Fire Victim Leaves Millions To 'Shocked' Diabetes Group

When a house fire last year killed 88-year-old Helene Whitlock Alley and her husband, a professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval Academy, she was remembered primarily as an unassuming retiree and a devoted wife.

Now, Alley is being remembered because of something else: a $7.3 million posthumous donation to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, the largest bequest in the nonprofit organization's history.

The bequest's size stunned the foundation, which had known Alley as a dedicated "hundred-dollar donor," said Alan Berkowitz, the group's national director of planned giving. Instead, he said, she turned out to be the "millionaire next door," a term taken from the title of a best-selling book about people who quietly accumulate large sums of money without attracting notice.

"I was shocked, shocked," Berkowitz said. "We had no idea what her wealth was."

The source of Alley's wealth is something of a mystery. Her late father was a successful businessman, Berkowitz said, and her assets included Merck stock that she might have purchased when she worked at the pharmaceutical company as a secretary before she married in 1949.

The reason for the bequest, however, is quite clear: Her late brother, Theodore Whitlock Jr., had Type 1 diabetes, and the gift was made in his memory and that of her father.

Alley included with her will a note to help her son, Robert, her only immediate survivor, understand why she left the bulk of her fortune to the foundation.

"My will may not be what you had anticipated," she wrote to her son, an illustrator of children's books. "However, I believe that once you have read my will you will embrace its purpose wholeheartedly."

Alley described her brother's battle with diabetes as "heart rending, frightening and inspiring."

"He was happily married, mentally sharp, independent and traveled alone by car or plane without hesitation," she wrote. "He injected insulin 3 or 4 times a day and checked his blood sugar multiple times a day until, one morning in his 73rd year, while fixing breakfast, he dropped dead."

Alley went on to say that her "knowledge of the difficulties" faced by her brother and other diabetics "motivated me to use my inherited funds and Merck stock to further the research to help find a cure for diabetes that at no time requires a diabetic patient to take an organ rejection agent" after receiving transplanted pancreatic cells.

She left her son $1 million. Through a family member, he declined to comment.