By Greg Garrison
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama – The members at the defunct Avondale Presbyterian Church were worried about Bette Wilson after her husband, Ross, died. She was in her eighties, living alone in a tiny, dilapidated house across the street.
She had attended the church most Sundays for 50 years until the 16-member congregation disbanded in 2010. She liked wearing different hats. People called her “the hat lady.”
When her microwave oven stopped working, the former church members didn’t think she had enough money for a new appliance and they gave her the one from the shut-down church building. They had no idea that she was secretly a multi-millionaire.
Mrs. Wilson died on Nov. 20, 2012, at 81. When her will was probated, it was discovered that she had more than a dozen banking and investment accounts that totaled about $2.8 million. She had $1.5 million in a Morgan Stanley investment account, and the rest spread out in other accounts up to $250,000 each.
Mrs. Wilson had worked as a credit manager for 40 years at Pure Oil Co., and her husband had worked for decades as an airplane mechanic for Delta Airlines. They had built a two-bedroom, one-bathroom, 850-square-foot house on 47th Street in 1953 and lived in it the rest of their lives. They had no children.
About two years before she died, Mrs. Wilson stopped by the headquarters office of the Presbytery of Sheppards and Lapsley in Hoover and told staff she wanted to put Living River, a church camp on the Cahaba River, in her will.
Read more at http://www.al.com/living/index.ssf/2013/12/elderly_avondale_widow_was_a_s.html