Dummar still plugging away in legal fight

TINTIC, Juab County — Is Melvin Dummar the man who saved billionaire Howard Hughes' life or a liar?

"I've been called everything from a crook to a forger," shrugs Dummar, a frozen-meat deliveryman at the wheel of his pickup, on rounds that can take him to the place where he says he rescued Hughes from the desert. "I don't care what people say — as long as they get the facts straight."

The question has come up again as Dummar fights another apparently futile court battle — 30 years after a Nevada trial jury and a Texas court rejected as an apparent hoax a handwritten will leaving him 1/16th of the Hughes estate.

Dummar, now 62 and battling cancer, is on his last lap for justice, trying to show with new evidence and witnesses that Hughes had a reason to leave him a rich reward — $156 million, to be exact — and that he was cheated out of the share.

A federal judge in Salt Lake City threw out Dummar's new case in January, but his lawyers are appealing. For good measure, they filed another federal lawsuit in Nevada, where lawyers for two Hughes aides named as defendants have countered with motions for dismissal and sanctions.

"Mr. Dummar just won't take 'no' for an answer," said Randy Dryer, a Salt Lake City lawyer for a Hughes cousin who is the only surviving target of the lawsuit. "He was told no in Texas, Nevada and Utah courts. Now he's appealing. He keeps filing suits to different courts trying to get a 'yes.' It's nonsense."

Dummar is trying to hold the two Hughes associates accountable for what he says was false testimony by a wider circle of Hughes aides at the Las Vegas probate trial in 1977-78, the main arena of litigation over the disputed will.

The Hughes aides, for the most part, testified their boss was holed up at a Las Vegas hotel and couldn't have been in the desert — and therefore, the will naming Dummar had to be a forgery.

But Hughes' reputation as a shut-in may have had its exceptions. Dummar's most important new witness is the billionaire's pilot, who says he routinely delivered Hughes on secret nighttime flights in a single-engine plane to rural Nevada brothels — and can place a once-missing Hughes in the desert for a rescue by Dummar.

Other witnesses say they can vouch that Hughes favored a certain diamond-toothed prostitute at a brothel in Lida Junction, Nev., near where Dummar says he found him. Still others claim to have heard secondhand that Hughes acknowledged writing a will that included Dummar.