Aiken funeral home owner tricked woman writing will: lawsuit

Mary Margaret Wenzel Crandall’s initials were marked throughout her last will and testament — but it wasn’t her handwriting.

That’s according to a lawsuit that claims an Aiken funeral home director and prominent community member, along with his partner, preyed on the elderly, dementia-addled Crandall in her last years before she died in January at 88 years old. The duo dissolved Crandall’s last wishes by tricking and coercing her into creating an “Illegitimate Will,” if she created it at all, the suit alleges.

At stake in the lawsuit is the possession of what’s estimated in the suit to be a more than $8 million estate.

The suit names Cody Lee Anderson, the owner of George Funeral Home and a former State House candidate, as one of the two men who allegedly swindled Crandall, her relatives and the charities named in her real will, which was created more than 20 years prior. Anderson’s partner in this flimflam was the funeral home’s former owner and a close acquaintance, Thomas Allen Bateman Jr, according to the suit.

The suit alleges Anderson and Bateman conspired to financially exploit Crandall and accuses them of exploiting a vulnerable adult. The plaintiffs — Crandall’s former accountant and former lawyer — have asked for a trial by jury and desire monetary reimbursement and financial punishment for Bateman and Anderson.

Attorney William Newsome, who is representing beneficiaries cut out of the estate, called the case a “shocking” example of vulnerable adult exploitation.

Bateman and Anderson’s lawyer, John Harte of Aiken, said they “absolutely” deny all the allegations in the lawsuit. He called the suit “extreme” and said that Crandall was close with Bateman and Anderson, considering them both friends.

“I don’t see where they did anything wrong,” Harte said. “There’s a lot of law that says a person can make a division of property near death even if everyone in the world doesn’t want them to do that.”

Bateman’s alleged hustle goes back 10 years to when he prepared Crandall’s husband for burial, the suit claims.

Crandall’s husband, John T. Crandall, was a World War II veteran and a nuclear scientist who worked at the Savannah River Site. The two met in the “Amazon jungle in Peru in 1982,” her husband’s obituary reads. He had a son from a previous marriage, but Mary and John Crandall had no children together.

Crandall enlisted George Funeral Home to prepare her husband’s body for the grave in December 2012, the suit says. Bateman was the owner at the time, and Anderson, in his mid-20s, became his understudy in 2014.

The duo began to “gain the trust” of Crandall as she grieved her husband’s death, the suit says.

More than 10 years earlier, Crandall had prepared her will and last testament, naming Wanda F. Scott and William Ray Massey as personal representatives of her final wishes, according to the suit. Scott and Massey are petitioners in the lawsuit. Scott was an accountant for Crandall and Massey a lawyer who worked with her to draft a will in 2001.

Crandall’s will, signed in October 2001, named relatives, including distant ones living in Germany and Brazil, as beneficiaries. It also named as beneficiaries Smith College of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the South Carolina Nature Conservatory, two Catholic churches in New York and South Carolina and genealogical societies.

The lawsuit says that by 2018 Crandall was experiencing dementia and paranoid hallucinations.

Anderson and Bateman knew Crandall’s mental health was declining and “instead of helping her” they “seized the opportunity to prey upon” her “diminished capacity,” the suit says.

Bateman had ingratiated himself to Crandall and by 2019 he had convinced her to give him power of attorney, according to the suit. With that power, he removed another person who was appointed to the position the year before.

Bateman and Anderson isolated Crandall from friends and family and left her with no access to her financial assets, the suit says.

Less than a year later, the suit claims, the two schemed to create a new will that would put Crandall’s wealth into their hands.

The ‘Illegitimate Will’

On May 1, 2020, three women stood outside of George Funeral Home, the suit says. They watched from a distance as a person in the front seat of Bateman’s car appeared to sign the document they were about to put their signatures on.

The suit doesn’t give an exact date when the will was drafted, but it claims that despite not having a law license, Anderson and Bateman acted as attorneys by creating a new will for Crandall using a website for legal documents. The two “fill(ed) in the blanks in a computer-generated generic will,” the suit says.

Bateman learned that Crandall was suffering “psychosis” and was taking medication for it from a nurse in March, the suit says.

The women who stood outside the funeral home in May thought the person in car was Crandall, signing her new last will and testament, but the suit questions whether it was actually her in the front seat. The suit claims that Bateman and Anderson may have orchestrated an elaborate ruse to fool the witnesses with a person impersonating Crandall among other scenarios that negated her 2001 will and left Bateman the sole beneficiary of an “illegitimate Will.”

It was unlikely that Crandall was in the car to sign the will, the suit claims. In May 2020, the assisted living home where she lived was locked down, denying visitors or residents leaving because of the coronavirus, the suit says.

The suit also alleges that the three women who signed the new will did not properly witness the document. When they signed, they were socially distancing from the vehicle in which Crandall was presumed to have signed the will. The three did not read the will, nor did they even know what they were signing, the suit alleges. They never spoke to Crandall when they signed the document.

The suit implies that the witnesses were either in on the scheme to rob Crandall of her will or were unknowing accomplices. All three were employees of George Funeral Home when they signed the will, the suit says.

The new will cut out a “long list” of relatives, friends and charities from the 2001 will and left Crandall’s entire estate to Bateman, according to the suit, despite him not having any blood or marriage relationship to her.

Bateman was “no more than a mere acquaintance,” the suit says.

The three women’s signatures were not the only questionable signatures on the will, according to the suit.

Anderson’s handwriting was also on the will. On the fourth page he printed Crandall’s name and forged her initials on “one or more pages of the Illegitimate Will,” the suit says.

The suit doesn’t outright dismiss that Crandall signed a new will but claims that if she did sign, she did not have the mental capacity to represent herself or didn’t know the content of the will. The suit also alleges that Bateman and Anderson may have forced or coerced her to sign the last will.

In late 2021, shortly before Crandall died of Alzheimer’s disease, Anderson attempted to clean out and sell her home, though he had “no legal standing to act on her behalf,” the suit says.

When Crandall died in January, George Funeral Home handled the funeral arrangements, the suit says. The funeral home run by Anderson said that Crandall didn’t want an obituary published.

‘What she wanted’

A legal response denying the allegations is being prepared and will be filed soon, Harte said.

Contrary to the characterization in the lawsuit, Bateman and Anderson w
ere close with Crandall for many years, Harte said.

Anderson lived as a young man near a golf course where Crandall lived decades ago. The two had remained friends and stayed in touch since.

In her later years, Crandall reached out to Bateman for help with things that her age made difficult for her.

“She was alone, and he would take her shopping and things she needed to do,” Harte said.

Harte said that Crandall was not mentally incapacitated by May 2020 and that the will created then accurately reflects the woman’s last wishes and does “what she wanted to do with her estate.”

Anderson in the news

Anderson is no stranger to controversy and headlines.

In 2017, the Aiken Standard named him to its class of “Young Professionals to Follow.”

The next year he was in the Aiken Standard again, this time for becoming the owner, at age 31, of George Funeral Home. The funeral home is a pillar of Aiken, having been founded in 1920.

“This a dream come true,” Anderson was quoted.

His one-year anniversary as the funeral home owner was written about in the paper.

In 2019, Anderson ran for the state House to fill the place of Aiken Rep. Ronnie Young following Young’s death, the August Chronicle reported. He lost the election to Melissa Oremus.

But Anderson’s run of positive press ended last year after he purchased a historic Aiken mansion. The Aiken Standard reported in 2021 on a lawsuit that claimed Anderson had not paid the seven-figures deal to the sellers of the mansion.

By July, the two sides had settled the dispute.

This story was originally published April 1, 2022 1:23 PM.