Judge awards property to Kuralt’s longtime mistress from Reno

Bob Anez

Wednesday, March 22, 2000 | 3:36 a.m.

HELENA, Mont. - A judge Wednesday awarded the Montana fishing retreat of the late CBS correspondent Charles Kuralt to his longtime secret mistress from Nevada.

A letter Kuralt wrote to Patricia Shannon two weeks before he died in 1997 clearly expressed his wish that she have the 90 acres along the Big Hole River after his death, state District Judge John Christensen said.

Given the long and intimate relationship between Kuralt and Shannon, the judge said, "any other conclusion would not make sense and defies logic."

Kuralt met Shannon, formerly Patricia Baker, when he went to Reno, Nev., in the late 1960s to do a story on her efforts to establish a neighborhood park.

Kuralt's two children had argued that the letter merely expressed Kuralt's intention to someday draft a will giving Shannon the property, which includes a former one-room schoolhouse and was valued at $600,000.

The fight over the fishing retreat began after the pudgy, balding "On the Road" correspondent died at 62 of complications from lupus. According to the judge, it was not until after the funeral that Kuralt's widow, Suzanne "Petie" Baird Kuralt, learned of the 29-year affair.

The dispute was originally between Shannon and Mrs. Kuralt. After Mrs. Kuralt died last October, Kuralt's two daughters from a previous marriage took up the legal battle.

Shannon has refused to be interviewed about her relationship with Kuralt. But she said Wednesday in a statement: "I hope that the wounds of these past months can begin to be healed and that we can now celebrate Charles' life the way he would have wanted us to."

The lawyer for Kuralt's children, Todd Hillier, had no comment.

At a nonjury trial last month, Shannon testified that Kuralt, the traveling correspondent known for his folksy reports about quirky Americana, played the role of husband and father for his secret family while his wife lived in New York.

At the heart of the dispute was a note Kuralt sent to Shannon the day he was hospitalized for the last time in New York City: "I'll have the lawyer visit the hospital to be sure you inherit the rest of the place in MT, if it comes to that."

Four months earlier, he had given Shannon 20 acres and the fishing cabin the two of them had built on the banks of the fishing stream. Shannon still lives there.

The judge found that Kuralt went to great lengths to keep his relationship with Shannon a secret. That desire for secrecy may explain why Kuralt did not immediately contact a lawyer to draft a will giving Shannon the disputed property, the judge said.