An Irish businessman who has spent the past 18 years trying to prove that he is the rightful heir to a multimillion-dollar fortune in the US has learned that DNA tests on his grandfather's remains have failed to establish any link to the American family who accumulated the money.
Mr Dermot O'Regan (64), from Crookstown, Co Cork, obtained permission to exhume the body of his grandfather, Jeremiah O'Regan, to try and prove that he was the brother of Ellen O'Regan, who married William Sheehan in the US and whose last surviving daughter, Mary Sheehan, left a large estate in Savannah, Georgia, when she died intestate in 1983.
The remains of Mr O'Regan's grandfather - who died in 1966 - were exhumed at Cork's St Finbarr's Cemetery on May 13th last following a day-long operation which also involved the exhumation of Mr O'Regan's parents: his father, Jeremiah, who died in 1985, and his mother, Mary, who died in 1976.
An American forensic anthropologist, Dr Karen Ramey Burns, from the University of Georgia, took three samples, including fragments of a femur and of a tooth from the remains of Mr O'Regan to see if she could obtain a match with a sample taken from Ellen Sheehan's body, which was exhumed at Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah last January.
But yesterday a Savannah genealogist, Ms Joan Flowers, who was appointed by the Chatham county coroner, Dr James Metz, to work with Dr Burns, confirmed that all three DNA tests had proved negative and thus failed to prove that Jeremiah O'Regan snr and Ellen Sheehan were brother and sister, as Mr Dermot O'Regan had hoped.
"It looks like the end of the road for Mr O'Regan in his quest to prove that his grandfather and Ellen Sheehan were brother and sister, and that he is the closest living relative to Mary Ellen Sheehan," said Ms Flowers, who was part of the independent team appointed by Dr Metz to examine the long-running case.
But Mr O'Regan yesterday expressed confidence that further DNA tests would prove the link. "The situation in the grave wasn't very clear in terms of remains and bones, and I've now sent over a sample taken from myself and I'm confident that that will prove positive and provide a match that will prove my grandfather and Ellen were brother and sister," he said.
Mr O'Regan's solicitor, Mr Colm Murphy, also stressed that initial tests had proved inconclusive and pointed out that there were other relatives buried in the O'Regan family plot in St Finbarr's Cemetery which may have complicated the sampling procedure.
He remained confident that a link would be made between Mr O'Regan and the late Ms Sheehan.
A Cork historian and genealogist, Mr Jim Herlihy, who has worked closely with Mr O'Regan over the past 15 years, tracing the O'Regan family tree in the hope it would enable Mr O'Regan to prove he is the rightful heir, said documentary evidence suggested that Ellen Sheehan and Jeremiah O'Regan were related.
"The research hinged on what Ellen Sheehan had put in her passport form in 1930, namely that she was 48 at the time and that she was born Ellen O'Regan in Ireland in 1882 and that she had gone to the US in 1898. All that matched Dermot's grand-aunt in terms of documentary records but not in terms of the DNA samples taken so far, which is disappointing," he said.
An Irish priest, Father Jeremiah McCarthy, who is parish priest at the Blessed Sacrament Church in Savannah, near where the late Ms Sheehan lived, became involved in the search for heirs at the request of her attorney, the late John Brennan.
He says that estimates of the estate's value of up to $160 million are hugely exaggerated. "I was approached by the late John Brennan around 1984-85 to try and find any surviving heirs.
"We put a number of ads in Irish papers, and about 11 people came forward, and it was those 11 or 12 people who got whatever was left after duties and attorney's fees.
"But it certainly wasn't $160 million. It was never that much," he said.
Mr Murphy agreed with Father McCarthy's assessment of the estate. He said he believed it was worth $200,000 when Ms Sheehan died but that, after legal fees were deducted, only $100,000 remained.
Mr Murphy added that if Mr O'Regan were to take a legal case claiming the assets had been wrongfully dispersed, he could seek at most up to $1 million. This would include the estate's value plus interest accrued over the past 20 years, as well as his costs in pursuing the case.