America’s Top Forty show was hosted for decades by Casey Kasem and was one of the top radio shows in the world. Casey was born Kemal Amin Kasem in Detroit on April 27, 1932 to Lebanese immigrant parents who worked as grocers. He succeeded on radio and also did other work like voice roles in cartoons like “Shaggy” on Scooby-Doo. When he died on June 15, 2014 at age 82 his estate was reported to be valued at over $ 80 million USD.
After his death, three children from his first marriage were involved in what can only be described as a very sad dispute with his second wife that went on for over 5 years. The dispute was recently reported to have been settled in December 2019. This, in my view, is another example of what goes wrong when proper estate planning is not considered by parents/spouses/children. The ensuing consequences are often unfortunate and can be played out, in large part, in the courts. There is too much to the Casey Kasem story for this blog but, the story involves his dementia from Lewy Body Disease, one of the most common progressive dementia’s after Alzheimer’s. It involves his disappearance and a Los Angeles court declaring him a missing person on May 12, 2014. It involves his not being buried for six months after he died and then being buried in Oslo Norway for some reason on December 16, 2014. For more on this story I suggest the article by Amy Wallace entitled “The Long, Strange Purgatory of Casey Kasem”.
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