The old will shows that Thompson originally planned to leave his mother $300,000; his sister $200,000; his sister’s two daughters $100,000 apiece; and his brother, William Dean Thompson, and father, William Thompson, $75,000 each. He also bequeathed $50,000 to an uncle, Thomas Dean.
Meanwhile, Thompson had directed that his wife, Lu-Shawn, get their multimillion-dollar Clinton Hill brownstone and all “tangible personal property, other than currency,” the will reads.
Under the old will, Thompson also ordered that $2 million be set aside in a trust, controlled by executors, to be invested, with Lu-Shawn earning the interest. The will stated that trustees would then quarterly dispense funds from the trust to his wife for a “good reason, after considering all other resources available to my wife.”
Thompson’s mother, Clara, filed bombshell papers a month after her son’s October death from cancer claiming that Lu-Shawn “spent money like it was water” and got her dying husband to sign a new will just before he died that bequeathed his $750,000 estate to her daughter-in-law and their two children. The new will makes no mention of the $2 million trust, or an additional $2 million at all.
Clara Thompson and the late DA’s sister, Catherine “Cinda” Adams Gaskin, have continued to dispute the legitimacy of the deathbed will and asked a surrogate court judge to force Lu-Shawn to produce Thompson’s 2008 will.
Clara claims Lu-Shawn destroyed the original copy of the 2008 will — making it null — and forced her dying husband to “execute a new will less than two weeks prior to his death, at a time when he was suffering from the tremendous physical and mental complications from his cancer and its treatment.”
But duplicates were made of the old will as records. A judge has ordered Lu-Shawn to produce one.