Mistress cut out of will

By Jeffry Scott

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

He was a Marietta businessman who made millions selling cars and she was a blonde psychological counselor who caught his eye one night at the Tropical Club in Marco Island, Fla. Before long she had his heart and the rest of him, too.

He was married, but it didn’t seem to matter. For seven years Harvey Strother and Anne Melican carried on an affair in the flamboyant fashion of an older man with lots of dough (his estate is worth $37 million) and a younger woman (she was 30 years his junior) with a taste for the high life.

When he died five years ago at age 79, he left her $6 million, against the protests of his family. On Monday, the Georgia Supreme Court agreed with the Strother estate and pretty much cut his Florida sweetheart out of the will.

“I haven’t read the ruling, I’ve just heard about it,” said Marietta lawyer Sidney Parker, the executor of Strother’s estate. “But we expected it to be reversed. Of course I’m excited and delighted.”

Allison Barnes Salter, another one of the Strother family’s lawyers, said Monday that Melican, may still collect $1.3 million from her former lover’s estate for the sale of a Marco Island condominium he left her in his will.

“That is still being contested,” said Salter.

The case contained the dramatic elements of another sensational oldster meets hotster hook up – Texas oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall and Anna Nicole Smith – that ended up as a will disputed in court. But this one was more pedestrian (Melican didn’t model for Playboy), and with a twist.

The Strother estate argued in court documents that Melican had such a spell over the car salesman he changed his will three times in six years to give her more money and property, the last time only three weeks before his death.

His infatuation with her – he bought her 14.5 carat diamond ring for $160,000, a mink coat, a Jaguar automobile, and paid $50,000 for plastic surgeries – was partly fueled by a mind often under the influence of booze, claimed the family.

According to court documents he drank a gallon or more of wine a day. Melican testified that he’d pour his first drink around 8 in the morning, drink a few hours, pass out, wake up, and start drinking again.

She said he was boozing like that when she met him and, at one point, she persuaded him to quit for several months, calling that “the closest thing to a miracle.”

But when they celebrated the purchase of boat they bought, the Lady Anne, he had a glass of wine to celebrate. “That was it,” Melican testified. “He never – he never – stopped having a glass of wine.”

During numerous hearings and through reams of court documents compiled since 2005, Melican has presented herself as a woman who fell in love and was as captivated by Strother as he was captivated by her.

But she wasn’t a home wrecker, she said. She didn’t know he was married when she met him in 1996 and he put his arm around her and tried to kiss her. He claimed his “wife” had just died. In fact, the woman who had just died was another long-time mistress.

When he told Melican about the death, he wept, she testified. “I thought, what a tenderhearted man, intelligent and charming. So that was the beginning of the relationship.”

In 1999, Strother’s wife, Betty, who was very much alive and suspected her husband was fooling around, hired a private detective, who confirmed the affair, and she got a legal separation from her husband, who moved out of their home and bought a house in Kennesaw.

He continued to provide support for his wife while carrying on the affair and descending deeper into alcoholism. In August 2000, while on vacation with Melican in Cape Cod, he passed out in a chair. The next morning he couldn’t speak, and was taken to a local hospital.

Soon, he required two caregivers at his Kennesaw home, but he continued to drink, and he continued to visit Melican in Florida. One of his caregivers testified that he would argue on the phone with Melican and become irate when he saw her monthly credit card charges. He would have the card numbers changed. But then she’d call and would recant.

The caregivers testified that when Strother returned from Florida they would meet him at the airport and he was so disheveled he looked "homeless." He would return, they testified without any possessions -- "no suitcase, no wallet, no nothing."

A few days after he changed his will for the last time to benefit Melican, a friend testified that he visited Strother at his Marco Island Condo and he was drunk, incoherent, and drinking wine from a box that had a spigot to refill his 16-oz plastic cup.

At one point, the friend testified, Strother relieved himself in a urinal placed beneath him on the floor. The friend said he told Melican to get Strother medical help. He said that he talked to Strother the next day and Strother told him that next time he was in Florida he would see a doctor.

Two weeks before he died, Melican sent Strother back home to Kennesaw while she went on vacation to Vail, Colorado. She never saw him again.