Two years after he was buried in a frozen Icelandic graveyard, Bobby Fischer’s body will be dug up to determine if a 9-year-old Filipino girl is his love child and heir to his $2 million fortune.
Iceland’s Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that Fischer’s remains must be exhumed to resolve a legal battle as convoluted as any of his chess games.
When Fischer died of kidney failure on Jan. 17, 2008 — after refusing medical help that would have kept him alive — he inexplicably left no will.
But there were at least three claimants to the secret stash of gold and cash Fischer kept in an Icelandic bank: Fischer’s two nephews, the sons of his older sister Joan, who taught him the chess moves when they were growing up in Brooklyn.
Miyoko Watai, a Japanese chess official, who said she lived with Fischer in Tokyo and married him in 2004 to spring him from jail.
The US government, which indicted Fischer for violating international sanctions by playing a rogue match in Yugoslavia in 1993 with his old rival Boris Spassky. Fischer won $3.65 million prize and went underground after the match.
But the fight for Fischer’s fortune took a new twist when a 29-year-old woman, Marilyn Young, said she and Fischer met at a Philippines tennis club and had a daughter, named Jinky, on May 21, 2001.
Young said that she and Jinky hadn’t seen Fischer since 2005 but he called them every day. “He would always ask for Jinky, who would say, ‘I love you, Daddy.’”
Enter the lawyers.
Under Icelandic law, Fischer’s nephews would have the best claim if he died without a wife or child. If he died with a wife, she would get everything. But if there was both a wife and child, the widow would get one third and the child two thirds.
Watai claimed she had a marriage license. Young’s lawyer countered with a birth certificate.
While an Icelandic court questioned the marriage license, Jinky flew to Reykjavik last December to present her own blood sample.
The Youngs hired an Icelandic lawyer, Thordur Bogason, who filed suit “as a last resort” to dig up Fischer’s remains to see if there was a genetic match to Jinky’s DNA.
Iceland’s top court overruled a lower court Wednesday and backed Jinky. “In order to obtain such a sample it is unavoidable to exhume his body,” the court said.