History Lesson 
Sarita's Secret
Once the seat of a famous ranching empire, this sleepy town has kept hidden for eighty years the answer to one of South Texas's greatest riddles: Is Ray Fernandez, the descendant of a Mexican maid, the heir to the gigantic Kenedy fortune?
(Page 4 of 4)
In the family cemetery, next to the chapel, the grave sites of the Kenedy clan are laid out in a single, neat row. Johnny and Sarita rest beside their parents. Curiously, I found no graves for Captain Kenedy or Petra. I learned later that Sarita had removed her grandparents from a Corpus Christi cemetery and reburied them in Brownsville, surrounded by four of their children. Father Kelly told me that he strongly opposes exhuming Johnny's body. "His will left everything to his wife. That should be the first issue," the monk said. "Even if he is the father, he chose not to give anything to the child."
JOHNNY KENEDY'S HANDWRITTEN WILL is what this lawsuit is all about. It bequeaths "all of my property of every character and description both personal and mixed"—no mention of real property—to his wife, Elena. Austin attorney Mark Schwartz and other lawyers representing Ann Fernandez contend that the will was effective only to dispose of Kenedy's personal property and that it did not specify who got the ranch. In such cases, they argue, the law requires that two thirds of the real property goes to the child and one third to the widow, with her portion reverting to the child upon her death. The defense argues that Ann is not a legitimate heir and that even if she is, Johnny clearly intended to leave his fortune solely to Elena. "In Texas you can leave your property to whoever you want," Buster Adami, a lawyer for the trust, told me. "You don't have to include children, either legitimate or illegitimate."
Schwartz believes that Elena and her lawyers were aware that the will was flawed. In 1949, the year after Johnny's death, they prevailed upon Humble Oil and Refining Company, which held oil and gas leases on the ranch, to file a friendly suit asking the court to declare Elena the rightful owner of the ranch. "This was a put-up job," Schwartz says. "They didn't even bother to introduce the will into evidence." Nor did they make any attempt to determine the heirs of Johnny or Sarita Kenedy. "The fact that they didn't invite Ann Fernandez to be part of the proceedings means it is not binding on her," Schwartz told me. Is it possible that Elena didn't know that the baby born to their maid was Johnny's? "A wife knows," Schwartz says. "If a maid gets pregnant and leaves for five months, then returns not to the ranch but to the family mansion in Corpus Christi—that couldn't have happened without the wife knowing."
Ray Fernandez came to the same conclusion as he began piecing together the parallel stories of his family and the Kenedys. "Elena was a little Napoleon," he said. "I talked to an old cowboy at Kenedy ranch named Duckett who told me that cowboys had to ask Elena's permission to get married. Elena would have done anything she could to keep the blemish from her husband's reputation. I think Elena kept the secret from Sarita." If Sarita had known that she had a niece, might she have included Ann in her will? In her later years, Sarita openly mourned the Kenedys' vanishing bloodline. In the evenings she would take her bottle of whiskey to the tower above La Casa Grande and stay there for hours. Vaqueros told of hearing her plaintive sobs and moans.
When Johnny died, Sarita and Elena became co-owners of the ranch, but the relationship was decidedly chilly. They found a common interest only after a Trappist monk who called himself Brother Leo came into their lives. He appeared one Sunday after Mass when they were placing flowers on Johnny's grave. Brother Leo had been released from his vows of silence and sent out to convince rich Catholics that the way to heaven was to trust their fortunes to his Trappist order. Handsome and magnetic, the monk became Sarita's closest spiritual adviser for her remaining thirteen years; some historians suspect he was her lover too. Sarita had already written at least two wills, one after her mother died and a second in 1948, after Johnny died. On his visits to La Parra, Brother Leo began to comfort Sarita, coaxing her to go easy on the whiskey and to think about leaving her fortune to a foundation, which he would be happy to oversee. Both Sarita and Elena made frequent and generous contributions to Trappist charities in South America and, at Brother Leo's invitation, took an ocean voyage to visit the missions their charities supported.
By the mid-fifties, there were many contenders for the Kenedy millions, including Sarita's husband's nephew Tom East Jr.; Peter Grace, a wealthy New York businessman who was active in Catholic charities; and Bishop Mariano Garriga, of Corpus Christi. Grace had been a friend and mentor to Brother Leo but eventually fell out with the monk and developed his own agenda. Sarita opened several bank accounts at the Grace National Bank, in New York, apparently without telling her lawyer, Jake Floyd, of Alice. (Floyd was known as El Víbora Seca, "the Dry Snake," a nickname bestowed by his bitter rival, political boss George Parr.) Brother Leo used one of the accounts to finance his various activities. Bishop Garriga warned Grace and Brother Leo that some South Texas "hothead" might do them irreparable damage if they continued funneling Sarita's money out of Texas. But the real power behind the scene, according to authors Michaud and Aynesworth, was Jake the Snake. He represented the Alice National Bank and wanted the bank to control the foundation Sarita planned to establish. In 1960 Sarita rewrote her will again, cutting out family members and leaving most of her estate to the foundation. Grace and Floyd continued to fight over control. Brother Leo, meanwhile, was helping Sarita make plans for another trip to South America. Already in failing health, she was diagnosed with cancer while in Argentina and was flown back to New York, where she died in February 1961 without ever seeing her beloved ranch again. Leo claimed that he was at Sarita's bedside at the end (although several nuns reported that he was in the cafeteria) and that on her deathbed she signed a document naming him the sole director of her foundation.
With Sarita's death came a mighty flood of lawsuits and more than 180 claimants, including Mexican descendants of Petra Vela de Vidal and descendants of Mifflin Kenedy's younger brother, Elisha. A nephew of Marie Stella filed a suit charging that Brother Leo and Grace had exerted undue influence over Sarita and asking the court to remove them from the foundation board. The dispute reached the highest levels of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope John XXIII supported the decision of New York's Francis Cardinal Spellman to give the Texas Catholics 20 percent of the money and the New York Catholics 80 percent. This provoked an angry tirade from Bishop Garriga. In 1964 a papal negotiator settled the suits, mostly on Floyd's terms. Grace received $14.4 million to start his own Sarita Kenedy East Foundation, devoted to worldwide Catholic charities. Brother Leo was frozen out, forced to resign from the foundation board and exiled to a remote monastery in Canada. Bishop Garriga was reduced to an ex officio board member of the John G. and Marie Stella Kenedy Memorial Foundation, and control went to Floyd's allies at the bank.
In the eighties rumors that the bank was fleecing the foundation found their way to Attorney General Jim Mattox, who launched an investigation. A new bishop in Corpus Christi, Rene Henry Gracida, wrested control from the bank, with Elena's help, and began funneling the bulk of its grants to his own diocese. This caused a revolt by the bishops of other dioceses in Texas, who in 1996 took their case to another attorney general, Dan Morales. He filed suit against Gracida, alleging misallocation of foundation funds. The mess over church control was finally resolved in 1997, when the makeup of the board was changed so that independent voices could prevail. But other messes remained. Descendants of Mifflin Kenedy's adopted daughter, Carmen Morrel, claimed that Sarita's father, Don Gregorio, had stolen her inheritance. The foundation settled for an undisclosed amount, and the trust is still fighting that one in appeals court. Then came a claim by descendants of a prominent Tejano family, the Ballís, who said that Mifflin Kenedy had leased their ancient grant rather than purchased it. They offered several ancient documents as evidence, but the nonprofit corporation won a summary judgment. The case is now on appeal.
The last of the cases is Ann Fernandez's. The legal obstacles are formidable. Buster Adami, on behalf of the trust, and Richard Leshin, on behalf of the foundation, will argue that the wills of Johnny and Sarita Kenedy took effect decades ago, and unless those outcomes are set aside, this finality bars a claim by Ann. Moreover, they contend, this lawsuit could destroy all those charities so dear to the Kenedy family. Mark Schwartz rejects this contention: "We're not asking for the moon. We want the charities to continue. We're asking pennies on the dollar and a seat at the table." Ray Fernandez would like to sit on the boards of the two nonprofits, help decide who gets the Kenedy money, and maybe expand the Hispanic representation.
Since Kenedy County doesn't have a probate judge, the case was assigned to the court of Travis County probate judge Guy Herman. In early 2004 Herman reviewed the evidence and decided that the law required the exhumation of Johnny Kenedy's body and a comparison of his DNA with that of Ann Fernandez's. Two times Herman ordered exhumations—in February and again in June—but both times lawyers for the two charitable institutions temporarily blocked it with appeals to higher courts.
But sometime in 2004, the exhumation is likely to happen, and forensic science will reveal what happened on the Kenedy ranch in 1925. Nobody has come right out and said it yet, but this case is really about the history of South Texas and a century and a half of cheating and lording over Mexican Americans by patróns. Even the darkest secret can't hide forever.
My Library
