Stephens v. Beard, 485 S.W.3d 914 (Tex. 2016).
Husband murdered wife, immediately shot himself,
but did not die until a few hours later. Each will provided for legacies
to nine named individuals if they died in a common disaster or if their
death order could not be determined. The trial court determined that the
legacies were effective because the spouses died in a common disaster.
The appellate court affirmed in Stephens
v. Beard, 428 S.W.3d 385 (Tex. App.—Tyler 2014). The court held that
the murder-suicide was a common disaster because Husband fired both the
murder and suicide gunshots in one episode. The court determined it was
irrelevant to the classification of the event as a common disaster that
Husband “did not successfully kill himself immediately” even though he
lived almost two hours longer than Wife. Id. at 388.
On appeal to the Supreme Court of Texas, the court
reversed without even giving the parties the opportunity to present oral
arguments. The court focused on the well-recognized legal meaning of the
term “common disaster” which means that the two parties “die at very
nearly the same time, with no way of determining the order of their
deaths.” The court held that Husband and Wife did not die in a common
disaster because although their deaths were temporally close, the order
of their deaths is known with certainty.
Moral: A murder-suicide will not be
considered as a common disaster if the death orders can be determined.