Melvin Dummar

Melvin Dummar was a Willard, Utah service station owner who claimed that at 11 p.m. one evening in December 1968 he had picked up the reclusive multibillionaire Howard Hughes along a desolate road in the Nevada desert. Dummar, then 23 years of age, had reportedly found a solitary and lost Hughes lying on the side of a stretch of U.S. Highway 95 about 150 miles (240 km) north of Las Vegas, near the small town of Lida Junction. Leaving his mineworker's job at the Basic Magnesium Corp. mine in Gabbs, Nev., where he'd been employed at the time, Dummar had been traveling to Los Angeles to find his wife, Lynda, whom he had claimed had "run off with another man," when he'd spotted Hughes. According to Dummar, an unshaven, dirty and disheveled Hughes had refused medical attention and directed Dummar to take him to Las Vegas, dropping him off early the next morning at the rear of the Sands Hotel at his request, borrowing 25 cents from Dummar. It was at that time Hughes had revealed his true identity to Dummar.

Related Topics:
1968 - Howard Hughes - Nevada - Los Angeles

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After Hughes' death at age 70 in April 1976, a handwritten will was discovered in the headquarters of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City, one that purported to leave "Melvin DuMar" one-sixteenth of Hughes' estate whose total estimated worth was over $2 billion. Dummar (whose inheritance would have been $156 million) had claimed a well-dressed man had dropped off the handwritten will, sealed in an envelope, on the desk of his service station, shortly after Hughes had died. Dummar, not knowing whether the will was real or not, then in turn delivered it to the headquarters of the Church of Latterday Saints in Salt Lake City, who had also been left one-sixteenth of the estate in the will.

Related Topics:
1976 - Mormon Church - Salt Lake City

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The document, which soon became popularly known as the "Mormon Will", had been ruled a forgery by a Nevada jury in June 1978 and Dummar received nothing from the Hughes estate. A 1980 feature film directed by Jonathan Demme and titled Melvin and Howard starring actors Paul LeMat as Dummar and Jason Robards, Jr. as Hughes, further examines this story.

Related Topics:
Forgery - 1978 - Jonathan Demme - Melvin and Howard - Paul LeMat - Jason Robards, Jr.

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In early 2005, retired FBI agent Gary Magnesen claimed to have found new evidence that Dummar's story was true. Magnesen stated that Hughes's closest employees remembered the reclusive Hughes entering the Sands early one morning in December 1968 and stating that he had been picked up by Dummar in the desert. Furthermore, Hughes had purchased interests in mines located near the area where Dummar had originally found him. See deseretnews.com.

Related Topics:
2005 - FBI - 1968

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