Heir Unapparent

The picture showed a hatted, jowly man with a small nose. It bore a startling resemblance to Fernandez, according to his wife.

"Seeing that for the first time was a weird feeling. You see someone who has a serious potential of being your family, and all your life you've been raised to believe it's a different person," he says.

The next step was to seek genetic confirmation, but Fernandez quickly learned there were no known Kenedy descendants. So he began tracking down relatives and other sources of genetic material.

"I found out he had a cousin named Max Dreyer, who runs a small museum in Raymondville. I contacted him, and he said it's not possible. The family had no kids," Fernandez says.

Dreyer, 93, was a second cousin to John G. Kenedy Jr. but had never met him because, Dreyer says, "the families didn't get along." Initially, he was reluctant to cooperate, but Fernandez got Dreyer's full attention after DNA tests showed a likely family link between him and Ann Fernandez.

"He [Fernandez] put in a lot of time down here trying to get me to sign this exhumation request. I finally signed it. When we ran the DNA tests, it turns out I'm related to his mother," says Dreyer, who is amused by the whole adventure. "I'd like to know now, for sure, if John G. Kenedy Jr. is the father of Fernandez's mother. Let's exhume him and get it over with. Either he is or he isn't."

Fernandez says that the positive DNA results from Dreyer convinced him to press on. It also sent him for a look at Kenedy's grave in a small family plot on the La Parra Ranch.

For the past 30 years, the Oblate Fathers have used the old ranch headquarters as a religious retreat named Lebh Shomea house of prayer, dedicated to silence and solitude.

"I went over and visited the grave. It's on the ranch, next door to a small chapel. It's considered a religious area by the monk, and he said it was ghoulish to exhume the body," Fernandez says.

Fernandez says another genetic link was established through testing of saliva residue on an envelope that contained the 1930 will of John G. Kenedy Jr.'s mother, Marie Stella Kenedy.

"It's a handwritten will in a paper envelope. The part that was licked had a woman's DNA on it. It was degraded, but the DNA expert said it was related to my mom's," Fernandez says.

Lawyers for the defendants, however, dispute these conclusions.

"The DNA tests did not eliminate Ann Fernandez as an heir, nor did they strengthen her claim," says Adami, who also says it is highly implausible that an illicit birth could have been kept a secret.

"Sarita is a very, very small community. Everyone knows everyone. Based on everyone I've ever talked to, it seems to me if not impossible, certainly very unlikely that John G. Kenedy Jr. had an illegitimate child without it being known. It's a very hard place to keep a secret," he says.

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After John G. Kenedy Jr. died in Saltillo, Mexico, in 1948 of uncertain causes, he was remembered in the obituary that ran in a Corpus Christi paper as a South Texas rancher and graduate of Texas A&M. Also noted was his status as a Knight of the Order of St. Gregory the Great, an honor conferred upon Catholic laymen by the pope for outstanding devotion and service.

"Of a retiring disposition, Kenedy led a quiet life and was best known, perhaps, for his support of the Catholic Church," noted the obit writer.

That depiction of piety jars with both written accounts and old memories of Kenedy.

In a book about the family, If You Love Me, You Will Do My Will by Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, Kenedy is cast as a hard-drinking, oversexed rowdy who once, while an undergraduate, ventured north to the land of the Mormons after hearing alluring accounts of polygamy.

"Mistaking a religious-based practice for promiscuity, he and a pal took a train out to Salt Lake City to sample this imagined lotus land of unfettered carnality. His father had to dispatch the Pinkertons to retrieve the young man," Michaud and Aynesworth wrote.

Another account featured the youthful Kenedy on a shooting rampage in Washington, D.C., where he and his drunken buddies allegedly used their hunting rifles to potshot the Capitol Hill streetlamps.

The book also described drunken wrestling matches and hunting trips.

Similar recollections of "Mr. Johnny" can still be found among the oldsters in Sarita, where the present drifts slowly and the past hangs heavy.

Old black-and-white photos of the founding families decorate the county courthouse, and reverential tales of the pioneer past are found at the starkly white Kenedy Ranch Museum, which anchors the square.

Inside the museum, a historical display includes a picture of Sarita Kenedy East, looking saintly in black lace, beneath a caption, "The Last of the Kenedys."

Her brother John has only a cameo appearance in a mural.

"I wish you could have known him so you would know what kind of person he was. He had a big heart, and he had the money, too," says José Salazar, 86, who, like his father, spent a lifetime as a vaquero on the Kenedy ranch.