Robert Worth Bingham - Controversial Inheritance

Controversial Inheritance

Bingham's first wife died in 1913. In 1916 he married Mary Lily Flagler, reputedly the wealthiest woman in America at the time and widow of Henry Morrison Flagler. She died within a year, and although there was never any evidence of it, Bingham's enemies would long claim he was somehow to blame for her death. As the family business crumbled publicly in the 1980s, several biographers, most notably David Leon Chandler, claimed Bingham had killed his wife for the money, either by overdose or withholding medical care. While acknowledging these theories were at least plausible, more mainstream sources, from the Filson Club's respected quarterly publication to the New York Times, dismissed the allegations as impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

Nevertheless, as Bingham inherited $5 million after her death, enabling him to purchase the Courier-Journal and Louisville Times, which became critical in establishing his later national prominence, it made an attractive conspiracy theory. Bingham's son, Barry Bingham, Sr., argued that Flagler was an alcoholic who drank herself to death, a theory supported by an affidavit from her family doctor given in 1933.