## Facts

- Laura Watts died leaving a will that made specific bequests to named beneficiaries and devised the residuary estate to Carl Manhart, with Virginia Warren and Frank Warren as contingent residuary beneficiaries.
- Watts named Manhart and the Warrens as coexecutors.
- The will was signed by three attesting witnesses: Manhart, Virginia Warren, and Frank Warren.
- Each of the three witnesses had an interest under the will (and also served as executor).
- The probate court admitted the will to probate, appointed Manhart and the Warrens as coexecutors, and found that Melvin and Arnold Fitzpatrick were Watts’s heirs at law who would take if she had died intestate.
- No party appealed the order admitting the will to probate, and no statutory will-contest petition was filed within the time allowed by the Probate Act.
- After the contest period expired, the coexecutors filed a complaint seeking a declaration of the respective rights of the will beneficiaries and the heirs at law.
- The circuit court upheld the will and ordered distribution according to its terms.
- The Fitzpatricks appealed from that later order, arguing that the will should not stand because all attesting witnesses were interested.

## Issues

1. Whether, after the statutory period for filing a will contest has expired, heirs at law may attack the validity of a will by appealing from a later order declaring rights and directing distribution.
2. Whether the heirs’ “interested-witness” argument functioned as an untimely will contest that the courts lacked jurisdiction to consider.
3. Whether the Probate Act’s interested-witness provision permits setting aside, through a late appeal, a will that has already been admitted to probate without a timely contest.

## Decision

- The appellate court treated the Fitzpatricks’ challenge as a will contest in substance because it sought to defeat the probated will on a ground going to its establishment.
- Because no will contest was filed within the statutory period, the court held the challenge was time-barred and that the courts lacked jurisdiction to consider it.
- The court affirmed the circuit court’s order upholding the will and directing distribution under the will.

## Legal Principles

- The Probate Act’s will-contest procedure and time limit (six months after admission to probate) is the exclusive method for attacking the validity of a will after probate; once that period expires, courts lack jurisdiction to entertain a validity challenge.
- A party may not avoid the statutory will-contest bar by re-labeling the attack as a declaratory-judgment action, a dispute over distribution, or an appeal from a later administrative order.
- Once an order admitting a will to probate becomes final (because no timely appeal or timely contest is filed), later proceedings in the estate cannot be used to reopen the question of testacy.
- The Probate Act’s interested-witness rules are aimed at assuring that a will is proved by the required number of credible witnesses and preventing witnesses from “bootstrapping” each other’s benefits; an interested witness does not, by that fact alone, make a will void.

## Conclusion

In *In re Estate of Watts*, the Fourth District held that the heirs’ attempt to invalidate a will on the ground that all attesting witnesses were interested was an untimely will contest brought after the Probate Act’s six-month contest period had expired. Because the statutory time limit is jurisdictional, the court refused to revisit the earlier admission of the will to probate and affirmed the order enforcing the will’s distribution scheme.


In re Estate of Watts, 67 Ill. App. 3d 463, 384 N.E.2d 589, 23 Ill. Dec. 795 (1979)