In New York County Surrogate's Court, the last will and testament of Marilyn Monroe was filed for probate, showing that for all her troubled personal life, her business affairs seemed in extraordinarily good order. Unencumbered by the debts, tax claims and pending lawsuits so common to Hollywood's money minters, the value of her estate was listed "in excess of $500,000," a legalism often meaning much more. She left $100,000 in trust for her mentally ill mother, $50,000 to her onetime ...

Abner Stoltzfus began taking on work as a roofer in his late teens, often traveling outside his home in Lancaster County, Penn., to rustle up some spare cash. Before long he ran into a member of the Pagans motorcycle gang who offered him some cocaine on the job. Soon Stoltzfus was hooked, money was running low, and he began pushing drugs to feed his habit. "I don't think there was much analysis behind his actions," his lawyer, John Pyfer Jr., ...

A family member says an elderly grandmother who left a trail of five dead husbands in five states over decades has died after an illness. Betty Neumar's son-in-law Terry Sanders says she died in a hospital in Louisiana. Stanly County, N.C., Sheriff Rick Burris says authorities are looking into her death. The 79-year-old was facing three counts of solicitation to commit first-degree murder. She was accused of trying to hire someone ...

ITEM: At a dinner party in New York's Westchester County, the dessert includes grapes. The hostess notices that her fellow suburbanites fall to with gusto; the guests from Manhattan unanimously abstain. ITEM: At St. Paul's, a fashionable New Hampshire prep school, grapes are the only part of the meal invariably left untouched. ITEM: In San Francisco, a Safeway official observes: "We have customers who come to the store for no other reason than to buy grapes. They'll load ...

When I traveled through northeastern Pennsylvania in March for my TIME cover story on shale natural gas, it wasn't hard to find unhappy homeowners like Sherry Vargason. Vargason, who lives on a cattle farm in rural Bradford County, has leased her land for shale-gas exploration, and a well was drilled a few hundred feet from her front door. Not long after, she began to experience problems with her water, which comes from an underground well on her ...

THE last thing that Valada Penny wanted was a baby. At 22, the beautiful black woman already had one child by a teen-age marriage. While separated from her husband and living with her parents in Brooklyn, working and trying to plan her future, she again became pregnant. She considered having the child. Then, when she was more than four months along, she decided instead to have an abortion. The late procedure, which involved induced labor, was painful. "I was like ...

Recently the University of Wisconsin and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation released its second annual County Health Rankings, a within-state comparison of county health covering each county in every state the United States. Newspapers and TV news programs jumped all over the results — particularly local outlets serving counties that were ranked comparatively lower than their neighbors. "If you are looking for a healthy county, head north," read a March 30 article in the Inland Valley ...

Stocky, cheerful W. O. Hodges, 45, was sheriff of Denton County , Texas for only four years, but he died last week a famous man. Before taking office, Hodges was just an ordinary sort of fellow; he grew up in a little cow town named Aubrey, spent a year at Texas Christian University, got a Depression job as a cop in the county seat, went to war as a coast guardsman, came home and started running for sheriff. He made it the second time out.Seven days ...

On Friday morning, walking through the Alberta area of Tuscaloosa, I saw a man sifting through the rubble of what used to be Affordable Mini Storage. He was going through the remains of his storage unit, searching for anything salvageable in the post-apocalyptic landscape of our home town. He picked up a toy from the debris, a still-sealed Ozzy Osbourne action figure and tossed it into his "save" pile. "At least he's in good shape, huh?" the ...

The incident was over in a matter of minutes. But two weeks after the beating of a black motorist by Los Angeles policemen was videotaped by an eyewitness, it had led to arrests, probes by local, county and federal organizations and a Justice Department review of law-enforcement violence across the nation. It began with wailing police cars chasing a motorist through the night, cornering his car in a Los Angeles suburb and surrounding the driver as he stepped into the ...