Chuck Yeager's daughter, who managed the 83-year-old test pilot's assets after the death of his first wife, has been ordered to pay her father nearly $1 million for violating her duties as his trustee in her zeal to protect his wealth from his second wife.
After nearly two years of deliberations, a Nevada County Superior Court referee determined that Susan Yeager improperly profited when she had her father's trust buy her out of property the two co-owned in Northern California near Nevada City.
The ruling, quietly signed by a judge late last month, found that the daughter, now 55 and living in Hawaii, could keep a family condominium Yeager had deeded first to her and then to his new wife. But Susan Yeager was ordered to reimburse the retired general's trust $915,018.68 in profits and back taxes incurred in the land sale, as well as an estimated $38,000 in court costs.
Yeager's lawyer and his heirs indicated this week, however, that the battle might not be over.
Susan Yeager could not be reached, but her brother Don said the heirs plan to appeal the financial judgment. And Yeager's lawyer said the general and his new wife are preparing a lawsuit, alleging that the children underfunded their father's pension plan.
"Round 2's gonna be coming up pretty quick," said Yeager's lawyer, George A. Roberts.
The case, which has estranged Yeager from his four grown children, cast a harsh light on the family of an American icon -- a World War II fighter pilot ace who went on to break the sound barrier and become the hero of the book and movie "The Right Stuff."
Technically, the Superior Court matter dealt with a tangle of lawsuits involving a modest cache of assets -- some rural property, a little money, a tractor, some lithographs autographed by Yeager and the rights to his life story beyond what has already been covered in the public domain and in his autobiographies. But its emotional center was the widower's decision in 2003 to marry Victoria Scott D'Angelo, 36 years his junior and a former actress and sometime drifter whom his children distrusted.
In interviews, Yeager and his second wife contended that the children feared losing control of their father's fortune, which his daughter, Susan, had managed after the 1990 death of his first wife, Glennis.
