Cash Landing

"At the hearing, I was sitting across a table from the people from Turbomeca and I told them I would make (a settlement) offer right there and give every dime of it to anybody who could cure my husband," Gaela says. "And I told them all I wanted was an apology. It wasn't about the money."

But on May 8, 1995, Gaela and Phil settled out of court. Turbomeca paid $25 million to the estate of Philip Dean Hedrick.

Gaela says she was ecstatic to be able to put closure on the lawsuit. But her days in court were far from over. Gaela had been approved as Phil's legal guardian and conservator shortly after the accident, and she says she became a marked woman. Friends and strangers seemed to take an acute interest in her financial affairs.

"The lawyers were throwing around numbers to me that didn't seem real," Gaela says. "I thought Phil and I would have our lives back and lawyers would not be in our business anymore. I didn't know this was the beginning. Rather than make our lives easier, it was going to make our lives harder. Every time you wrote a check or spent some of that money, it felt like blood money because all these people would be out there with their hands out, just grabbing. You don't understand -- we didn't win the lottery."

Gaela says she and Phil received 85 phone calls at home the day after the settlement was announced on the news.

"I heard from a girl I hadn't seen since fourth grade. I heard from people that said they had loaned Phil $400 back in 1975 with interest. Or somebody's family needed this and this. Everybody wanted a piece of it."

Throughout the settlement process, a public debate had raised questions about legal reform to limit wrongful-death awards and whether such large payoffs merely served to grease the pockets of ravenous lawyers and further jam court dockets.

The day the Hedricks reached a settlement, James, their attorney, told The Star: "We held out and held out, and they (the defendants) finally got there."

In actuality, James and the attorneys representing Phil Hedrick earned one of the largest pieces of the settlement. The $25 million was dispersed this way: $10.1 million for attorney fees and costs; $8.9 million into Phil Hedrick's structured annuities; $3 million deposited into a restricted account for Phil; $2 million into Gaela's structured annuities; $624,000 for medical payments and check charges; $173,000 deposited into the checking account of Phil's estate; and nearly $86,000 into Gaela's checking account. Phil's payments from the structured annuities brought home about $43,000 per month.

Gaela was overwhelmed once the checks started arriving. "When we got the settlement, nobody told me what the laws were. Nobody told me how to handle it. Nobody prepared me for what was going to happen."

Though she had wished for material things in life -- a bigger house, better clothes, new cars -- the reality was that she was now in a financial position to improve her family's standard of living and take care of Phil without worrying about the cost, although she had trouble figuring out what to do with "so much extra money."

One of the first things Gaela did was take Phil, her children, one of her children's spouses, and a hired caregiver on a trip to Jamaica for two weeks. "We needed time to get away," she says. "We needed time to regroup."

Gaela started splurging and loaning money. As sole conservator of Phil's estate, she didn't need his approval for any of her expenditures. His input legally was limited to deciding which county he wanted to live in.

"I still cleaned my own house," Gaela says. "I still wore tennis shoes I bought from Wal-Mart. But I had some nice stuff I bought with my money from annuities. I had never had a matching pair of bras and underwear. Yeah, they were expensive, but five years later, I am still wearing the same bras and underwear. We got some stuff initially we never had in our lives, but we are still using it and still have it. We haven't spent another dime of it."

Some of Phil's family members disagreed. His brother and sister-in-law, Jerry and Dorothy Hedrick, criticized her spending habits and the medical care she was giving Phil.

Gaela says they had ulterior motives. "Dorothy wanted money from day one," Gaela says. "We got a call from Dorothy wanting some money for her son to start some pyramid-scheme business. She said she needed a loan of $7,500 and asked my mom to write a check. It was terrible, absolutely terrible. Dorothy threw a fit in the attorney's office and said she and Jerry deserved part of the money." Gaela says she was naive. "I tried to treat them like my own family. I trust my own family with everything and I thought Phil's family was that way too. I thought people were honest."

But Jerry and Dorothy were adamant in their suspicions, especially about another man -- Brian Hacker, a construction worker -- in Gaela's life.