As a chess mastermind Bobby Fischer was ever the combatant, capable of executing strategic maneuvers as complicated as they were brutal. Now, after his death, the tussle over his million-dollar estate may turn out to be just as convoluted.
Fischer, an American Jew who renounced his heritage, was buried after a Catholic funeral service at a small country church in Iceland, where he had lived as a citizen and a recluse from 2005 until his death on Jan. 17. It is thought he did not leave a will.
Last week the Reykjavik newspaper Visir reported that Fischer's estate, worth an estimated 140 million Icelandic krona (US$2.14 million), would go to Miyoko Watai, whom it described as Fischer's widow.
"It has been confirmed that Watai was Fischer's wife, not his girlfriend as has been argued so many times," the report said.
But Fischer's brother-in-law Russell Targ has been in Iceland to instruct a lawyer to investigate whether his two sons should be the beneficiaries.
There are also confusing accounts of a daughter, now seven, whom Fischer is said to have fathered during a relationship which blossomed at a country club in the Philippines.
On Sunday Watai's lawyer, Arni Vilhjalmsson, said he had received a document from the office in Japan of a magistrate or district commissioner "or someone like that" confirming the marriage.
"It's a copy and I am waiting for the original," he said. "As you know, they chose to keep it in public that she was just his fiancee. It has the date Sep. 6, 2004. He was in custody in Japan at that time and he came to Iceland in March 2005."
If the document is proved authentic, Vilhjalmsson will take it to a magistrate in Iceland and ask for a private liquidation of the assets. A second lawyer, Tudjon Jonsson, confirmed that he was working for Targ.
"But I cannot make any comment," he said.
Watai is said to have begun collecting pictures of Fischer after he toppled the Soviet master Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972, meeting him in Tokyo a year later.
In 1992, following his rematch against Spassky in the former Yugoslavia, Fischer went into exile because he was wanted in the US for defying international sanctions.
He was held in Tokyo in July 2004 for allegedly traveling on an invalid US passport and kept in a detention center for nine months, during which time he was said to have become engaged to Watai.
But the wedding waters are muddied by reports that in a radio interview Fischer gave in Moscow in 2005 he said that he and Watai were never married.
"We are just good friends," he said.
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