approach which provides an exception for wrongdoers who are found insane at the time they committed the act thereby entitling them to inherit by reason of the fact their actions were not intentional but the result of their insanity. This result hardly seemed fair or equitable to the victim’s family.
Eventually this legal loophole would be closed within the State of New York in the Nassau County Surrogate’s Court when the Honorable Edward McCarty III removed the insanity defense as grounds to inherit estate assets from the victims they killed by simply omitting the term intentional. Under the court’s prior interpretation, only intentional acts leading to murder would disinherit the wrongdoer from inheriting. Conversely by omitting the term intentional from the law, the Nassau Surrogate negated the Slayer Statute’s insanity defense exception to the law.
In 2008 Leatrice Brewer sliced the throats of her three children and drowned them in a bathtub before attempting to commit suicide herself by jumping out her two-story window. In the 2009 NY criminal trial of Leatrice Brewer, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Leatrice Brewer contended that she was attempting to kill her children in an effort to save them from an evil curse.
Later Leatrice Brewer successfully brought suit against the County of Nassau on behalf of the three children she murdered. Ms. Brewer sued Social Services for their failure to remove the children from her care prior to the triple murder. As such a Nassau County jury found it appropriate to award Leatrice Brewer the sum of $350,000.00 for the County’s failure to remove her three children from her care. However thanks to Surrogate McCarty’s pragmatic and equitable approach to the NY estate law, he ruled that Ms. Brewer was not eligible to receive the proceeds of Ms. Brewer’s wrongful death lawsuit on behalf of her three children whom she murdered. He reasoned that while she was found not guilty by reason of insanity, a presumably unintentional act, she still killed her children nonetheless.
Estate of Lechner
On September 29, 2025 Kimberly Lechner was stabbed nine times, leading to her to death, by husband Anthony in their Maryland home, leaving behind her two children ages 19 and 21. Kimberly’s murderer, husband Anthony Lechner would eventually plead not guilty by reason of insanity claiming he had no recollection of the night he murdered his wife. A Maryland State evaluation concluded that Anthony Lechner was not criminally responsible at the time of the slaying by reason of insanity. To make matters worse, under the current Maryland Estate Law, their slayer statute unlike New York’s, only precludes those found guilty of an intentional act of murder to be disinherited from their victim’s estate. As such, pursuant to Maryland Estate Law, the lion share of Kimberly Lechner’s estate, the woman who was stabbed 9 times by her husband, will now pass to her husband unless the matter is brought before the court to reinterpret Maryland’s flawed slayer statute. This result would literally be insult to injury. Every State should have a Slayer Statute and every Slayer Statute should include both intentional and unintentional acts of homicide precluding inheritance as a matter of public policy.
If you or a loved one are thinking about planning their estate and would like a free consultation with a NY estate lawyer feel free to call The Law Offices of Jason W. Stern & Associates at (718) 261-2444.
Our Queens estate lawyers have 70 years of combined NY estate law experience drafting and probating the wills for families like yours in the counties of Queens, New York, Kings, Bronx, Westchester, Rockland, Nassau, Orange and Dutchess.