Anne Heche didn’t repay a loan before she died. Now an ex wants her estate to pay up, claiming the company she worked for cheated him.
Sheila Wannenbach’s family had her declared dead in a hospice last February, the same day her son had been killed in a car accident on their way home from a church. But a DNA test revealed that she and her husband had been having an affair 20 years earlier.
She was a 30-year-old lawyer at a small firm when she left her husband and had a two-year-old son. She never told a soul about the relationship until she was discovered in a hospice.
In a lawsuit filed in November, Sheila’s lawyer argues that her former bosses—Sandy Stahl at the company that Sheila worked for—had cheated her out of her rightful share of the estate of her late mother, Mary Wannenbach, after the woman died.
Stahl was the one in charge of the estate when Sheila left her husband and had a two-year-old son with him. But her former bosses were allowed to take over and she never saw an accounting of the funds she had taken.
The company eventually sold about half of those assets, she said, but did not disclose which ones. The couple also never put their son’s name on the trust that would have funded the money when he was old enough. Instead, it was put in by his mother, Sheila’s sister-in-law.
“What they did is not right,” the lawyer said.
Stahl and his team have maintained the company did nothing wrong.
“I want to be very clear: We did nothing wrong,” he told CNN this week.
Stahl is also arguing that a $1 million check was deposited in Sheila’s account two weeks earlier. He said that money was hers from a settlement between the two families.
He sued Sheila’s family over the money, but dropped the case after a judge ruled against him. Sheila’s mother, Barbara Schmitt-Wannenbach, died in March, the day after Stahl filed her case.
“Barbara is devastated,” her daughters, Melissa Zellner and Julie Nettleton, said in