The $5 Million Trust, the Staged Burglary, and the Lawyer Who Went Too Far: Butler v. LeBouef

Some legal cases read like a mystery novel. Butler v. LeBouef, decided by a California appeals court in 2016, is one of them — complete with a suspicious burglary, a forensic handwriting expert, and a pattern of behavior stretching back 25 years.

At the center of it all was an attorney who, according to the trial court, used his law license to take advantage of a vulnerable, elderly man and walk away with a $5 million estate.

Meet John Patton

John Patton was a well-known interior designer living in Santa Barbara. By the last years of his life, he was in serious decline — battling depression, alcoholism, diabetes, high blood pressure, and other health problems. People who knew him said he was drunk more often than not, fell frequently, and needed neighbors to help him in and out of his car and shower.

Patton's longtime partner had died in 2004, leaving him grieving and increasingly isolated. That's when an attorney named John LeBouef entered the picture as a social acquaintance, visiting more and more often — sometimes with his own life partner and business partner, Mark Krajewski, in tow.

For years, Patton's estate plan had been simple and consistent: his money would go to his nieces and a close friend. Then, in December 2006, that all changed. A new will and trust surfaced naming LeBouef as the main beneficiary of Patton's entire $5 million estate. Patton's longtime assistant later said he was worried he was "losing control of his finances" and that LeBouef had been moving his money around.

When Patton died in 2011, his nieces — his closest known relatives — challenged the will and trust in court, arguing LeBouef had drafted the documents himself to enrich himself.

The Law That Was Supposed to Stop This

California has a rule built for exactly this kind of situation: if someone drafts a legal document that ends up giving them a gift, the law automatically assumes something went wrong — fraud or undue influence — unless that person can prove otherwise with strong, convincing evidence. And if the person who drafted the document is also the one who benefits from it, that assumption becomes even harder to escape.

LeBouef's defense was that he didn't draft anything — some other, unidentified attorney supposedly prepared Patton's will and trust. There was just one problem: the original trust document had gone missing.

The Missing Document and the "Burglary"

Right before LeBouef was scheduled to hand over the original trust for inspection by a handwriting expert, he reported that Patton's house had been burglarized. According to LeBouef, the burglar took the trust document and his laptop — and, oddly, almost nothing else, even though expensive art and watches were sitting out in plain sight.

The trial judge didn't buy it. The court concluded the burglary was staged specifically to prevent anyone from examining the document closely — because that examination might have revealed the trust had been tampered with.

There were other red flags too. Patton died unexpectedly, and there was confusing, conflicting testimony about how long LeBouef was actually in Patton's house before he called 911 to report the death — long enough, the court suspected, for him to search for and alter the will and trust.

A Pattern Going Back Decades

What really sealed the case wasn't just what happened with Patton — it was what had happened before. The court allowed evidence about two earlier situations involving LeBouef:

• Irene Grant, an elderly woman who inherited money from a man she had cared for. LeBouef had drafted that man's will. Afterward, LeBouef married Grant, who was 20 years his senior, took control of her finances, and later drafted her trust — naming himself as the main beneficiary once again.

• Audrey Cook, another elderly widow LeBouef befriended. He drafted an amendment to her trust that left most of her estate to his partner, Krajewski, with a close friend of LeBouef's installed as the person managing the trust. When Cook died, her family sued and eventually recovered over $1 million.

A forensic document examiner testified that Patton's trust and Cook's trust shared the same unusual misspellings, sentence structure, and formatting quirks — she said she was "virtually certain" the same person had prepared both documents, using a level of confidence comparable to "beyond a reasonable doubt."

The court allowed this history into evidence because it showed a repeating pattern — not to prove LeBouef was simply a bad person, but to show that his claim of not knowing who drafted Patton's documents wasn't believable given how many times a nearly identical situation had played out before.

The Court's Ruling

Based on all of this, the trial court found that LeBouef had, in fact, drafted or prepared Patton's will and trust. That triggered the legal presumption of fraud or undue influence — and LeBouef never came close to proving otherwise. The court declared the will and trust invalid, removed LeBouef as trustee, and ordered him to hand over the trust's assets.

The court didn't stop there. Because LeBouef lost, California law required him to pay the other side's attorney's fees — over $1.2 million. LeBouef argued this wasn't fair, since the presumption against him was "conclusive" (meaning there was technically no way for him to rebut it once the court found he was the drafter). The appeals court rejected that argument, explaining that the fee rule applies regardless of whether the presumption against a drafter is one that can be challenged or one that can't — the point of the law is to punish exactly this kind of self-dealing, not to offer a technical escape hatch.

Finally, the court refused to pay LeBouef anything for his work as trustee or for expenses he claimed — including thousands of dollars for carpet, a dishwasher, and a gas range charged to the estate — because the entire trust had already been ruled invalid because of his own misconduct. As the court bluntly put it, no one gets to profit from their own wrongdoing.

Why This Case Matters

Butler v. LeBouef shows how far courts will go to unwind an inheritance scheme, even when the direct evidence of wrongdoing — like the original trust document — has conveniently disappeared. It also shows how a pattern of similar conduct across many years can become powerful proof in a single case: one suspicious inheritance might be an unfortunate coincidence, but three, with the same handwriting quirks and the same circle of friends involved each time, tells a very different story.

For families dealing with a relative whose caregiver or attorney seems to have taken an unusually close interest in their estate plans, this case is a reminder that California law gives courts real tools — and real teeth — to unravel transfers built on fraud or undue influence, even years after the fact.