Purported Howard Hughes heir dies

Man claimed to have helped billionaire and was willed portion of estate

Melvin Dummar was driving through the Nevada desert in December 1967 when he stopped to relieve himself and saw, he said, a thin, graying man lying on the ground, bleeding. The only right thing to do was to stop, and so Dummar did.

As he told it, he invited the man into his Chevy, asked him where he wished to go, and drove him several hours to Las Vegas. There, on the passenger’s request, Dummar dropped him off behind the Sands Hotel, giving him some pocket change to take on his way.

Dummar, a magnesium plant worker who at the time was en route to Southern California to make amends with his estranged wife, assumed the man was a “bum,” he said years later.

But in what he described as a turn that upended his life, he came to believe - and to insist despite widespread doubt - that his desert acquaintance was the reclusive billionaire industrialist Howard Hughes.

Dummar, who made international headlines and inspired the film “Melvin and Howard” (1980) with claims that Hughes had bequeathed him more than $150 million for his act of kindness, died Dec. 9 at his home in Pahrump, Nevada. He was 74 and had complications from cancer, said a grandson, Justin Dummar.

“Finding Mr. Hughes out there in the desert has changed my life forever,” Mr. Dummar told the Associated Press in 2004. “I was promised about $156 million in his will for saving his life. But I never got a penny of that money and have wound up scorned, sick and nearly broke.”

Melvin Earl Dummar was born in Cedar City, Utah, on Aug. 28, 1944. He served in the Air Force but was discharged for what was described in news accounts as “emotional problems.”