Edsell v. Evered

The ultimate question presented is whether the appellant, a pretermitted wife under the husband’s will, demonstrated by competent evidence that the pre-marital agreement signed by her was presumptively a product of her husband’s overreaching, thus shifting to the husband the burden of coming forth with evidence that the wife entered into the agreement voluntarily.

The evidence presented by the petitioner/wife, and adopted by the trial court in his extensive findings of fact, is essentially as follows.

The petitioner and the decedent, Ralph Edsell, met in 1978, when the petitioner was a guest at…