The Truth About Mary Jo Mayton

This blog is for anyone who knew and loved my father, Phil Smith, and for anyone who knows and loves Mary Jo Mayton. It’s intended especially for anyone who believed that Mary Jo ever loved Phil. If she did love him, she wouldn’t have done the things documented here.

On Nov. 14, 2019, eight days after my father, Phil Smith, died at the age of 78, I received a call from a lawyer in Memphis, Tenn.

He told me he represented Mary Jo Mayton, the woman my Dad had married two-and-a-half years earlier, and then asked when I planned to file my Dad's will with the Shelby County Probate Court. He needed to know when it would be public because Mary Jo would be making a claim on my Dad's estate.

Eight days — that’s how soon after Phil Smith drew his final breath on Earth that the lawyer of my Dad’s “wife” reached out to see how quickly they could go after his money. Since he was calling so close to my Dad's death, it's likely Mary Jo retained him much earlier: Perhaps the second after she heard he died? When he was in hospice care and unconscious? While he was still alive but in failing health? As soon as they were married in 2017?

Either way, Mary Jo — her lawyer referred to her as my “stepmother” but let’s be honest, she was just “that woman” our Dad married — wanted to get every penny she could from my Dad’s estate. Having her attorney reach out right away meant she would get the process going sooner rather than later.

A few weeks after that call, less than a month after Phil died, she indeed filed a petition with the Probate Court asking for her “elective share” of his estate, a “homestead allowance,” a “year’s financial support” and a “personal property” allowance. Those were the four "buckets" of money she was entitled to, as our estate lawyer explained it.

She wanted his money and proceeds from his house and his belongings (e.g., his car) — everything she could get her old, wrinkled hands on — and petitioned the court to make her intentions public record. The lawyer initially said in lieu of a percentage of all those assets, they would "settle" for a cash payment of $135,000, then dropped it to $106,000, both of which were unreasonable considering the amount left in his estate.

**To see all the public filings, including the petitions that she signed to make claims against my dad’s estate, click here and enter docket number PR015413.

She did this in early December 2019 (on my birthday, no less), meaning our holiday season would be spent compiling a list of Dad’s creditors and assets, emailing our estate lawyers, and figuring out how we could maintain HIS wishes — almost literally his dying wishes — of leaving everything to his actual blood relations.

Yes, a spouse is entitled to certain things in Tennessee, but Dad's Last Will and Testament specifically excluded Mary Jo and her kids by name, stating he made no provisions for them.

Phil wanted them to have nothing. He told us that. He told his financial adviser that. He told his attorney that. And he made it all official by telling the State of Tennessee that. Hell, he even told Mary Jo and her kids that, because they all had to acknowledge being mentioned in the will and ensure their names were spelled correctly.

But do you think that would stop her?

When some of our Dad’s friends heard what she was doing, they clutched their pearls, aghast at why this woman would seek her THIRD dead husband’s money — money our Dad and our Mom saved over 45 years together. They repeated what Dad and Mary Jo had told others on several occasions — they kept their finances completely separate. They indeed had different checking accounts (except for one joint account for some shared bills), different investment accounts, different life insurance policies.

“I’m shocked,” many of Phil's friends said when they heard Mary Jo was going after his estate. “She has her own money — and plenty of it. Also, they kept their finances separate and told everyone that.”

Yeah, she told us that too. We just weren’t that gullible.

They couldn't see that she was, and is, the textbook definition of both a black widow (Phil was her third husband to die because of poor health and, dare we say, mysterious circumstances) and a gold digger (she got money from all of them and likely even went after Phil specifically because he was a widower).

Anyone who truly paid attention to Mary Jo could see that securing money from our Dad was always her goal, even though she had a LOT more money than he did. She would make that clear later on.

From the day we met her, in fact, back in 2013, everything was about material possessions: How many homes her family members owned, what boats or airplanes they bought, even the salaries of her kids and grandkids.

She and my Dad would remind us, “We keep our finances separate,” but we noticed that he would pay for meals when we dined together; clearly, she was taking advantage of his chivalrous side. While she later paid for her own house in Alabama (only her name was on the deed) and most, though not all, of the utilities were in her name, he paid for a lot of things for her home, such as appliances and a riding lawn mower. All of the utilities in his Collierville condo were in his name alone.

All of which made it strange when she would claim to worry about Dad not having enough money for his nursing-home bills (he stayed in one for about four months before passing). She would brag to me, “I have plenty of money; my husband Ed made sure of that. But I don’t think Phil does.” (That was a reference to her second husband, Edwin Bozeman, who died in 2008 and apparently left her well off — “which husbands are supposed to do,” she would later say. Also, more money talk; she was obsessed with it).

I knew my Dad did have enough money to live in a nursing home for a long while, but I also knew what she was after. By him not spending his money on things like health care and nursing home costs, that left more for her and, more likely, her greedy, nasty children.

It was always about the money for them.

If you met Mary Jo Mayton and didn’t learn this simple fact, you weren’t paying attention.

Philip Lee "Phil" Smith was widowed in 2008 when my Mom — the one-and-only Kathryn Elizabeth "Kitty" Morrison Smith — passed away after a lengthy battle with ovarian cancer. Soon after she died, my Dad vowed to not be alone again. He couldn’t stand cooking for one or watching TV alone or doing anything by himself. After 43 years of marriage to a companion extraordinaire, he knew the solitary life was not for him. Anyone who knew him realized this too.

So he went on a quest to find a new wife. On a trip to Boulder, Colo., he met and began dating a woman who lived there. In the summer of 2010, he asked her to marry him. She accepted, and he moved to Colorado to be near her. We warmed up to her, but circumstances beyond anyone's control got in the way and they split after less than a year of dating and after only a few months of engagement.

When he moved back to Memphis, heartbroken and dejected, there were a few other possibilities, but nothing panned out. Friends introduced him to Mary Jo. Before long they were dating.

He wasn’t into her at first, and we weren’t sure it would work. But then things got more serious. He likely realized this was his only shot at a relationship. We began to worry because this woman wasn't anywhere near Phil's standards and we didn't trust her from the beginning. But he seemed content, and he was a grown adult still very much of sound mind, so we went along with it.

Dad would later tell us of Mary Jo’s pressures for them to get married and he even mentioned that, after a couple years of dating, she had finally given him an ultimatum: Marry her or lose her. It was the Christian thing to do, she said. She was planning to move to Foley, Ala., and if he wanted to live with her, they had to be legally wedded. No way in hell she would live in sin.

As Dad had just turned 76 and was in deep fear of being lonely again, he relented and proposed. She accepted, of course. How else would she stake claim to his money if the state didn’t legally acknowledge their union? We objected, but again, not much we could do. He desperately wanted to avoid being abandoned once more.

Because he did propose, some might argue that he loved her, and perhaps there were feelings there, but he never expressed them to us. We never heard in his words or saw in his actions any strong emotion toward this woman. And how could he? For someone who was married to Kitty, finding true love again was never in the cards. He settled (and I do mean, settled) for someone who cooked and cleaned for him, who served as a companion on weekends and holidays, who could accompany him when spending time with other couple friends.

What struck us more than anything was how embarrassed he was of her. He didn’t want us to get to know her, perhaps because she was (is) an awful, awful person who made clear from the beginning not only her greed but also her racism. (She would later, when Phil went into hospice care, refuse to agree to be alone with him and the hospice nurse for fear of said nurse being Black.) Moreover, she didn't like any of us and probably told Phil as much.

Not surprisingly, none of Dad’s family was invited to the wedding. Not his kids. Not his brothers. The only ones attending their nuptials were her family and their shared friends.

Soon after they got hitched, Mary Jo indeed bought that house in Foley, Ala. We were worried about Dad being far away from his church, his friends and his support network, especially his golf buddies, the “Frozen Chosen.”

Thankfully, Dad insisted on keeping his condo in Collierville, and not only would he and Mary Jo come to Memphis a few times a year, but their friends visited them a few times in Alabama.

On one of those trips back to Memphis in March 2019, Dad fell ill. They made it to Memphis, where he was admitted to the hospital with gout and pneumonia. He felt better after about a week and was discharged, but there was one problem: He couldn’t walk. Little did we know at the time that he would never walk again and that he would never leave a hospital again except when he went home to die.

Over the next eight months and beyond, we would understand, without a doubt, Mary Jo’s true feelings and intentions. She dreaded being with him. She was planning to move back to Alabama and out of his life. And she would be overjoyed once he died.

After he spent a few months in the hospital and a couple of short-term rehab centers, doctors determined that he was not improving as he faced a litany of health problems. Long-term nursing care was his only option.

His and Mary Jo’s first choices didn’t have availability, so he wound up being admitted to Quince Nursing and Rehab Center in East Memphis. Mary Jo and her daughter drove over to the facility and informed everyone that it was a good spot for Dad.

Soon after, however, some problems emerged. Quince is an older nursing home, but for Mary Jo, the real problem was that the staff and many of the residents are Black. On trips to see Dad at Quince that summer, it was obvious that Mary Jo didn’t like being there and didn’t get along with the nurses. She did manage, not surprisingly, to form a bond with the facility's only white nurse.

(Side note on Mary Jo’s racism: She LOVED telling the story of why she didn’t drink coffee. When she was young, her grandmother warned her that drinking coffee would turn her Black, as if that was the worst thing that could happen to a privileged little white girl. She told that joke with such glee, oblivious to the fact that she was admitting her grandmother’s and her own overt racism. Or maybe not oblivious at all but proud of her bigotry.)

Every day Dad was at Quince was another day Mary Jo couldn’t be in Foley, another day she was surrounded by so many Black people who I'm sure could sense her discomfort around them.

She made it clear that her goal was to move Dad back to Alabama, and she joked about loading him into her son’s RV and hauling him down there. Once in Foley, she said she'd "keep him in his wheelchair on the screened-in porch and not let him go anywhere.” A half-baked and foolish plan that, of course, was meant to appease her and not tend to Dad’s growing medical needs.

That idea was never seriously entertained, and Dad languished at Quince for another few months while Mary Jo stewed. This was not the life she imagined for herself. She didn’t take that whole “for better or worse, in sickness and in health” part of the wedding vows seriously.

Her disdain for Phil and this whole situation is perfectly captured in the below photo I took of Dad during a visit in July 2019. Being wheeled out to the facility’s courtyard and sitting in his chair with the sun on his face was his favorite thing to do, truly one of his only pleasures. But it was obviously a nuisance for Mary Jo. The scowl on her face tells you everything you need to know about this hideous woman.

Things would soon get worse. Her scowl would turn uglier. And her refusal to take the “for richer or for poorer” part of the wedding vows would also bubble to the surface.

While her greed was well-established six years earlier when Dad’s friends introduced them, emerging in drips and drops over the years, it came flooding out as Dad approached the end.

About a week before my Dad died, his brother Bill and Bill’s wife, Kim, were in town for a visit. I was making plans to fly to Memphis from my home in Colorado because Dad was on the verge of going into hospice.

One morning, Bill and Kim had driven over to Quince to spend some time with Dad. As they arrived at the nursing home around 9:30 am, they noticed Mary Jo was on her way out.

Strange, they thought. She had only left the condo about 20 minutes before they had, so her time with Dad had been short. Surely there was a reason. When Bill approached her, he noticed that she was visibly upset. He asked what was wrong.

“I just found out that Phil didn’t leave any of his life insurance for me,” she told him in a huff. “He’s not providing for me. Husbands are supposed to provide for their wives when they die.”

She also noted that she had been “loaning him money all along.” Was this true? She paid $2,000 to keep his bed at the Village of Germantown while he was hospitalized, but I saw him pay her back for that. Again, separate finances.

Perhaps there are other “loans,” but I later got all of his bank statements and canceled checks for the last three years, and there are plenty of payments to Mary Jo, likely reimbursing her for whatever she spent on his or their behalf.

Later that day, when Bill and Kim were back at the condo with Mary Jo, as she was sorting through some of her mail, she casually said — apropos of nothing and to no one in particular — “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with this $900,000 statement from my investment account.”

Always. About. The. God. Damned. Money.

That continued over the next 10 months. She fought, through her lawyer, for as much of Dad's assets as she could. Why? Because she felt entitled. It's all documented in the court filings, for anyone who has the time and interest. For those who don't, let this account be your guide.

Mary Jo never actually lived in Dad’s condo at 1426 Calumet Farms in Collierville, nor was she on the deed, yet she claimed that address as her “residence” as part of her petition for a “homestead allowance.”

Sure, she stayed there when she and Dad would come back to Memphis. And sure, that’s where she slept each night she was with him while he was in the hospital and nursing home. And by the way, we fully acknowledge that she did indeed spend a lot of time with him during his illness, but isn’t that what spouses do?

When Dad specifically wrote her out of the will in May — a document that was revised in October 2019 to exclude her and her kids, all by name — he was saying to the world in the most public way, “The woman I married has no right to anything of mine; it all goes to my kids.”

But when Phil died a few weeks later, none of that appeared to matter, and a legal battle ensued.

I won’t get into the fact that Mary Jo is at least partially responsible for my Dad’s illness to begin with. If you saw the food she made him, you'd agree. It’s also my understanding that her first two husbands died of health issues due in part to poor diets; I know her second one did because she told me about his stroke and subsequent time in a nursing home.

Part of me thinks simply being married to her provided enough misery for Dad to give up. Death or life with Mary Jo? Not a tough decision.

Nor will I dwell on how suspicious it was that Mary Jo and one of her daughters went to the funeral home to get his death certificate — thankfully the funeral director called and asked my permission, which I declined. Why would she need it? I think you can guess why. People can do a lot of damage, financially and otherwise, with such a document.

And I won’t go into detail about how Mary Jo and her family treated Dad’s children, children-in-law, and grandchildren (that's my sister Julie, her husband, Ben, and their two girls, plus my wife, Sandy, and me) except to say they didn’t offer any sympathy after he passed, not even at the funeral. There was never an utterance of “I’m sorry for your loss,” or “Your Dad was a good man.” Nothing. I also won't get started on our passive decision to allow Mary Jo and her family to have a role in Dad's memorial service. It's something our family regrets to this day.

Especially once we learned that after the funeral, in the church where our parents raised us, Mary Jo’s daughter Shelby asked our Uncle Bill for Julie’s and my home addresses because her church in Alabama wanted to send us a "note of condolence.”

No note ever arrived, but our addresses were perfectly accurate in Mary Jo’s court petition a few weeks later, which is surprising because my sister was living with an in-law and no one except our family knew it.

Deceitful even as we were saying goodbye to our Dad.

In the fall of 2020, as we approached the one-year anniversary of my Dad’s death, Mary Jo was still fighting for a substantial percentage of his estate. By the way, there wasn’t much of an estate involved here: the balance of his home, car, and possessions. He spent his money so he could enjoy life, and our family wholeheartedly supported that. At the same time, Mary Jo publicly gave him grief about sending money or gifts to his kids and grandkids. 

We also couldn't sell his condo while the estate was being challenged, so it sat there empty except when Julie and her girls, and Sandy and I came to visit and clean out his belongings. 

As for his life insurance and retirement accounts, he had left those to Julie and me — much to the chagrin of Mary Jo and her children — and there was nothing they could do about those funds. Mary Jo’s lawyer had tried to get us to say how much money he had left us, but the probate judge declined his request.

Still, she was pushing for almost ALL of his remaining assets. She rejected our counteroffer and proceeded. Our lawyer informed us that this matter would head to court — complicated, of course, by COVID-19 and the fact that neither Julie nor I lived in Memphis. In a hearing, after depositions of those involved (namely me as the executor, and Mary Jo as the claimant), the judge would determine how much money Mary Jo would receive from the eligible remaining estate.

Our lawyer said he would depose Mary Jo to get a better idea of how she and Dad divided their expenses, etc. And her lawyer would depose me about, well, we’re not exactly sure.

Then came a shocking twist.

In October 2020, a few days before those depositions were supposed to begin, we were informed that Mary Jo had accepted one of our previously made offers. The estate was closed a few weeks later, she got her pittance (much of which likely went to her own lawyer’s fees), and Julie and I received our share (after paying a large chunk to our attorney).

Just like that, it was over. 

Why did she fight so long to get most of Dad’s money only to relent at the end by accepting a settlement? We’ll never know the answer for sure — and at this point, three-and-a-half years later, we don’t care — but we guess it might have had something to do with her health. Had she died before the case was settled, they wouldn’t have gotten anything. This way, they would get something.

More likely, it has to do with the unbridled greediness of Mary Jo and her daughters who probably feared getting less than we had offered because, well, everyone knew Mary Jo didn't deserve shit.

Why am I posting this now, more than three-and-a-half years after my father died? To be honest, I wrote this account soon after the estate was settled, back in early 2021, to provide a record of how things transpired. It was cathartic for me, as a writer, but I held off on posting. Now, however, I want people to know the truth about a woman whose hideousness went unseen or, more likely, ignored.

Without a legal battle, we could've closed Dad's estate in two months. Because of Mary Jo's actions, it took us 10, including months upon months of holding onto his condo we should've sold before COVID hit. I won't disclose the exact dollar amount in the settlement, but it's not the dollar figures that matter — it was the way she defied Phil's own wishes and went after money she claimed she would never seek. 

So to anyone who knows Phil Smith, I ask you this: If the roles were reversed, if Mary Jo had died before Dad, do you believe that he would petition the court for her money? Would he challenge her kids because he had “spousal” rights? Would he fight them in an expensive legal battle for a year?

Of course you don’t believe that. Because he wouldn’t. Because he wasn’t driven solely by money like she is. Because he was a loving, trusting person who would say, “Well, we kept our finances separate, and I’ve got enough money to live on. Her money belongs to her and her kids.”

Which leads to the next question: Is Mary Jo a gold digger? I think the evidence speaks for itself. She didn’t need the money she took from our Dad’s estate, but she sure wanted it. Or maybe her kids convinced her to go after it. If she felt bad about what she had done and decided to drop the case, she never apologized or showed remorse. But that's doubtful anyway because she happily accepted our settlement check.

Whatever. They’re all shitty, and the more people who know about their actions, the better. Especially their fellow churchgoers at Shady Grove Presbyterian in Memphis. I'd love to ask them if they consider Mary Jo and her kids good examples of Christians.

Through this entire ordeal, only one thing was clear: Mary Jo never loved Phil Smith. She only loved the idea of outliving him and taking his money. Which she did. She just didn't get as much as she wanted. I'm not sure if she found someone else to marry and then pilfer his kids' and grandkids' inheritance, but I'm sure she tried.

Mary Jo is now 85, I believe (her birthday is April Fool’s Day; how perfect!), and she apparently suffers from dementia. That can't be easy for anyone, but I'm not at all sympathetic.

Because only the good die young. Which means she could outlive us all.

Thankfully, however, the legacies of good people like Phil and Kitty Smith will endure, even if their lives have not.

I'm sure they would be the first to say I shouldn't give any more thought to Mary Jo and her family — and I haven't, in fact, given them any thought in the past two years. I revived this blog so others can see the truth about her.

But she doesn't get the last word.

So I'll close with a more upbeat thought and a much happier image — it's of Phil and Kitty, pictured at the Outer Banks in North Carolina, reveling in the joy that was their life together.

It's a good reminder of two wonderful people gone from this Earth too soon but who will forever live in the hearts of so many.