Stung: Death Leads Heirs Into Legal Quagmire

PHILADELPHIA - October was waning when a yellow jacket punched its stinger into the affable young millionaire.

Bryan David Nelson, a dedicated duffer at age 29, had just come off the front nine at Commonwealth National Country Club in suburban Horsham. Nelson was a regular on the golf course, known to attendants for his red Mercedes sports car, his sunny clubhouse manner and his fat tips.

"The nicest kid in the whole world," recalls clubhouse supervisor Tommy Pugliese. "They're the ones who go first, you know."

Nelson was chatting with caddy master Danny Kelly when the yellow jacket nailed him on the arm. He swatted the insect down. Kelly stomped it into the asphalt, and Nelson went inside to relax.

Not 20 minutes later, "all hell broke loose," Kelly said. A Horsham Fire Co. ambulance raced into the parking lot. The next thing the caddy master knew, the medics were hustling Nelson away.

He looked unconscious. "His face was blue," Kelly says.

At Abington Memorial Hospital, doctors placed Nelson on life-support equipment. Relatives started summoning out-of-state kin.

Four days later - on Nov. 3, 1991 - Nelson died.

Left behind were a 19-year-old widow, homes in Pennsylvania and Vermont, a $100 million-a-year pantyhose company, and lingering suspicions over how Nelson died.

His passing gave birth to a Byzantine legal brawl over who gets what.

NO SHORTAGE OF WILLS

At first, no one could find a will. Then a brother from Santa Fe showed up with copies of a 1985 will. Then the chairman of the pantyhose firm came forward with a 1984 will.

Meanwhile, family members and company officials are lobbing charges of stock swindles and extortion conspiracies.

"The Alice in Wonderland of all court cases," one lawyer calls it.

And last month, Nelson's widow sued the Horsham Fire Co. and two ambulance workers, claiming they inadvertently killed her husband with a drug overdose.

Sarah Nelson's lawsuit says the workers, meaning to treat Nelson's allergic reaction to the sting with an intravenous bag of saline solution, grabbed the wrong bag. Nelson was given an overdose of an anesthetic called lidocaine, sending him into seizures and stopping his heart, says the suit, filed in Montgomery County Court.

Horsham Fire Co. president Richard Haddon declined to comment on the allegations.

`SOMEBODY BLEW IT'

Robert Daniels is Sarah Nelson's attorney. "You go out one day to play golf and, boom, you're dead," he said. "Somebody blew it. It's as simple as that."

Less simple is the ongoing grab in Montgomery County Orphan's Court for Bryan Nelson's estate.

"The fight is never over until the bones are picked clean," says Marvin Wilenzik of Conshohocken, attorney for two of the litigants. "Everyone is looking for one thing - money."

Of that, there is much.

When he drove off to play golf that morning, Nelson was worth from $5 million to $25 million, depending on which side does the figuring.

The heart of Nelson's estate is his controlling interest in Hosiery Corp. of America, the brainchild of his father, Jules "Sonny" Nelson, who founded the company in the 1970s.

According to court records, Bryan Nelson was still in a coma when the search for his will began.

On Halloween evening, five people gathered in the master bedroom of Nelson's two-story colonial in Penllyn, Montgomery County to search the bedroom safe.

By then, Nelson had been unconscious for a full day, and "it became clear that his death was likely," court records say.

Present that night, flanked by her father and brother, was 19-year-old Sarah Jannicky Nelson, Bryan's bride of just five months.

MET IN VIDEO STORE

Sarah and Bryan had met in a video store in Vermont, where she was attending high school and he was on an extended break from work.

After graduating second in her class at Woodstock High School, Sarah moved with Bryan to Montgomery County, enrolled at Bryn Mawr College, and married him at the end of her freshman year.

Also in the room that October night was Joseph Murphy, the chief executive officer at HCA.

A middle-aged former Marine, Murphy had taken the helm of HCA in 1981, when Jules Nelson's health began to fail. After the elder Nelson died, it was Murphy who became "like a father to Bryan," says Ben Greber, a longtime HCA executive who recently retired.

And it was Murphy, Greber says, who steadied and protected the company when Jules Nelson's 25-year marriage fell apart in 1980.

Before the breakup, Claire Nelson had been president and part-owner of HCA. In a 1980 separation agreement, she accepted $1.8 million in return for her interest in the firm.

In 1984, Bryan sold 25 percent of his company stock to Murphy for a mere $1,000. He and Murphy also signed a 1984 "buy-sell" agreement requiring their shares of HCA to be sold back to the company should either of them die.

"Bryan knew that without Joe Murphy, the company would be down the tubes," Greber says. "And Joe wanted to make sure, naturally, that he would be protected if he stayed."

With millions of dollars hinging on its contents, the bedroom safe was opened. No will was found.

Four days after Bryan Nelson's death, Sarah Nelson was appointed administratrix of the estate.

The young widow told Montgomery County probate officials that her husband had died without a will. Under Pennsylvania law, that entitled her to slightly more than half of the estate.

And because the couple had no children, the rest would go to Claire Nelson, Bryan's mother.

Murphy, meanwhile, moved quickly to enforce the 1984 "buy-sell" agreement and call in the stock. By early last year, he had reached a tentative agreement with Sarah: In return for Bryan's company stock, HCA would pay the estate almost $4.3 million - at least $1 million more than the company's own accountants said the stock was worth.

But Sarah Nelson switched lawyers, rejected the offer and quickly opened a new can of worms.

In April, Sarah's new attorneys asked the court to void the 1984 stock agreements between Bryan Nelson and Murphy. Their petition essentially paints Nelson as a callow, trusting youth who was fleeced by a savvy elder.

Murphy and his lawyers smelled a conspiracy. Claire Nelson, they alleged, was back on the scene, scheming with Sarah.

The widow and her mother-in-law had formed an "illegal windfall profit scheme . . . which would operate in the same manner first used by Claire Nelson to extort millions of dollars from HCA and her estranged husband's estate," Murphy's lawyers say in court documents.

Last March, Bryan Nelson's older brother, Jeffrey, a photographer living in Santa Fe, turned up with a copy of a 1985 will.

That will gave Jeffrey most of his brother's estate - including 88 percent of his HCA stock - and cut Claire Nelson completely out of the picture.

But the brother had only a copy, not the original will. Where was it?

Hidden or destroyed, possibly by Murphy or Sarah Nelson, Jeffrey's lawyers suggested. They asked the court to accept it as valid.

After a summer of uncertainty, Sarah, Claire and Jeffrey Nelson settled their differences last fall: Jeffrey would quit pushing the 1985 will, and his mother and sister-in-law would cut him in on the estate.

Enter Murphy, once more.

In November - a month after the Nelsons' family agreement - Murphy submitted a different Bryan Nelson will to the court. This one was an original signed in 1984, giving most of HCA's common stock to - you guessed it - Joseph Murphy.

A hearing on the will dispute is set for March 23 before Montgomery County Register of Wills Sara E. Long.

Murphy has been out of the country recently and could not be reached for comment. Jeffrey Nelson declined to be interviewed. So did Sarah and Claire Nelson, through their attorneys.

"If Bryan were here today," attorney Wilenzik said, "he would say that this is ridiculous."