Heir Unapparent

"Mr. Johnny loved to drink hard liquor right out of the bottle. "He'd come and tell the cook, 'Kill a calf, make some menudo,' and then he'd go to Matamoros and not come back," says Salazar, who still puts in a few hours on horseback each day at the ranch.

Tobin Armstrong, 80, whose 50,000-acre ranch abuts La Parra on the south, knew Kenedy intimately and as a fellow Anglo rancher. He recalled him with affection while also decrying the lawsuit.

"I knew him from childhood. He was a dear, dear friend. I called him Uncle Johnny," Armstrong says. "He was a wonderful guy, great athlete, tremendously attractive. He could play any musical instrument you put in his hands. We traded horses with him, and he came regularly to visit."

Armstrong dismissed the Fernandez suit as "without value."

"I think it's a tragic, unfortunate development. To take someone, after all these years, and drag them out of the ground and smear them in all the newspapers is just disgusting," he says.

But former Kenedy County Sheriff Rafael Cuellar, 66, whose father and grandfather both worked for the Kenedys, says the matter must be resolved, despite local reservations.

"I can understand why a lot of people are against exhuming the body. Like my mother, they don't believe in autopsies or exhumations," he says. "But wouldn't it be something if they exhume the body and the DNA matches? Wow! DNA is a wonderful thing. It would be like when you go to court. Beyond a doubt. Even the unbelieving would have to believe."

In the lawsuit filed by Ann Fernandez, Kenedy is cast as a hard-drinking womanizer, the son of a privileged South Texas aristocracy who used his family power to take advantage of a young Hispanic maid.

"In the 1920s, John Jr. had just about everything a man could want. But he wanted more. He wanted Maria. John Jr. slept with Maria. Maria became pregnant," reads the lawsuit.

"When Maria's pregnancy began to show, the Kenedy family sent her to Waco to have the child. According to baptism records, Maria gave birth to Anita at an unwed mother's home in Waco in 1925," according to the suit.

After that, the suit claims, Maria was not permitted to return to work at the family mansion at La Parra. Instead, she was sent to work at a Kenedy house in Corpus Christi that John Kenedy Jr. regularly visited.

The baby Anita, the suit claims, was raised by "a Mexican woman in Kingsville."

The suit makes other allegations that bear a sinister flavor.

"Shortly after returning to work as a maid for John Jr. in Corpus Christi, Maria became pregnant again. This time she would give birth to a son, Raul. However, Raul's life would be cut short. He died from poison in 1931 at the age of 2. Ann, who was poisoned at the same time, was hospitalized, but survived," reads the suit.

Questioned about this disturbing allegation, Schwartz, the Fernandezes' lawyer, said it would be elaborated upon at trial.

The suit also claims that Tom Goates, who was Maria's second husband, became aware of Ann's parentage and attempted to confront the Kenedys but was intimidated into silence.

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For Richard Leshin, a Kingsville lawyer who represents the John G. and Marie Stella Kenedy Foundation, the Fernandez lawsuit is just another in a seemingly never-ending series of legal raids on the Kenedy estate.

The litigants have ranged from disaffected Kenedy in-laws to descendants of the holders of the original Spanish land grants. Several decades of courtroom warfare were triggered by contested wills left behind by Sarita, who died of cancer in 1961.

Ultimately all claims, including those by Brother Leo, a Svengali-like Trappist monk who had befriended Sarita and induced her to spend vast sums on Catholic charities in South America, were defeated.

"I would say there has not been a day since her death that the foundation has not been in litigation. The foundation has remained intact, but tens of millions of dollars have been spent on legal fees that could have been available to charities," Leshin says.

And, Leshin predicts, this suit likewise will fail.

"I think even if she's declared the daughter, there are other issues that would prevent her from receiving the assets of the foundation. It's been too long," Leshin says.

Among them are the fact that John G. Kenedy Jr.'s will was ruled final in 1949 and that more than a half-century has passed without anyone making a claim against the estate.

He nevertheless painted a doomsday scenario should the Fernandez lawsuit wrest control of assets from the trusts.

"It would shut down a lot of Catholic churches in South Texas and have a very detrimental effect on other Catholic churches around Texas, plus other charities," he says.

But Schwartz, the Austin lawyer who represents the Fernandez family, says this lawsuit is not about raiding estates or destroying charities.

"This case is about how we treat children born out of marriage. We think a father has some responsibility for those children and, in this case, for the descendants of those children," he says.