Dummar may have told truth after all

Melvin Dummar never got rich.

And lots of people think he's a liar.

But a rescue effort is under way for the Brigham City man's reputation, if not his bank account.

A veteran detective says he's found new evidence proving Dummar was telling the truth three decades ago about a legendary encounter in the desert with eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes.

In 1976, Dummar's story made him the world's most famous gas-station operator. He might have become the richest one, inheriting one-sixteenth of the Hughes fortune. But a jury rejected his story and declared an alleged will of Howard Hughes to be a hoax.

"I just know that I got ripped off," Dummar said last week. "And nobody would believe me."

The eccentricities of Howard Hughes are now on display in the Oscar-nominated film "The Aviator." Dummar's purported encounter with Hughes was portrayed in a 1980 Oscar winner called "Melvin and Howard."

Dummar's story always did seem like something Hollywood dreamed up. He claims that while driving through rural Nevada one night in December of 1968, he pulled onto a dirt road to answer the call of nature. He says he found a scraggly, bearded man lying injured in the desert. Dummar drove the stranger to Las Vegas and did not believe it when the man claimed to be Howard Hughes.

In 1976, when the real Howard Hughes died, he was the most famous billionaire in the world. The question of who would get his money became an international guessing game. When a handwritten will was discovered in Salt Lake City, it created a worldwide sensation.

The document became known as the "Mormon Will" because someone had mysteriously dropped it on a desk in the headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The purported will divided the Hughes estate into 16 equal shares, with one share designated for the LDS Church itself and another sixteenth for "Melvin DuMar."

When the world press corps beat a path to Dummar's gas station in Willard, Box Elder County, he professed surprise at the existence of the will. He told reporters his story of the old man in the desert, but Dummar said he never knew if the stranger really was Howard Hughes.

"I thought he was a bum," Dummar told reporters in 1976. "I lent him some money."

The first-cousins of Howard Hughes mounted a fierce court battle. If they could prove the will a hoax, they stood in line to inherit the entire fortune. The cousins' strongest ammunition in court was the fact that Dummar eventually admitted he lied about an important aspect of his story.