Watchtower Took In Billions From Jehovah's Witnesses Who Died

The generation that built the religion of Jehovah's Witnesses is dying. Decades ago, Watch Tower, the parent company of the religion, responded by building an office, writing a brochure, and drafting a set of legal instructions. Together they make sure that when members die, their houses don't stay in the family. The houses go to Watch Tower, which sells them and keeps the money.

Naturally, this has triggered lawsuits. In one, a judge wrote down the story of a will drafted by a Witness for a dying man who wasn't a Witness. It was mailed straight to Watch Tower's headquarters in Brooklyn, where it sat for 75 days. Nobody close to him knew it existed until he was dead.

A Made-Up Widow Named Marie

One sentence sums up the whole system:

At her death, the society receives full title to the home.

That sentence was printed in a 1994 Watch Tower brochure that you had to write away for. It wasn't handed out at the Kingdom Hall. It describes a widow the brochure calls Marie. She isn't a real person, just an example. She is 75, her home is worth $247,000, and instead of leaving it to Watch Tower in her will, she signs it over now and keeps the right to live there until she dies.

Marie was invented for the brochure, but the next woman is real. In 2022, Janet Worthington of Hillsborough County, Florida, recorded a deed on her home. When she died, the house would go to four people: 10% to one, 20% each to two others, and 50% to the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of New York. A year later she recorded a new deed. This time 100% went to Watch Tower.

The Charge Against Watch Tower

I'm going to build this like a trial, and I want you to judge it like a juror. Here is the charge. Since at least 1991, Watch Tower has asked its members, in its own magazines, at their meetings, and through an office set up for this purpose, to leave it their homes when they die. It has also coached them on making those gifts hard for families to challenge in court, which I find particularly nefarious. Once it has the house, it sells it and keeps the proceeds. All the while it says in writing, again and again, that it doesn't solicit donations.

All of the evidence comes from one of five kinds of source:

• a Watch Tower publication
• a letter Watch Tower wrote
• a public deed record
• a charity filing Watch Tower itself submitted to a government
• a published court opinion

Watch Tower doesn't publish how much it receives from estates, and in most countries, including the United States, it doesn't have to. So I built a model to estimate how many homes are being donated and how much money has come in over the decades from those homes and from estates.

The case has five exhibits. The first is the pitch. The second is how the gift is made to stick. The third is the houses themselves. The fourth is the money. The fifth is what happened when families objected and took Watch Tower to court. After that I'll give Watch Tower's best defense, and then a verdict.

Exhibit A: Thirty Years of Asking for Your Estate

Despite what Watch Tower says about not soliciting, this was never hidden in some back office. It was printed in the Watchtower magazine year after year for more than 30 years.

The claim that they never solicit money goes back to the founder. At a 1913 convention, Charles Taze Russell, the first president of the Watchtower, was asked why the International Bible Students Association, which became Jehovah's Witnesses, refuses to solicit money. His answer was that God has never commissioned them, that they know of, to ask or solicit in any manner in his name. He also asked, "How can we spend so much money when we solicit none?" and answered, "People voluntarily push it on us." Keep that in mind, because it comes back to haunt Watch Tower.

The Magazine Box

Starting in the 1980s, the December and later the November Watchtower carried a box listing all the ways you could give money to the Watchtower. In 1985 the box opened like this:

People are surprised when Witnesses calling at their door do not solicit funds.

A few lines further down, the list began. You can give gifts of money. Property can also be donated. There were conditional donations, insurance, bank accounts held in trust for the society, and of course wills. The box tells you Witnesses don't come to your door asking for money, then lists everything you could own that they would gladly accept.

By 1991, the box included the line this article is about:

Saleable real estate may be donated to the Watch Tower Society either by making an outright gift or by reserving a life estate to the donor who can continue to live therein during his or her lifetime.

A life estate is exactly what Marie did. You give Watch Tower your house now and keep living in it, and the day you die it becomes theirs. There is no will and no probate, and nothing is left in the estate for your family to fight over. The box ran in one form or another until 2017.

The Planned Giving Desk and Its Brochure

In 1994, Watch Tower set up what it called the Planned Giving Desk at its complex in Patterson, New York. It also printed a brochure of more than 30 pages, Planned Giving to Benefit Kingdom Service Worldwide. It reads like something from a university's fundraising department. It covers gift annuities, charitable remainder trusts, lead trusts and retirement accounts, and it includes Marie and her house.

The brochure is honest about the math. On a gift annuity, you hand over a lump sum and Watch Tower pays you a fixed income for life. The brochure says the rates are designed to result in an ultimate gift to the society of about 50% of the value of the transfer. In plain terms, Watch Tower designed this to keep about half of what you give it by the time you die.

In 2000, the desk was renamed the Charitable Planning Office, and the brochure got a new name and a new opening. It starts with Hezekiah, the king who was told to set his house in order because he was about to die, and draws this lesson:

God clearly indicated that it is the primary responsibility of family heads to care for their family.

It then goes on for 30 pages about how to give your assets to Watch Tower. A few pages in, it says:

It is neither the intention nor the desire of the charitable planning office to solicit donations.

Watch Tower had been soliciting donations every year for decades.

A 2010 edition added something new, and it matters for Exhibit C: the beneficiary deed. You record a deed naming Watch Tower as the beneficiary of your house, but while you're alive you keep full control. The brochure says these deeds let you sell, mortgage, or deal with the property as he or she wishes during the owner's lifetime without needing Watch Tower's signature or consent. When you die, the house transfers directly to Watch Tower.

The Awake! Article and the Meetings

The idea wasn't completely new. In 1998, the Awake! magazine, which Witnesses were handing out to strangers at their doors, ran an article called "The Wisdom and Benefits of Estate Planning." Most of it is ordinary and even decent advice. But right in the middle it says:

The Planned Giving Desk of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, for example, provides assistance for those who are interested in including the society in their estate planning.

That is a direct solicitation for Witnesses to hand over their assets when they die.

Watch Tower also made the appeal at meetings. A letter to all bodies of elders in the United States, dated November 18, 2010, scheduled a service meeting part for the week of November 29 to review a Watch Tower article. The letter says:

This article highlights the use of the brochure charitable planning to benefit Kingdom Service Worldwide.

In 2013, the circuit overseer's outline for his meeting with the elders included a one-minute item on that brochure. In November 2018, the midweek meeting workbook ran a part called "A Gift in Hand for Jehovah." It lists donations that need advanced planning or legal advice, including wills and trusts as well as real estate, stocks, bonds, and insurance.

The Brochure Kept Off the Counter

In May 2010, the branch sent three copies of the brochure to every congregation in the country. The letter said they should be kept in the literature cabinet and should not be displayed on the literature counter at any time.

So the appeal ran in the magazine year after year, in the public Awake!, and on the meeting schedule. But the brochure that walks you through signing over your house when you die was to be kept off the counter.

"We Do Not Solicit"

Set all of that next to what Watch Tower says about itself:

• The form letter it sent people who asked about giving says the information is not in any way to be considered a solicitation.
• The 2010 brochure says there is neither the intention nor the desire to solicit.
• A 2016 leaflet from the British branch, Making a Bequest, says near the top, "Jehovah's Witnesses do not solicit funds." Yet the leaflet exists to get you to put Watch Tower in your will. It even says, "Mentioning us in your will can also greatly help this work after your death." I would call that a solicitation.
• The most recent accounts of Watch Tower's main UK charity, which received 7.8 million pounds in legacies in a single year, say, "We do not engage in fundraising activities."

Watch Tower would say it only responds to people who ask. That's partly true. The February 1995 Our Kingdom Ministry, announcing the first issue of the brochure, said it was prepared in response to many requests from publishers and interested ones. But you don't need a yearly magazine box, a public Awake! article, a service meeting part, and a meeting workbook part to respond to people who ask. You need them to get people to ask in the first place.

Exhibit A establishes that for more than 30 years, Watch Tower has run a standing, organized appeal for its members' estates, including their homes, while denying in writing that it solicits anything. It doesn't establish what Watch Tower does to make sure the gifts arrive.

Exhibit B: Making the Gift Survive the Family

Exhibit B isn't about whether Watch Tower asks. We've seen that it does. It's about what Watch Tower tells people to do so the gift lands even if the family objects.

The Doctor's Statement

Start with the form letter that Watch Tower's Pennsylvania corporation sent to people who asked about giving. In a section on executing your will, it says:

If there's any question of your ability to make a will and sign it, it may be appropriate to have your attorney obtain a signed statement from at least one doctor attesting to your competency so that the will may not be contested later.

The 1994 brochure says something very similar. Get a physician statement, it says, because this will greatly diminish the likelihood of a successful attempt to contest the will.

Think about who that advice targets. It is for a person whose mental capacity might be in question. And the only reason a will needs protecting from a contest is that somebody, usually the family, thinks it's a bad idea.

Sending the Original Will and Family Names

The same page continues: if your will makes the society a beneficiary, you may send the original to the Planned Giving Desk. You may also want to file with the society a list of your relatives' names and addresses and a general list of your property and its location.

The 2010 edition still asks for a general list of all property, its location, and the names and addresses of the heirs. Watch Tower's internal manual for branch offices goes further. Its 1977 edition became an exhibit in a federal lawsuit. It says that if someone wants to give the entire estate to the society, they should check with a lawyer whether local law allows it, because some areas don't. It also says it would be good to send the society the executed original will for safekeeping. The 2003 revision says it helps if the branch also has a list of names and addresses of all relatives.

Watch Tower's explanation is that this saves the estate time and money. To be fair, an executor does have to notify the heirs, so the information helps. But it also means that before the will is ever read, Watch Tower knows exactly who the family is.

The Conditional Donation

Then there is the conditional donation arrangement. You give Watch Tower money now, and if you need it back during your life, you can ask for it. That sounds generous and flexible. But here is how Watch Tower's British branch explained the real advantage in an October 2012 letter to all congregations:

Importantly, the conditional donation does not become part of your estate on death, but rather it remains with the society. If someone contested your will, the money donated by this agreement would not be affected.

It's a selling point. Give us the money this way, says Watch Tower, and if your family fights your will, they can't touch it.

The current American version is called a donation with agreement. The 2021 frequently asked questions put it plainly:

If the donor dies, the promise expires and the donee corporation retains the balance of the gift. It does not become part of the donor's estate.

The minimum amount is $5,000.

The Norman Case

A court has tested this. Lloyd and Lilly Norman were Jehovah's Witnesses their entire adult lives, living in Abbotsford, British Columbia. In 1997, they lent their local congregation $250,000, interest-free, to help build the Kingdom Hall. The loan paper said that if both of them died, whatever was still owed would go back to their estate. Hold on to that.

In 2001, Mr. Norman called the Watch Tower Society of Canada and asked how to lend money in the same way. That same day he mailed a check for $200,000. On the memo line he wrote that it was an interest-free loan he could ask for back. His letter said they could get it back in an emergency, and that once they had both died, the funds would remain the property of the Watch Tower Society. He even pointed to the Watch Tower box from November 1999.

The society wrote back and explained the difference. With a loan, whatever is left goes back to the estate when you die. With a conditional donation, the funds automatically remain with the society. It told him it had taken his money as a conditional donation, not an interest-free loan, and asked him to confirm that this was what he meant. The agreement it sent him had this line:

No request for a refund may be made by a power of attorney, an estate, or legal representative.

Only the Normans themselves could ever ask for the money back. That excluded their son, their daughter even if they were handling the affairs, and the family after the Normans were gone.

Over the next eight years the Normans kept sending money under the same agreement, $310,000 in total. They turned $60,000 of it into outright gifts. Mrs. Norman died first. When Mr. Norman died, $250,000 was left in the account, and his estate went to court to get it back. Watch Tower won, and won again on appeal. All the money stayed with the society.

You might think that if that's what the Normans wanted, it was their right. But consider what the arrangement allows. Suppose Mr. Norman developed dementia and his son, holding power of attorney, needed the gifted money to pay for his care. Under this agreement the son would have no right to ask for it. The society would decide, in its own words, "in its sole discretion."

Note the difference. When the Normans lent money to their congregation, the note protected their estate, and what was owed went back to the estate after they died. With the society's agreement, Mr. Norman got the arrangement his own letter described, and his estate, his family, and anyone holding power of attorney got no say. The court upheld that. I'm not saying the ruling was wrong. I'm saying it shows the design worked exactly as advertised.

Steering Gifts Away From Congregations

The same thinking shows up with local congregations. A 2000 letter told US elders that when someone offers their congregation a gift of land it doesn't need, they shouldn't accept it. They should point the donor to the Charitable Planning Office so the gift goes through the society. The 2021 frequently asked questions ask whether you can leave your estate to local congregations and answer:

Since congregations are occasionally reorganized to better support local needs, it is preferred that such gifts be directed to Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Incorporated.

The standard congregation bylaws from 2020 forward say that if a congregation dissolves, whatever remains in its accounts or property goes to Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of New York. The money always ends up at headquarters.

The Fair Counter

There is a fair counter. Competency letters and conditional gifts are normal parts of estate law. Plenty of charities use them, and a doctor's letter can protect a donor from someone pressuring them the other way. That's true. But a charity doesn't put the phrase "if someone contested your will" in a letter to its members unless it expects wills to be contested.

Exhibit B establishes that the system Watch Tower built expects pushback from families and is designed to get around it. It doesn't tell us what happens to the houses. For that we go to the county records.

Exhibit C: The Deeds

This is where the brochure stops being printed paper and becomes real addresses. Deeds are public records. I searched the free county indexes in six states for any deed involving a Watch Tower corporation, then pulled and read the documents themselves.

What I found is a floor, not a total. These indexes can miss misspellings, names can be cut short, and above all, if an executor sold a property and wrote a check to Watch Tower, Watch Tower's name was never on a deed. That sale won't show up. This is a minimum.

What the Search Turned Up

• In Maricopa County, Arizona alone, there were 27 beneficiary deeds naming a Watch Tower corporation, the exact instrument the 2010 brochure describes. In 19 of them, Watch Tower is the only beneficiary.
• There were 18 life estate records, almost all in Florida, with the house going to Watch Tower when the owner dies. That's the same arrangement as the fictitious Marie's.
• There were 17 deeds where an executor or personal representative handed a home to Watch Tower out of a probate estate.
• There were nine trust distributions and three outright gifts.

Individual Deeds

Some deeds tell you a lot on their own.

• In 2019, Linda Lee Gerber recorded a beneficiary deed naming Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of New York as beneficiary of her home. Three other people are named, each with a third, but only if Watch Tower disclaims the house within 90 days. What are the odds Watch Tower declines the property?
• In Sun City, Norman Crowell and his wife, Wanda, recorded a beneficiary deed to Watch Tower in 2016. In 2024, now a widower, he recorded a new deed. Two people get to live in the house for life, and then it goes to Watch Tower.
• Of every beneficiary deed to Watch Tower I found in Maricopa County, only one was ever revoked, in 2025.

Houses Already Sold

• In 2013, Nellie G. Alvarez recorded a beneficiary deed on her Phoenix home naming the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of New York. In January 2017, Watch Tower sold that house for $136,000.
• In 2000, the probate estate of Maxine Ardis Morrison in Sun Lakes, Arizona, deeded her home to Watch Tower. A separate court filing describes the transfer as directed by her will. Watch Tower sold the house in 2006 for $102,000.
• In November 2023, Bob and Cecilia Mary Shipper signed a warranty deed that begins "for no consideration and as a gift." When it was recorded, the deed was mailed to Watch Tower, attention Charitable Planning Office. In October 2025, Watch Tower sold the house for $399,900.
• In Buckeye, Arizona, Thomas and Susan DeYoung deeded their home to Watch Tower in January 2019 for the sum of $1. Fourteen months later, Watch Tower sold it for $180,000.
• In New York City, executors of three estates deeded homes in Queens and the Bronx to Watch Tower. It resold them for $750,000, $950,000, and $427,500, over $2.1 million in total.

Across every resale I could find with a recorded price, 16 in all, the median price was $204,750 and the total was $5.6 million. The usual time between a house being deeded or willed to Watch Tower and Watch Tower selling it was about three and a half years, though some sold within months.

Watch Tower Sells, and Never Said Otherwise

Watch Tower doesn't keep the houses, and to be fair, it never said it would. The same old form letter says of real estate:

It is generally preferable that you sell the real estate and then use the proceeds as you wish.

It adds that if you'd rather deed it over, in some cases:

a transfer of the real estate to the society followed by an immediate sale on behalf of the society would be a practical way to handle the matter.

The 2025 accounts of Watch Tower's main UK charity put it in policy language. When a property comes to it by gift or by will and it doesn't need the property, the accounts say:

A decision is made to dispose of the property and it is expected that such a property will be sold within 12 months.

The Counter

The counter is that I'm describing a few dozen houses in a country with over a million Witnesses. That's true. But this is only what showed up in free public indexes in a handful of counties and a few states. Every cash sale, where the house is sold and a check is written to Watch Tower, is invisible because no deed exists. Most of the Arizona beneficiary deeds haven't shown up as a Watch Tower sale yet, so we don't know how much money they will bring in. The records don't say whether that's because the owners are still alive.

The point of Exhibit C isn't how many houses I can list. Every step in the brochure shows up on real deeds with real names, and they end the same way: Watch Tower sells the home and keeps the money. Members' homes go to Watch Tower through every channel the brochure describes, and Watch Tower turns them into cash.

Where the Case Stands

Exhibit A shows that Watch Tower has asked for this kind of donation for decades while denying that it asks. Exhibit B shows that it designs the gifts to survive family challenges, and that they have survived in court. Exhibit C shows that the houses appear on real deeds in counties you can look up yourself, and that Watch Tower sells them. That leaves two questions. How much money is this? And what happens when a family fights back?

Exhibit D: How Much Money Is Involved

I'll split this into what we have on record and what we can estimate from those records.

What Is on Record

In the United States, the country with the most Witnesses, Watch Tower doesn't have to file any public accounts. It's a church, so by law it isn't required to be transparent. I don't think that makes sense, but that is the law. Watch Tower isn't transparent, and it chooses not to be. So there is no American figure for how much it receives from estates.

That isn't true everywhere. In some countries Watch Tower's charities must file accounts, and Britain is the best of them, because UK accounts list legacies, the money left in wills, as their own line. Here are the facts from the filings at Companies House:

• In the 2011 financial year, Watch Tower's two main UK charities reported about 3.4 million pounds in legacies.
• In 2025, those same two charities reported just over 12 million.
• Add the Kingdom Hall trusts, which only began listing legacies separately in 2022, and the 2025 total is 13,667,000 pounds. However you count it, legacies have more than tripled since 2011.
• From 2011 through 2025, the total comes to just over 105 million pounds, about 140 million US dollars.
• In 2025, legacies were nearly a fifth of the main charities' entire income. Their accounts say, "The association is funded by voluntary donations and legacies," and a sister charity says it has a consistent income base through gift aid and legacies.

In New Zealand, where the regulator used to require a separate line for bequests, Watch Tower's New Zealand society reported $745,000 in bequests in 2012. That was almost 32% of its income that year.

Canada doesn't break out bequests, but the Canadian tax filings list the kinds of non-cash gifts the Watch Tower Society of Canada had to issue receipts for. In several years that list includes real property, a residential building, and residential real estate. Houses, in other words, though the filings don't say what they were worth.

In the United States, the closest thing we have is a sworn affidavit. In 2004, Richard Abrahamson, secretary and treasurer of Watch Tower's Pennsylvania corporation, told a California court:

In many cases, the individuals have deeded a part of their property to Watch Tower PA, but have retained a life estate in the property donated.

That's under oath, so we can hopefully trust it.

The Estimate

What follows is an estimate from my model. Watch Tower doesn't publish these figures.

In simple terms, the British filings tell me roughly how much Witnesses leave Watch Tower per death there, and British tax statistics tell me how much of a typical estate is the house. I took that rate and applied it to every country where Witnesses live. I used Watch Tower's own publisher counts, each country's death rate, how many people own their homes, what those homes are worth on average, and whether the law even lets you leave your whole house to a charity. In much of Europe and Latin America it doesn't if you have children, so I discounted those countries.

The model estimates that Jehovah's Witnesses worldwide leave Watch Tower around 560 homes' worth of property every year. Very cautious assumptions give about 160 properties, and generous ones about 1,000. The center line is:

• roughly 560 homes a year
• roughly $115 million a year in homes
• about $200 million a year counting everything left in wills, not just houses
• since 2008, roughly 7,400 homes worth about a billion and a half dollars at today's prices
• in the United States alone, about 175 homes a year

Applied back to 1994, the year the first brochure came out, the model says roughly 11,000 homes have been gifted to Watch Tower. At today's prices, that's about $2.3 billion.

There are honest caveats, which you will never get from Watch Tower. When I test the model against New Zealand's actual bequest filings, it predicts nearly twice what New Zealand reported, so my numbers might run high. On the other side, the cautious version falls well below the number of deeds I found in Arizona and Florida, so that version is probably too low. The middle sits just above what's on the public record, and the public record misses every house an executor sold for cash before writing a check to Watch Tower. That's why I give a range rather than a fixed number. The range is wide, but the middle is the likeliest answer.

Watch Tower Doesn't Need the Money

Does Watch Tower need this money? No. This isn't a story about an organization that's short of money. It is sitting on a mountain of real estate and cash. The story is about where the money comes from.

Exhibit D establishes that in the one country where the numbers have to be public, money left to Watch Tower in wills has more than tripled since 2011. Everywhere else, including the United States, where Watch Tower keeps the figures to itself, the best estimate is around $200 million a year, houses and all other estate gifts included. The range on either side is wide.

Exhibit E: What Courts Have Found

The courts are the one place where a family tells its side under oath and a judge writes down what happened. I found five published cases worth examining, and I'll be careful to say exactly what each court found and what it didn't. I've added a sixth at the end.

Florida, 1969: Louis He

If you can read only one, read this one. Louis He was an elderly man living alone in Dade County, very sick and mostly confined to his bed. Some months before he died, Jehovah's Witnesses started visiting him. The court found he was never a member of the religious sect known as Jehovah's Witnesses. He was still going to his own church and even attended Easter Sunday services just before he died.

In March 1969, a Witness named John Hartley Jr. asked the lawyer who worked for Watch Tower to draw up a will for Mr. He, saying it had to be done immediately. The lawyer couldn't, so Hartley wrote the will himself. He and William and Lilly May Payne, also Witnesses, took it to Mr. He's home and had him sign it. It named the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania as sole beneficiary.

The original will was sent straight to Brooklyn. The court found that it went to the main office of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania at 124 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, New York, where it remained in the hands of officials of that corporation until the decedent's death some 75 days later. Louis He wasn't given a copy of the will he signed. His closest friends and his own minister didn't know it existed until after he died.

His brothers and sisters took it to court. The judge found:

the will was a result of undue influence and overreaching on the part of the members of the religious sect of which the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania is the parent head and was not the free expression of the decedent Louis He, but was the expression and desire of those who procured the execution thereof.

The will was revoked, and the appeals court affirmed.

Remember what Watch Tower's branch manual said about sending the society the executed original will for safekeeping, and what the brochure said about sending the original to the Planned Giving Desk. In Louis He's case, the original went to Brooklyn and sat there for 75 days while his closest friends and his own minister had no idea. Remember too the advice about getting a doctor to affirm mental capacity so the family has a harder time fighting it.

Florida, 1950s: Laura Brackett

Laura Brackett was a childless widow in Clearwater. In 1949 she made a will leaving everything to her sister and her sister-in-law. In September 1955, she was baptized by a Witness named A.G. Wakefield. In February 1956, a lawyer she didn't know drew up a new will leaving all of the testatrix's property to the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. The court found that Wakefield directly supplied the data for the preparation of the will.

The doctor detail appears here too. The lawyer had her examined by two doctors. One said she was capable of making a will, and the other said she wasn't. She signed anyway in June 1956. In July, a court declared her incompetent by reason of chronic senility. Friends noticed that she would speak of her dead husband as alive and physically present. She died that December at 81. The court threw out the will because she lacked the capacity to make it.

Fairness matters here. The court said it didn't have to decide whether there was undue influence, and the judge wrote that he assumed Wakefield was a kindly man who did not realize that he was promoting the execution of a will by a person incapable of making a valid will. That was the court's view, so I'm giving it to you. The lawyers defending the will on appeal included Hayden Covington, Watch Tower's own legal counsel at the time.

New York: Julia Eckard

Julia Eckard died in 1970. Her will left $50 to her daughter Charlotte and $50 to her son Frank. It then said:

For reasons that to me are good and sufficient, I make no further testamentary provision for my said daughter and Frank Darmody.

Everything else went to the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania.

New York at the time had a law that let children challenge a will leaving more than half an estate to charity. Her children used it, won, and won again on appeal. But New York's highest court reversed both rulings and threw out the challenge. The $50 gifts and that one sentence meant the children had been disinherited, so they had no standing. The court said:

If anything, the grant of nominal bequest to a close relation is the more accepted or customary way of indicating an intent to disinherit.

I want to be careful. The record doesn't say why Julia Eckard cut her children out, and it doesn't say whether she was a Jehovah's Witness. I'm not going to guess. What it shows is a mother leaving her children $50 each and the rest going to Watch Tower, and Watch Tower fighting the children all the way to the state's highest court and winning.

Ohio: Luther Loyd Dietrich

This one is strange. Luther Loyd Dietrich had two accounts at Fifth Third Bank, about $100,000 in total, payable on his death to his mother. The bank's computer showed a change in 2005 naming Watchtower instead, but the bank couldn't find the signed form the change required. Dietrich died in October. His estate went to probate court, which ruled the money belonged to the estate.

Watchtower knew about the case. Its manager of charitable planning, Michael Lewis, testified that Watchtower learned of it shortly after it was filed. It hired an Ohio attorney who attended the pre-trial conferences and kept it updated, but it never joined the case. About two years after the bank paid the estate, Watchtower sued the bank. Its position, as the appeals court put it, was that the intended bequest to Watchtower from Dietrich was not consummated due to the bank's negligence.

The appeals court sent the case back for trial. The majority said it may have been a strategic decision on the part of the society to wait and see to whom the probate court would award the account proceeds before pursuing its claims. The dissenting judge, Kathleen Ann Keough, was blunter. The dissent quotes Watchtower's attorney telling the bank's lawyers that Watchtower was keeping its options open, and says:

Rather than defend or assert a claim to the contested asset, Watchtower sat idly by and acquiesced to the probate court's determination.

I couldn't find how the case ended, but you don't need the ending. The record shows the shape of it. Watchtower watched from the sidelines while a dead man's money went to his estate, never joined the case, and then sued the bank.

Ontario: Arthur Sodden

The fifth case is more recent. Arthur Sodden had five children. When his wife Hilda was dying in 2004, she asked him to promise that whatever money they left would go to the children equally, and he promised. Over the next couple of years he moved his bank accounts into joint names with two of his sons and told them to share it equally among all five. When he died in 2007, those accounts held about $1,076,000. His will left the residue of his estate to the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Canada.

Watch Tower claimed the accounts belonged to the estate, which would have meant they went to Watch Tower. Its only witness was Daniel Pole, the lawyer who drafted Arthur's will. He told the court Arthur had said the money in those accounts should go into the estate. But the court records that Pole admitted he did not know about the bank accounts until after Arthur's death. The court of appeal said:

It emerged at trial that Daniel Pole was an elder with the Jehovah's Witnesses and had acted as Watch Tower's counsel in the past and that he did not disclose this information to Arthur at the time of executing the will.

The trial judge rejected the evidence of Mr. Pole, Watch Tower's sole witness, in its entirety and found it neither credible nor reliable. The money went to the five children equally, as Hilda had asked. Watch Tower appealed and even tried a new argument, that Arthur had created a secret trust, but lost there too. The appeal court called the result inescapable, and Watch Tower was ordered to pay costs. The five children were Wayne, Steven, Brian, James, and Carolyn.

Pennsylvania: Frank Pavlis

Now for one extra, the biggest. Frank Pavlis was a Witness in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He was a chemical engineer and the very first employee of Air Products and Chemicals. He was a widower with no children.

In 2014, at 97, he wrote checks totaling $7 million with "real estate investment" on the memo line. The money went to companies controlled by a man named Justin Billingsley, and in return he got two promissory notes, one for $3 million and one for $4 million. He made the $3 million note payable on his death to the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of New York. The $4 million went to Watch Tower too, as what was left of his estate under his will.

He died in 2018 at 101. His estate said the money never came back and sued in federal court in Delaware. Watch Tower was never a party to the lawsuit, but at a 2021 hearing the defense lawyer told the judge there was effectively only one beneficiary: "It is the Watch Tower organization." The estate's own lawyer said Watch Tower had been fully apprised all along, so it knew what was going on.

The judge was worried that nobody was checking how much the estate was spending on lawyers, and said:

This trust is like a carcass that allows it to be the subject of predatory behavior that nobody is checking what's going on here.

The judge even floated making someone from Watch Tower attend the trial, but it never got that far. In April 2022 the lawsuit settled with a $7 million judgment for the estate, an estate whose beneficiary was Watch Tower.

What the Cases Do and Don't Show

The counterargument is fair. These are six cases spanning something like 60 years. Watch Tower won some of them. Where it lost, the courts found against individual Witnesses or against the society's legal position, not against some written policy. All of that is true. I can't tell you how often anything like Louis He's case happens. Most families never go to court, and those who do don't usually produce a published opinion we can read.

What the cases show is a pattern, and it is what the record says when somebody finally takes a look:

• a will written by a Witness for a man who was never a Jehovah's Witness, sent to Brooklyn for safekeeping, with him never getting a copy
• a widow declared senile a month after signing everything over to Watch Tower
• an elder drafting a will without telling the client he had been Watch Tower's lawyer
• two children left $50 apiece
• a society that stayed out of a probate case over $100,000, then sued the bank when the money went to the estate and not to Watch Tower
• $7 million, effectively all headed to Watch Tower, tied up in a federal lawsuit Watch Tower never joined but was fully apprised of, while the judge warned that the trust was like a carcass and nobody was checking what was going on

Exhibit E establishes that when these gifts have gone to court, judges have found undue influence, lack of mental capacity, and testimony they didn't believe because it wasn't credible. It also includes outcomes where Watch Tower won. It doesn't establish how common any of this is.

Watch Tower's Best Defense

Here is the best defense I can construct, and it's a good one that a lawyer might actually make. It goes like this.

Every major charity in the world does planned giving. Universities, hospitals and churches all have planned giving offices, and they all use life estates, beneficiary deeds, and gift annuities. It's legal, standard, normal, and often good for the donor's taxes. Every gift was voluntary. Adults have the right to leave their property to their faith, and no child has a legal right to an inheritance that overrides where the parents wanted it to go. Selling donated houses is what any charity would do, since holding thousands of scattered houses around the world would be wasteful. Courts have often upheld these gifts, as in Norman and Eckard. When Watch Tower says it doesn't solicit, everyone knows what that means: no collection plate, no tithing, no fundraisers calling at dinner. It doesn't mean Watch Tower can't publish information for people who want to give. And nobody has shown a single document where Watch Tower tells anybody to cut off a family member because of it.

Parts of that are simply true, and I concede them. Planned giving is legal and common. The tools Watch Tower uses are the tools any big charity would use. People have the right to leave their homes to their religion regardless of what their kids think. And I have no document and no court record showing that Watch Tower tells anybody to disinherit a family member, whether or not they've been shunned. If you've heard that claim, I can't back it up, so I'm not making it.

Here is what the best defense doesn't answer.

• A university does not tell you in writing that it doesn't solicit gifts while printing a list of ways to leave it your property in its own magazine year after year for three decades. Watch Tower does.
• A university doesn't keep its giving brochure off the counter on purpose. Watch Tower did.
• A university doesn't sell donors on a gift that will survive if someone contests the will. Watch Tower does.
• None of those other charities control their donors' lives the way Watch Tower controls Jehovah's Witnesses. A university doesn't discipline you for who you spend time with. Watch Tower's own 2024 Elders Manual says that willful, continued, unnecessary association with disfellowshipped or disassociated non-relatives despite repeated counsel would warrant judicial action. When an organization with that kind of power over people asks for their houses, and then tells them how to keep their families from challenging it, that's not the same as a hospital fundraising office. The tools may be the same, but the relationship between the people getting the money and the people giving it is not.
• American universities and hospitals publish audited accounts showing what they receive in bequests. Watch Tower publishes nothing in the United States. We know the British numbers only because British law requires them.

Russell said at the start of this organization that God never commissioned them to solicit in any manner. A yearly list of ways to sign over your property, a planning office, and meeting parts are a manner.

And there is the record. In the Ontario case, the man who drafted the will was an elder who had been Watch Tower's own attorney, and he didn't tell the client. In Louis He's case, a Witness wrote the will himself for a man who was never a Jehovah's Witness and sent the original off to Brooklyn. Those aren't critics' accusations. They are things judges found.

The Verdict

The charge was that since at least 1991, Watch Tower has asked its members to leave it their homes, coached them on making those gifts hard for families to challenge, including in court, and sold the homes it receives, all while saying it doesn't solicit anything.

Whether they ask: that case is made. It's in the magazine year after year, it was in Awake!, it's on the meeting schedule, and it's in a brochure that was kept off the counter on purpose.

Making the gifts stick: that case is also made. In Watch Tower's own words, a doctor's statement is a good idea so that the will may not be contested later. So is sending the original will to its office for safekeeping. And a donation gets pitched as safe if someone contests your will.

Selling the homes: that case is made from deeds in six states, from Watch Tower's own form letter saying it's generally preferable that you sell the real estate, and from its British charity's policy that such property will be sold within 12 months.

How big it is: the British numbers are fact, 105 million pounds in 15 years. The worldwide figure is an estimate from my model, and I've told you where it could be off. Watch Tower could settle this tomorrow by publishing the number, but it doesn't, and I wouldn't hold my breath. So the best we can do is an estimate. By my model, from 1994 to 2025 about 11,000 homes worth about $2.3 billion in today's money have been given to Watch Tower. That is a floor, because we don't know how many estates sold a property and wrote Watch Tower a check, and no deed is recorded for that.

Here is what my case doesn't prove. It doesn't prove that the kind of undue influence seen in some of those court cases is common. It doesn't prove that anyone is told directly to disinherit their children. Where the record is silent, I've said so.

But the core charge stands. Watch Tower built a system to collect its members' homes. It built that system to withstand their families taking it to court. And the whole time, it told everyone it never asks for money.