## Facts

- Three life insurers issued policies on John W. Hillmon totaling \$25,000, naming his wife, Sallie E. Hillmon, as beneficiary.
- Mrs. Hillmon claimed Hillmon died from an accidental shooting at a remote campsite near Crooked Creek, Kansas, in March 1879 and sued for policy proceeds.
- The insurers denied that Hillmon died and alleged a conspiracy to defraud them by substituting another person’s body as Hillmon’s.
- The insurers argued the body was Frederick (or John) Walters, a young cigar maker.
- To support that theory, the insurers offered letters Walters wrote from Wichita shortly before the death, stating his intention to leave Wichita and travel “with a man named Hillmon” to work on or start a sheep ranch in the West.
- The trial court consolidated the three actions for trial, treated the defendants as sharing only three total peremptory challenges, and excluded the Walters letters as hearsay.
- The jury returned a verdict for Mrs. Hillmon.

## Issues

1. Whether a federal court may consolidate related actions against multiple insurers for trial over defendants’ objection, and whether consolidation limits each defendant to fewer peremptory challenges.
2. Whether a declarant’s letters stating a then-existing intention to travel with another person are admissible to show the declarant later acted in accordance with that intention.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court held the trial court had authority to consolidate the actions for trial.
- The Court held consolidation did not merge the defendants’ identities and did not reduce each defendant’s statutory entitlement to three peremptory challenges.
- The Court held the Walters letters should have been admitted to prove Walters’s then-existing intent, allowing an inference that he later traveled with Hillmon.
- The judgment for Mrs. Hillmon was reversed and the case remanded for a new trial.

## Legal Principles

- Federal courts may consolidate actions “of a like nature, or relative to the same question” to avoid unnecessary cost or delay, even over objection.
- Consolidation for trial does not eliminate separate party status; each defendant retains its own procedural rights, including full peremptory challenges.
- A declarant’s contemporaneous statement of then-existing intent or plan may be admitted, notwithstanding the hearsay rule, when the intent is material and supports an inference of subsequent conduct consistent with that intent.
- Letters written in ordinary private correspondence shortly before the contemplated act, under circumstances that reduce suspicion of fabrication, may be competent evidence of intent and, by inference, later action.

## Conclusion

The Court ordered a new trial because consolidation could not deprive each insurer of its own peremptory challenges and because Walters’s letters stating his intent to travel with Hillmon were admissible to support an inference that Walters went with Hillmon, bearing directly on the disputed identity of the decedent.


Mutual Life Ins. Co. of N.Y. v. Hillmon, 145 U.S. 285 (1892)