Most estate planning attorneys will spend their careers reading about “slayer” statutes rather than applying them, which is probably how everyone would prefer it. Recent news regarding the deaths of Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner reminded me of my involvement in an estate arising out the murder-suicide of a married couple and made me aware of the differences between Louisiana law and California law.
“Slayer” statutes exist for the worst cases, the ones in which someone may stand to inherit from a person in whose death that same person may have played a role. Still, every so often, a case brings slayer statutes back into public view and reminds us that backup language in an Estate Plan may matter more than anyone expected. The deaths of Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner have produced one of those cases, raising a question that goes beyond the criminal charges: What happens when the person named to inherit is also the person whose right to inherit is being challenged?
According to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, Rob Reiner, 78, and Michele Singer Reiner, 70, were fatally stabbed at their Brentwood home on December 14, 2025. They had been married for more than 35 years. Their son, Nick Reiner, allegedly fled the house and was arrested that evening. Two days later, District Attorney Nathan Hochman announced that Nick had been charged with two counts of murder, along with a special circumstance allegation of multiple murders and a special allegation that he personally used a knife. As of this writing, Nick has pleaded not guilty to the charges and is awaiting trial.
An Estate Planning issue surfaced in June, when Nick filed a petition in Los Angeles probate court asking for access to money held in a Trust his parents created for him when he was a baby, reportedly worth $1.5 million. He is represented by a public defender and wants to hire a private attorney instead. His civil attorney argues that Nick should be able to use money that lawfully belongs to him to fund his defense. A lawyer for the Trust declined to release the funds, leaving the matter before the probate court.
The timing may be one of the most interesting details. The Trust reportedly provided for Nick to receive half the money at age 30 and the balance at age 35. He turned 32 last September, so the age-30 distribution was apparently due roughly two years before his parents died. According to the petition, that money was never paid out though it doesn’t say why, and the Trust terms have not been made public. If the Trust gave the trustee discretion to hold back the age 30 distribution, the Trustee may have been doing exactly what Rob and Michele designed the Trust to do. It also raises a harder question than the headlines suggest: whether an interest that may have vested before death should be treated the same as property passing because of death.
How California Handles It
California, like most other states, has statutes designed to prevent a killer from profiting from a death. California’s statute prevents a person who feloniously and intentionally kills the decedent from receiving property under a Will, receiving an interest under a Trust, taking property by intestacy, or claiming certain community property rights. The California statute can also bar that person from serving as executor, trustee, guardian, conservator, or custodian, severing joint tenancy interests, and reaching beneficiary designations on assets such as life insurance. The mechanism the statute uses is to treat the killer as though he or she died first, and the rest of the plan proceeds from there.
Even with that statute in place, the administration does not necessarily become simple. A final judgment of conviction settles the question conclusively, but absent a conviction, the probate court may decide the matter using the civil standard, a preponderance of the evidence, rather than the criminal standard, beyond a reasonable doubt. That leaves the Trustee in a difficult position. Pay to the alleged slayer, and the Trustee may have funded someone a court later determines is disqualified. Refuse, and the Trustee may be withholding from a beneficiary who has not been convicted of anything. If the Trust is silent about what to do while that question is open, the Trustee may have little choice but to ask the court for direction.
How Louisiana Would Handle the Same Facts
Louisiana does not call it a “slayer statute,” and it is not tucked into the probate code the way California’s is. It lives in the Louisiana Civil Code, in the articles on “unworthy successors” (La. C.C. arts. 939–946), and it grew out of the much older civil-law idea that a person should not be permitted to profit from a wrong done to the person from whom he inherits. The underlying goal is the same as California’s, but the mechanics differ in ways that would matter quite a bit if the Reiners had been Louisiana domiciliaries.
Two paths to unworthiness, not one. Under Article 941, a successor is unworthy if he is convicted of a crime involving the intentional killing, or attempted killing, of the decedent, or if he is judicially determined to have participated in the intentional, unjustified killing, or attempted killing, of the decedent, even without a conviction. Louisiana courts do not have to wait for a criminal verdict any more than California courts do; a civil finding is enough. But unlike California’s statute, which folds automatically into the probate and trust administration, Louisiana requires a judicial declaration of unworthiness, and that declaration must be sought in the decedent’s own succession proceeding. It is not automatic, and it is not self-executing. Nothing happens to Nick’s inheritance rights under Louisiana law unless and until someone who would benefit from his exclusion actually files to have him declared unworthy.
Who can ask, and how long they have. Only a person who would succeed in Nick’s place, or in concurrence with him, may bring that action, or someone claiming through such a person (Art. 942). A sibling who would otherwise share the estate with Nick, or take his share if he is excluded, fits that description. The action prescribes in five years from the death of the decedent for an intestate succession, or five years from probate of the will for a testate one (Art. 944). That is meaningfully longer than the time pressure a Trustee often feels in the California scenario, where the estate administration itself is what forces the issue.
Forgiveness is a real defense. Article 943 provides that a successor will not be declared unworthy if he proves reconciliation with, or forgiveness by, the decedent. This has no California analogue in the same form and would be a natural point of factual dispute if the case ever reached a Louisiana court: had the parents, in the two years since the missed age-30 distribution, done or said anything that could be read as forgiveness of whatever family conflict existed?
What happens once someone is declared unworthy. Article 945 lays out the consequences in detail: the successor loses his right to the succession, must return any property already in his possession along with its fruits, and is disqualified from serving as executor, trustee, attorney, or other fiduciary under the decedent’s will or in an intestate succession. That last point maps closely onto California’s rule barring a slayer from serving as executor or trustee. Article 946 then provides the same conceptual mechanism as California’s “treated as predeceased” rule: an intestate successor’s rights devolve as though he died before the decedent, and a testate successor’s rights devolve under the rules for testamentary accretion, again as if he predeceased the testator.
The trust wrinkle looks different in Louisiana. Louisiana’s Trust Code does not contain its own freestanding slayer provision the way California’s probate code does. Instead, an inter vivos trust is, at its core, a donation, and the Civil Code’s unworthiness doctrine reaches donations. That means a Louisiana trustee facing a Nick Reiner-type petition would be looking not to a trust-specific statute, but to the same succession-law unworthiness articles, applied to the trust interest as a form of gratuitous transfer. As in California, absent a conviction or a judicial declaration of unworthiness, the trustee has no independent authority to simply withhold a vested distribution on suspicion alone; the safer course, just as in California, is to seek instructions from the court rather than make that call unilaterally.
The forced heirship wrinkle that California doesn’t have at all. Louisiana is the one state that still has forced heirship, and it would add a layer to this case that a California attorney would never need to consider. A “forced heir” under Louisiana law is a child who is 23 or younger at the parent’s death, or a child of any age who is permanently incapable of caring for himself because of mental incapacity or physical infirmity. At 32, and with nothing in the public reporting suggesting incapacity, Nick would not be a forced heir under Louisiana law, so he would have no automatic légitime to fall back on even if he were never declared unworthy of the rest. If he had been a forced heir, though, and were declared unworthy, his légitime would become disposable and the forced portion of the estate would shrink accordingly (Art. 1500), a mechanical wrinkle that simply does not exist in a state without forced heirship.
The Same Lesson, Told Two Ways
Whether the framework is California’s statutory slayer rule or Louisiana’s civil-law doctrine of unworthy successors, the practical bind facing a fiduciary is identical: a person hasn’t been convicted of anything, a court hasn’t declared anyone unworthy, and money that may or may not lawfully belong to a beneficiary is sitting in trust while the criminal case plays out. Louisiana’s version gives the family more time to sort it out, since nothing changes automatically and the action to declare unworthiness carries a five-year window rather than resolving inside the ordinary pace of a probate proceeding. But that same feature means a Louisiana estate can sit in genuine legal limbo longer than a California one might, since inaction has no automatic legal consequence the way it might elsewhere.
The Reiner case will continue to play out in public, but the Estate Planning lesson is already familiar to anyone who drafts these documents, in Louisiana or anywhere else: the first person named may not always be the person who ultimately can receive the distribution or serve as a fiduciary. Fortunately, most clients will never encounter an unworthy-successor fight, but they may encounter the ordinary version of the same problem. A beneficiary dies before the client. A sibling named as Trustee is no longer able to manage the role. An ex-spouse remains on a retirement account beneficiary form because the Trust was updated after the divorce, but the 401(k) was not.
That is why successor fiduciaries, contingent beneficiaries, and clear “treated as predeceased” provisions matter, and it is just as true under a Louisiana trust instrument governed by the Louisiana Trust Code as it is under a California one. Clients tend to focus on the first name listed because that name reflects the plan as they picture it today. The backup provisions rarely get the same attention, but they may often determine whether the plan can still work when life does not unfold as expected.
The loss at the center of this story should not be overlooked: Nick Reiner’s siblings have lost both parents and may now spend years in court with their brother. Hopefully, Rob and Michele Reiner’s Estate Plan named the successors and contingent beneficiaries that a situation like this demands. A comprehensive Estate Plan, whether drafted under California law or under the Louisiana Civil Code and Trust Code, should do more than express the client’s first choice. It should also give the family a path forward when that first choice cannot inherit, cannot serve, or becomes the source of the dispute.
- When the Beneficiary Is the Defendant: Slayer Statutes and Estate Planning - September 1, 2026
- Still Fighting: The Estate Planning Legacy of Shannen Doherty - July 13, 2026
- Declare Your Independence From Intestacy - July 1, 2026
