American heiress, widowed with the death of Henry Ford II, 70, who died of pneumonia on 9/29/1987. He left Kathleen $3 million in cash plus the income – estimated at $15 million a year – from a $350 million trust, in addition to homes in London, Palm Beach and suburban Detroit. The generous will to his widow sparked a long and bitter court battle, which was settled in 1988, between Kathleen and Henry’s three kids from his first marriage.
Raised in a working-class home in Detroit, she was married and pregnant at 15; her husband, David DuRoss, was killed in a car crash three years later on 12/12/1959. She became a model to support their two kids. At 30, she met Henry Ford II, and took the role of his mistress for years in a “back street” affair before becoming his third wife on 10/1/1980. Broadly traveled in the U.S. and Europe, she took up the hobby of photography.
On the evening of 1/10/1997, while she was out of the country, a burglar removed a windowpane of the master bedroom at her $4.6 million home in Palm Beach, Florida and made off with her jewels, worth an estimated $12 to $15 million. She was not insured, and offered a $1 million reward. Though the majority of the jewels were returned through the efforts of Randy Jones and Shawn Slep, the owners of Global Gems, a jewelry store, and Jeff Meyer, who spotted one of the gems and reported it in December 1997, the reward was never paid and turned into an ugly legal fight instead.