A real Man of God Malice in Wonderland a real man of god

When Good Prevails

The Heart is the Last to Go

In Trouble’s Shadow

A Taste of Freedom

Family Feud

Reserving Judgment

Jack Nevitt’s Ride

Rolling on the River

Of Lullabies and Baby’s Blue Eyes

River of Tears

Blood, Sweat and Cheers

On a Ride to Immortality

Heroes Die More Than Once

Scalping is the Ticket

Hail and Farewell

WHEN

GOOD

PREVAILS

LEXINGTON

1994


That which brought The Right Rev. Hal Mark Cobb to the brink was something almost every one of us sees every day: the warning tag on a hair-dryer cord, big and white and black and red.

Hell’s flag.

Cobb was convicted Thursday of murdering his first wife, Lisa Cobb, on March 3, 1984, by tossing a hair dryer into the tub as she bathed. His “inner demons” took over, he testified, when he happened to glance across the room as he sat on the toilet washing his wife’s hair and saw the tag on the dryer’s cord -- the one that warns of electrical shock. “Now is the time to do it,” the demons said. And Hal Mark Cobb, a church music minister looking for a way out of a marriage devoid of song, paused ...

A warning label became an invitation to kill. The devil sat on the toilet.

The chill of Lisa Cobb’s murder is the wind that blows out of a sky without a heaven. At a glance, it would seem everything sacred died in that bathroom in south Lexington. How can a man wash his wife’s hair so tenderly while contemplating her murder? How can a man of God drop a humming hair dryer into his wife’s bath as their infant daughter plays only inches away?

How can innocence survive in a world in which, toe-to-toe in a cramped space, evil can whip good so soundly?

Lisa Smiley Kear loves a little girl. The girl, Chelsea Rae, is 11. Kear is her adoptive mother. The family -- Kear, her husband, their twins and Chelsea -- lives in Pasadena, California. When police in Lexington began two years ago investigating the 1984 electrocution of Lisa Cobb, which originally had been ruled an accident, Kear sat Chelsea down for a talk.

“Someone has said they think Daddy might have done it,” Kear told Chelsea. The girl is Hal Mark Cobb’s daughter -- the child who played in the bathroom that day 10 years ago when her father electrocuted her mother.

“The police are looking into it,” Kear told Chelsea, “but unless they can prove anything, we’ll assume he didn’t do it.”

Kear was Cobb’s second wife. They married in August 1985, separated in 1988, were divorced in 1990. “Our marriage broke up because he wanted to live a gay lifestyle,” Kear has said.

Until police began investigating Lisa Cobb’s death in 1992, Chelsea had no idea her father might have killed her mother, Kear said. Neither did Kear. All they knew was this: “The same story the rest of the world had been told,” Kear said -- the one in which the Cobbs’ Siamese cat knocked the hair dryer into the tub.

Chelsea does not remember her mother, has no memory of playing on the floor of that bathroom or being whisked away from the tub by her father and bounced on his knee as her mother’s life ebbed. The Kears didn’t even tell the girl her father was a suspect until they has checked with a child psychologist.

But Chelsea has taken it all in stride. “She’s doing great,” Kear said.

She keeps pictures of her biological mother and has one of her father. It sits on her dresser -- at least it was last time Kear checked.

The photo shows Chelsea and Hal Mark Cobb on the porch before her first day of first grade.

The Kears only told Chelsea Thursday night that there had been a trial and that the man in the picture had been found guilty of murdering her mother. They did not want to distract her from her school work.

Chelsea is a good student, and popular. She is class secretary, too.

She has long, blond hair, blue eyes and dreams of an acting career -- as her father once did before a jury, after watching him cry on the witness stand for five hours without once having to wipe a tear from his eyes, gave the last act of Hal Mark Cobb twelve thumbs down.

“She’s beautiful,” Kear says of Chelsea. “The older she gets, the more she’s beginning to look a lot like her mother.”

This year Chelsea has the lead role in her school’s Christmas play, The Gift of the Magi. It is a story of prevailing innocence and love triumphant.

THE

HEART

IS

THE

LAST

TO

GO

LOUISVILLE

1994

Uncle Freddy was afraid the Easter bunny would mess the bed, but is sat as still and lifeless as a rock. As if mindful it was in the presence of death. As if doing anything might make the dark angel in that room seize it with the same white-knuckle grip now being used on my Granny.

Of course that wasn’t about to happen. It was clear there would be no going out of turn. Only one living thing in that dim apartment was eaten up with cancer. Only one was on the verge of going away wherever, forever.

“Know who this is?” Freddy asked his dying mother, pointing to me. “Is this Robbie?”

“I should hope so,” Granny whispered. We all strained to hear -- what? Has any of us ever before listened so closely to Granny? To anyone?

It’s all about wasted time. Standing on the precipice of the stillness and the void, suddenly we find we are not alone. Something was in the bedroom that day -- something unseen and abiding, at peace with the centuries and the chill of a late wind.

We were there for Granny. We were there for each other.

Until now, I never thought my grandmother looked like an old lady. There were the clear, sharp eyes, the feisty spirit, the high cheekbones. The easy manner of someone who has enjoyed life. It had, after all, been a pretty fair existence: the glitz and glory of train rides, big cities, high heels and sunny days at the ball park -- all beside my grandfather during his days in the office of the old Louisville Colonels minor-league baseball team.

But the woman in the bed, this woman who bore two daughters and a son, now wasn’t healthy enough to support even one life. Her 83-year-old body was failing. The thing she carried inside her this time, so late, was a killing thing, a shadow, where once, long ago, there had resided the precious lives of her babies.

Those babies, now grown, and some with babies and grandbabies of their own, stood in front of their mother as the refrigerator in the kitchen hummed and the bananas in the bowl on the hutch grew brown. In so many ways the apartment was as it always had been, right down the bottle of Kentucky bourbon on the kitchen counter -- a common sight by my grandmother’s stove, especially when my grandfather was alive.


All my life, wherever my grandmother lived in Louisville was ground zero for family. No matter where I’ve lived, no matter where my parents have lived, no matter what else was going on in my life. No matter. The woman on the couch in this overgrown river town was always waiting. Sitting there in her housecoat with her cigarettes and her iced coffee. We would flood the place at least once a year -- usually at Christmastime -- to eat ham and brownies with powdered sugar on top.

But this time we weren’t here for Sunday dinner. I knew we never would be again. The woman on the couch had become the woman in the bed. Only one other stop remained.

I was looking on my Granny for the last time, trying to remember the lines of her face, marking the rise and fall of her stomach as she breathed the last few times of all those millions of times. We had come here because Freddy had called to say if we wanted to see her alive one last time, we had better come now.


It was late on a chilly afternoon. Shadows fell long across the ground outside. Traffic whispered along the road a few blocks away. The lights of the city were starting to come on. And here I was. I could see both bones in Granny’s arm.

I didn’t see the horses, though. Of course, that didn’t mean they weren’t there. I knew Granny had seen them -- in her room, at Freddy’s house, wherever it was her mind wandered free these days.

“You have to get those horses out of your yard,” she told Freddy, who had never kept anything more exotic than a rabbit. I had no reason to doubt the horses really existed somewhere in that in-between place where my Granny now rested. Maybe she was seeing something none of the rest of us could.

There was the rabbit, too, of course, but he was real -- and Easter present from Freddy to his kids. When my eyes adjusted and I finally saw it sitting there on her bed, it seemed strange, out of place.

Amid the contrived brightness of the room -- yellow walls and tulips; floral curtains, Granny’s new robe -- the drab, gray-and-white rabbit, sitting so still, seemed like something dropped in from another dimension, as if it had popped out of that long-ago world in the black-and-white photograph of my grandfather that sat propped on a table near the bed.

“Want me to take the rabbit?” Freddy asked Granny.

There was a pause. The woman in the bed raised her hand slowly, ran her long, bony fingers down the rabbit’s head between its ears.

A couple weeks ago in the hospital, the day before the biopsy, Granny had wanted her hair done; that squishy hospital pillow had messed up the back. Now, somehow, she found the strength to pet a small, frightened animal destined to outlive her. Ovaries and colon, kidneys and stomach, the heart is the last to go.

“Do you want me to take the rabbit?” Freddy asked again.

The light in the window had faded to a dusky gray. The woman in the bed had only three more sunsets left before all those horses carried her away on the wind.

“No,” she whispered.

IN

TROUBLE’S

SHADOW

WHEELWRIGHT

1993


They come into town along Kentucky highways 122 and 306: Harry and Louearta Turner's new neighbors, all dressed in orange jumpsuits, arriving by the vanful.

They come -- state prisoners being transferred to the new Otter Creek Correctional Center -- right smack into the heart of this mountain town in which the mayor doesn't lock his door.

The private prison in Floyd County marks its grand opening today with tours and a speech by the governor. But the inmates have been coming in, 25 a week, since Oct. 27 -- turning up the side of a mountain toward the prison that sits above the Turners' white-frame house.

The couple, who watched from their front porch as the first two vans full of prisoners came up the road at lunchtime three weeks ago, share their neighbors' concerns about having a prison in the backyard.

"I don't like it," Louearta said. "I'm going to try to move out of here if I can.

"It didn't help Wheelwright none to put that in up there."

But other residents of this coal town disagree, allowing that the cargo of those white vans will help fuel the local economy the way the load in the coal trucks rumbling through town once did.

Wheelwright's economy is not in good health. All but abandoned by the industry that spawned it, the old coal camp, population 720, has unemployment estimated at 50 percent.

"Since the mines have went down, it's been pretty slow around here," Billy L. Hall said.

The closest mines these days, city councilman Luther Johnson Jr. said, are in Carr Creek -- a rough 18 miles away on winding, hilly roads.

But townspeople have mixed feelings about the minimum-security prison. Many inmates have escaped from Kentucky's other three private prisons since U.S. Corrections opened the first one, the Marion Adjustment Center, in 1986.

In its first six years, the Marion County prison had almost 80 escapes. And the Lee Adjustment Center in Lee County has had more than 50 since it opened in 1990.

In Kentucky's minimum-security prisons, there are no fences and the guards do not carry guns because officials say they are trying to condition inmates to re-enter society.

Under the state's classification system, even inmates who have escaped before or have been convicted of violent crimes are eligible for minimum security.

That does not sit well with the people who live at the bottom of the hill in Floyd County -- although their fears are generic and have little to do with Otter Creek's being privately run.

Coal miner Wiley Johnson said his wife, who attends Prestonsburg Community College during the day, has applied for work at the prison to help pay her way through school. But Wiley is not sure he likes the prison's being there.

"I work the evening shift, and I kind of hate leaving my wife and two boys here -- 'cause if they take a notion up there to leave," he said of the inmates at the prison, "they're gone."

Ronald Triplett, who lives behind Wiley Johnson, is not concerned about the prison, however. "I sleep with a .357 anyway," he said.

Besides, the prison has been good to the Tripletts. Ronald's wife, Kimberly, got a job as the warden's secretary.

Nestled among mist-shrouded mountains near the Pike County line, the prison will house 300 inmates and employ 85 people full-time by early next year, director Timothy S. Maguigan said. About 90 inmates and 45 employees are there now.

And although it's not official yet, Johnson said yesterday, city officials have been told that the prison will be expanded some time next year to house 500 inmates.

That means even more jobs, and for that many in town welcome the prison.

"I was glad to see it come, myself," said Don Hall, a gate officer at the prison who used to work at a coal tipple.

There's just one problem, Triplett said: His wife, who makes $5 an hour, was drawing more in unemployment benefits.

Wheelwright residents, many of whom had grown used to earning $10-an-hour or more working in the mines, pinned their hopes for economic revival on prison jobs that are not delivering the wages to which they're accustomed, said Gary McCoy of Wheelwright Utilities.

Still, the prison has been a good neighbor, Johnson said. "I think we made a good decision. They've been good to us. We ask 'em for something, they do it," Johnson said U.S. Corrections Corp. bought the prison site from the city. "That's $50,000 they give to us," Johnson said.

The firm also gave the city about $4,000 worth of concrete blocks to build a new fire station.

Several local businesses also have benefited from the prison, including the pharmacy, that supplies drugs for the prisoners and the BP Oil Co. station in Bypro, which has seen business rise by more than $200 a month.

As for the state, the privately built and run prison provides a relatively inexpensive way to house prisoners.

Besides not having to pay for construction costs, the state will pay the Louisville firm operating the prison 10 percent less than it would cost the Corrections Cabinet to run it.

U.S. Corrections Corp. will receive $29.38 per prisoner each day under its contract with the state -- a bargain compared to almost any motel -- especially for a place with an indoor gymnasium and cable television.

The state also is off the hook for insuring the prison. The Louisville firm also assumes liability if something goes wrong, Maguigan said.

But it is that possibility that has some townspeople worried -- especially those who live in the shadow of the mountain.

"I don't like it one bit, no I sure don't," said Dolly Hall, 65.

Up the hillside behind her house, prison employees worked hurriedly in the drizzly gloom to finish painting the guard shack near the entrance to the prison before today's festivities.

A

TASTE

OF

FREEDOM

LEXINGTON

1993


It happened in jail, a place that's all about time.

It happened on Thanksgiving Eve at the Fayette County Detention Center, where the trusty's white mop sweeps back and forth like a pendulum. Where an inmate nearing freedom rises from a card game and says, "I got 11 hours left to go." Where the second-hand on the wall clock lurches haltingly, as though it might catch and stop.

It happened just inside the front door of the jail: The 77-year-old version of Bernie Brancaccio had a high-noon meeting with the young man he used to be.

Brancaccio, the jail's first food service director, was invited back to the detention center yesterday for a Thanksgiving meal of turkey and dressing, French-cut green beans, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes and rolls -- a tradition he started 17 years ago.

But when they rolled the gray-bearded man with the hearing aid through the front door in his wheelchair and steered him immediately to the left, he found himself face to face with a orange-and-black banner that reached from floor to ceiling.

Brancaccio peered up, up, up at the banner, which had been sent compliments of his old school, Purcell Marian High in Cincinnati. Staring back at him was a bigger-than-life ink portrait of Brancaccio in his youth -- a young man with thick, dark hair and a faraway look in his eyes who lettered in three sports in high school.

"Bernie Brancaccio," the letters on the banner spelled. "Football, Basketball, Baseball."

"It's real nice," Brancaccio said, smiling as he looked up the wall at the poster.

"I can't see half of it."

What Brancaccio could not see or hear of his past, however, he could touch and smell and taste. In just moments he would roll up to a table in the staff dining room for a Thanksgiving feast prepared in the same kitchen he ruled from the time the jail opened in October 1976 until failing health forced him to quit three years ago.

Once, Bernie Brancaccio, Class of '36, was a sports hero. In high school, he was a star in three sports. He played minor-league baseball for the Cincinnati Reds.

He was inducted into his high school's athletic hall of fame in October. In the program for the ceremony was a quote from a letter that fellow Purcell Marian alumnus Roger Staubach wrote to Brancaccio:

"You left a legend that the rest of us have to live up to."

These days, Brancaccio wears glasses with lenses as thick as soda-bottle bottoms, and his right leg is gone -- lost to the ravages of diabetes. A series of strokes have impaired his memory and his ability to talk.

But Brancaccio seemed at home yesterday at the jail. "I always did like it here," he said, smiling.

Brancaccio, who started and owned Lexington's first Frisch's Big Boy Restaurant franchises, began working at the jail after he retired.

"He didn't want to quit working," said Jailer Ray Sabbatine. Brancaccio loved to cook, a passion that occasionally flared into outbursts of obscene language. He did not suffer fools gladly in his kitchen.

Kitchen trusty Thomas Crockett of Lexington, 24, who is serving time in the jail for contempt of court, remembers Brancaccio's fire.

"He was spunky," Crockett said.

Brancaccio frequently was the brunt of good-natured practical jokes by jail staff, Sabbatine said, "because he'd get so mad.

"He'd get furious."

"He was a wonderful gourmet cook, and we'd call him a short-order cook."

Yesterday was different, however. Brancaccio smiled and pointed a crooked finger at those who joked with him.

"It tastes fine," he said of the food.

"It's not as good as yours, though, huh?" Sabbatine said, gently ribbing his friend.

Brancaccio shook his head and laughed.

The meal that staff members ate with their honored guest is the same one all 550 inmates will eat today. Trusties started Monday preparing the feast, which includes 27 25-pound turkeys and 240 pounds of green beans, said food services director Fred Anderson.

The holiday dinner is of some consolation to inmates. "It's something to look forward to," said Chris Horning, 21, of Lexington, as he mopped the floor yesterday. "It makes the time go by quicker, too."

"We love it," Thomas said. "We wish it was Thanksgiving dinner every day."

Still, most, if not all, inmates would rather be somewhere else. The holidays make being in prison all the harder, Horning said. He misses Thanksgiving with his family and the big dinner his mother cooks.

"And we put the Christmas tree up on Thanksgiving, too," he said.
As for Thomas, he would rather be at his grandmother's house. "Time passes slower in here," he said. And fellow kitchen trusty John Doneghy would rather be at home with his wife and daughters.

But to Brancaccio, the jail is like home. And there are few places he would rather be -- including Building 27 of the Veterans Administration Hospital in Lexington, where he lives apart from his wife because of his poor health.

"When I left here," he said of the jail, "I missed it all the time."

Yesterday, as the laughing and smiling Brancaccio relived a life without wheelchairs and hospital beds, he found freedom behind the heavy, metal doors of a jail. It tasted good.

FAMILY

FEUD

LEXINGTON

1993


The remains of Dr. Nicholas J. Pisacano are interred beneath a towering white pine in Section O of Lexington Cemetery, but his memory is buried in a much less peaceful place: beneath almost two feet of paper work generated by an ongoing civil war over his money.

"Nick always felt that money was evil," Pisacano's close friend, accountant Joe E. Coons, said in a deposition. Were he alive, Pisacano might see the events of the last three years as proof.

Since Pisacano died in 1990, money has pitted his friends and loved ones against one another in legal battles over his retirement benefits and created an undercurrent of suspicion that led to the doctor's disinterment two weeks ago.

At the request of Pisacano's children, forensic specialists are re-examining organs from the body, which was reburied after the samples were taken, and performing toxicology tests on the tissue to check for unusual levels of substances such as arsenic. Lexington police are waiting to see whether Pisacano was poisoned, said Lt. Jim Cox of the robbery-homicide squad.

Testing Pisacano's remains will take at least four to six weeks, said Dr. Carolyn Coyne, deputy medical examiner for Kentucky.

"All early indications are that he was probably having some heart problems and died as a result of those," Fayette County Coroner Dr. Dennis Penn said. "Again, at this time, we have no evidence of foul play."

Pisacano had been "awfully tired" in the months before his death and planned to visit the Mayo Clinic in July 1990 for a coronary-bypass operation, I.G Manis, executor of Pisacano's estate, has testified.

Lt. Cox said police are "in a holding pattern right now until those autopsy and toxicology tests come back.

"We have done some interviews with family members, and all the normal checks."

Brief news reports and the family's cryptic public statements about Pisacano's disinterment have created an aura of mystery about the doctor that never existed in life.

Pisacano was a prominent figure at the University of Kentucky, where he served as a member of the board of trustees and in several other leadership roles.

Although possessed of a keen sense of humor, he was disarmingly straightforward and sometimes gruff -- qualities that made Pisacano a popular biology professor at the University of Kentucky, where he taught without pay for 11 years.

Money was unimportant to the nationally known physician, friends have testified. Those closest to him, however, have been consumed by financial matters pertaining to his wealth almost since the day he died.

It is unclear whether the fight over Pisacano's money has anything directly to do with his exhumation. Together, however, the events assume added meaning.

The lawsuits and public records pertaining to his death provide glimpses into Pisacano's world, where the common bond between some of his friends and family members -- their love and respect for the gravel-voiced physician from Philadelphia -- dissolved into distrust once the doctor died.

After Virginia Leigh Pisacano found her husband dead in his bed the morning of March 11, 1990, then-Fayette County Coroner Dr. David A. Hull ruled that Pisacano had died of a heart attack. But a letter Hull wrote March 28 suggests that at least one of Pisacano's five children by a previous marriage was not convinced by the coroner's ruling.

In the letter, addressed to Pisacano's daughter Lori, Hull stood by his opinion that the doctor's death was "a natural one."

"There is no evidence to support any other diagnosis," Hull wrote, citing Pisacano's history of heart problems and other chronic ailments such as diabetes.

Medical records contained in the coroner's file on the case said the 65-year-old doctor smoked and was overweight and paid little attention to his health.

"In the event that you continue to feel that this decision is not justified, I will be glad to entertain any evidence or written statements that you may have to the contrary, including written opinions of your own as to the cause of your father's death," wrote Hull, who died last year.

Lori, whose married name is Walls, did not return a reporter's calls. Her brother, Dean Pisacano, who has served as spokesman for his siblings in other matters, would not comment.

Court documents suggest reasons why Pisacano's children might want their father's death investigated. A thread of suspicion runs through the convoluted tangle of litigation, which dwells on changes in beneficiary forms and the possibility of forgery.

Two civil suits -- one in state court, the other in federal -- contested a total of $1.4 million.

On one side is I.G. Manis Jr., as executor of Pisacano's estate; and the doctor's five children from his first marriage, to Anna Mae Pisacano, which ended in divorce in 1973.

On the other side is American Board of Family Practice Inc., Pisacano's longtime employer; and the doctor's second wife and widow, Virginia Leigh Pisacano, whom he married in 1978.

The federal complaint, filed in January 1992 by American Board, ended Thursday when U.S. District Judge Karl S. Forester ruled that the board had acted properly when it directed Pisacano's pension benefits to his widow.

The estate had argued in a counterclaim that if the payment had been made within 60 days of Pisacano's retirement as his pension plan required, Pisacano would have received the money. Then, it would have gone to his estate when he died. But Forester dismissed the counterclaim in his ruling last Thursday.

Pisacano's will established a life trust for Virginia Leigh. She would live off the income, and when she died, the remainder of the trust -- basically, the principal -- would be divided among the Pisacano children.

Pisacano's estate contends that the doctor's pension should have gone into the trust rather than directly to his widow.

Attorneys for the estate touched repeatedly on the fact that J. Whitney Wallingford, counsel for American Board, also served as Virginia Leigh's attorney.

"When you retained him individually, you were aware that he also represented the plan as legal counsel. That's correct, is it not?" Virginia Leigh Pisacano was asked in a deposition.

"Well, yes," she said.

In one deposition, an attorney for the estate questioned the speed with which Pisacano's widow received the money.

"Why is after Dr. Pisacano's death there such an appearance -- or it seems to me there was then very much a hurry to distribute the money to Virginia Leigh Pisacano. Was that a correct impression?" Charles Christian asked Raymond Carey Cranfill, retired head of the trust department at First Security National Bank and Trust Co.

"She wanted it fast; that's correct," Cranfill said.

Wallingford would not comment on the case. Virginia Leigh Pisacano did not return reporters' phone calls.

In the federal suit over Pisacano's pension, five handwriting experts were called on to determine whether the doctor's signature had been forged on a beneficiary designation form dated Feb. 5, 1990 -- a month and six days before he died.

The form designates his widow as beneficiary. Two of the handwriting experts said Pisacano had not signed the document. One, a 20-year veteran of the FBI, called it a "well-executed forgery."

But three other experts, including the court-appointed one, testified the signature was authentic.

In his deposition in federal court, Manis, the trustee, said he had seen Virginia Leigh Pisacano sign her husband's name to documents in the past.

"She can sign his name where you can't tell the difference," he said.

Virginia Leigh Pisacano said in her deposition that as her husband's administrative assistant she had signed his name before. She was not asked in the deposition whether she had signed his name to the critical beneficiary form.

However, she did say of Dr. Pisacano, "I presume he signed it the day I gave it to him."

No witnesses signed the document.

In his ruling, Judge Forester said it was irrelevant who signed the document because Virginia Leigh Pisacano was automatically the beneficiary under the plan's guidelines.

The legal skirmishing began in September 1990, when Pisacano's estate filed a complaint against American Board in Fayette Circuit Court.

The suit still is pending.

The estate seeks to recover money paid to the board under an annuity owned by Pisacano. The board, which paid into the annuity for Pisacano, was the beneficiary. But the board did not sign over beneficiary status when it granted the doctor ownership of the matured annuity upon his retirement, the complaint says.

The board established a trust that began paying Pisacano from a deferred compensation plan and transferred ownership of the annuity to the doctor when he retired Dec. 31, 1989. After Pisacano died, the board, as beneficiary, received the remainder of the money from the annuity -- $323,861.09 -- and began paying it out to Pisacano's widow in monthly installments of $3,800.

In doing so, board members -- several of them close friends of the Pisacanos -- said they were honoring the doctor's wishes.

"Every time Nick signed a beneficiary form, despite anything any other document said . . . he always assigned it to Virginia Leigh. Always. And I think that the board's position is we're going to live by the arrangement that we knew Nick wanted us to live by," Coons testified in his deposition.

"And they don't feel that payment of those funds into a trust in which she's the primary beneficiary is enough to live up to that end?" John P. Brice, attorney for the estate, asked Coons.

"No," Coons said.

Manis contends the money should have gone to Pisacano's estate, where it was to be held in trust. A driving issue behind the battle over Pisacano's money seems to be the question of who will pay the taxes on it.

The heirs are being taxed on the principal even though they have received none of it.

"Would it seem to you that it's fairly inequitable for . . . Dr. Pisacano's estate to have to pay income tax liability on an amount . . . and then not receive the benefit attendant with the income?" Brice asked Coons.

"I think he'd want Virginia Leigh to have the annuity, period," Coons responded.

"I don't think he'd give a damn who paid the taxes on it."