I’ve mentioned before that I’m fascinated by the life of Howard Hughes, the billionaire aviator, movie producer, Lothario, and eventual recluse and nutcase. There are many chapters in Howard’s life story that are worth considering, but one of the most interesting to me personally is the epilogue that comes after his death, the tale of Melvin Dummar and the so-called “Mormon Will.”

Dummar is something of a legendary figure here in the Salt Lake area, because he’s from around here. He’s an ordinary joe — some would call him a loser — who claims to have had an extraordinary encounter and almost became ungodly rich because of a simple act of decency.

So the story goes, Dummar was driving alone through the sparsely populated hinterlands of Nevada one dark and bitterly cold night in the late ’60s when he spotted someone lying in the middle of the road. Dummar assumed the scruffy-looking, half-frozen old man was just a bum, but he nevertheless took pity on him, and brought him into his truck to get warm. The old man asked Dummar to take him to Las Vegas, and Dummar complied. At some point during the ride, the bum claimed he was Howard Hughes; Dummar didn’t believe him. When they reached Vegas, Dummar gave “Howard” — if that’s who the old man really was — some change and dropped him off behind one of the hotels. Dummar never saw him again.

Several years later, following Hughes’ death, a handwritten will turned up under mysterious circumstances in the offices of the LDS Church in downtown Salt Lake City. It named as beneficiaries both the Church and Melvin Dummar — who at that time was eking out a living running a gas station in the small town of Willard, Utah, on the shores of the Great Salt Lake — and it specified that each of them was to receive 1/16th of the vast Hughes fortune. For a brief time, Dummar became an international celebrity. Then the Mormon Will, as the document came to be known, went into probate court and was declared to be a fabrication. Dummar was branded a con artist… and not even a particularly good one.

Aside from a 1980 movie called, appropriately enough, Melvin and Howard, Melvin Dummar returned to the obscurity from whence he came. In recent years, he has been painted by Hughes biographers as a joke, an opportunistic liar, or a mere footnote that’s not worth saying much about.

Then about a year ago, a new book was published about Dummar and the Mormon Will. Written by a former FBI agent named Gary Magneson, The Investigation makes the case that Dummar has been telling the truth all these years, that there is evidence Howard occasionally left the Vegas hotel room where he supposedly spent the last decade of his life. Magneson believes that Hughes was either touring mines recently acquired by his business empire or possibly visiting a brothel in the area where Dummar claims to have picked him up and that the old man had impatiently (and foolishly) wandered off into the desert instead of waiting for his ride. Magneson also thinks that the jury which decided the probate case back in 1978 was tampered with, witnesses intimidated, and Dummar screwed out of a fortune.

I’ve read The Investigation and found it to be pretty convincing, despite a clunky writing style reminiscent of most of the self-published “personal histories” that you inevitably run across when you live in Utah. (The Mormon Church encourages its members to keep journals and write memoirs for their posterity; a nice idea, but few people have the writing chops to really make them interesting.) However, I should probably specify that I’ve always been inclined to believe Melvin’s story. Why, you may ask? Well, mostly because I think it’s a great story, almost an archetypal story, of a small man performing an act of kindness only to be rewarded when the “bum” reveals himself to be a powerful man, and I’d just like to think that it really did happen. I guess I’ve always had a soft spot for the underdog.

Anyway, I don’t think The Investigation made much of a splash on the bestseller lists, but it did give Melvin Dummar some ammunition to go back to court, hoping that this time he might be able to get what the Mormon Will promised him, or at the very least clear his name. I’ve been following this case with some interest, wondering if it was possible that after all these years, Dummar might finally get his hands on that fortune he’s been seeking his whole life.

I should’ve known better. Two weeks ago, a judge threw out the suit, saying the 1978 probate was “fully and fairly litigated” and the decision stands. If that wasn’t enough, the judge dismissed the suit “with prejudice,” which means it can’t ever be refiled. So much for happy endings.

Incidentally, I recently saw the aforementioned film Melvin and Howard, and I quite liked it, even though it actually has very little to do with Howard Hughes or the Mormon Will. (The probate trial, which you’d think would have been the centerpiece of the movie, gets only about five minutes worth of screentime right at the very end.) Instead, the film focuses on Dummar’s peripatetic life and struggles to win his fortune. Not Howard’s fortune necessarily; any fortune would have done. Paul LeMat of American Graffiti fame (he was John Milner in that film, driver of the yellow deuce coupe) is affable and convincing as Melvin, and Jason Robards turns in what amounts to a memorable cameo as Hughes. It’s rambling and loosely jointed in the fashion of other late-70s/early-80s character studies, by turns funny, poignant, and quirky. The final scene, in which Melvin muses on the best part of his encounter with Howard, is guaranteed to bring a smile to your lips. And for locals it has the added attraction of having been filmed in the locations where the events actually occurred, including a very pre-suburban sprawl Willard, Utah. Definitely worth a rental or your time if you find it on TV. And don’t forget to watch for Melvin himself, who appears in the film as a counterman at a bus station snack bar.