I recently finished reading Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 classic, The Talented Mr. Ripley. The titular Ripley (for the unfamiliar) is a New York City con artist who’s dispatched to southern Italy by the shipbuilding magnate Herbert Greenleaf to convince Greenleaf’s son, Dickie, to return to New York rather than idle away and try his hand as a painter in Il Bel Paese.
While there, Ripley ingratiates himself and becomes enamored with Dickie, and eventually decides to steal his identity. Ripley executes his plan, so to speak, on a gloomy afternoon’s boat outing by beating Dickie to death with an oar and giving him a burial at sea.
Suspicion of Ripley comes and goes after Ripley leads Herbert and the authorities to conclude that Dickie took his own life. Once in the clear, he sends Herbert a will (which he forged) leaving Dickie’s estate to Ripley. The book ends with a letter from Herbert letting Ripley know that the presumably sizeable estate would be administered accordingly.
The book would have had to go on much longer—and perhaps have been called The Patient Mr. Ripley—had it been set today in the Muskokas, rather than on the Mediterranean.
A would-be estate trustee in Ontario requires “proof of death” to secure a certificate of appointment, but the usual forms of proof (death certificates; funeral director’s certificates) are hard to come by if someone simply vanishes. That’s where Ontario’s Declarations of Death Act, 2002 comes into play. The Act, which codifies and expands on the common law rule, allows a court to declare someone deceased if, generally speaking, (a) they’ve “disappeared in circumstances of peril” or been absent “for at least seven years”; (b) they’ve been incommunicado since; and (c) there’s reason to believe they’ve passed.
The facts of the few published decisions dealing with the Act are sad—and not too dissimilar to the fiction Ripley led others to believe about Dickie. Still, in one instance, the court concluded that the respondent simply “disappear[ed] into the Indian populace” after not returning from a trip abroad and thus declared her an absentee (described as “a status betwixt the quick and the living”) under the Absentee Act, while simultaneously appointing the applicant to manage her property.
Sad though the cases invoking the Act may be, a declaration under the Act can provide closure, trigger insurance payouts, and facilitate estate administration. Sometimes, miracles happen, though: There have been “numerous … cases of persons who were declared by courts to have died, only to later reappear.” Wasylyk v. Wasylyk, 2012 ONSC 7029, para. 8. And the Act has a procedure for that happy outcome. We’ll see if anything like that happens in the next Ripley book—whenever I finally get to it.
Written by: David Postel
Posted on: September 30, 2026
Categories: Commentary, Estate Trustees
I recently finished reading Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 classic, The Talented Mr. Ripley. The titular Ripley (for the unfamiliar) is a New York City con artist who’s dispatched to southern Italy by the shipbuilding magnate Herbert Greenleaf to convince Greenleaf’s son, Dickie, to return to New York rather than idle away and try his hand as a painter in Il Bel Paese.
While there, Ripley ingratiates himself and becomes enamored with Dickie, and eventually decides to steal his identity. Ripley executes his plan, so to speak, on a gloomy afternoon’s boat outing by beating Dickie to death with an oar and giving him a burial at sea.
Suspicion of Ripley comes and goes after Ripley leads Herbert and the authorities to conclude that Dickie took his own life. Once in the clear, he sends Herbert a will (which he forged) leaving Dickie’s estate to Ripley. The book ends with a letter from Herbert letting Ripley know that the presumably sizeable estate would be administered accordingly.
The book would have had to go on much longer—and perhaps have been called The Patient Mr. Ripley—had it been set today in the Muskokas, rather than on the Mediterranean.
A would-be estate trustee in Ontario requires “proof of death” to secure a certificate of appointment, but the usual forms of proof (death certificates; funeral director’s certificates) are hard to come by if someone simply vanishes. That’s where Ontario’s Declarations of Death Act, 2002 comes into play. The Act, which codifies and expands on the common law rule, allows a court to declare someone deceased if, generally speaking, (a) they’ve “disappeared in circumstances of peril” or been absent “for at least seven years”; (b) they’ve been incommunicado since; and (c) there’s reason to believe they’ve passed.
The facts of the few published decisions dealing with the Act are sad—and not too dissimilar to the fiction Ripley led others to believe about Dickie. Still, in one instance, the court concluded that the respondent simply “disappear[ed] into the Indian populace” after not returning from a trip abroad and thus declared her an absentee (described as “a status betwixt the quick and the living”) under the Absentee Act, while simultaneously appointing the applicant to manage her property.
Sad though the cases invoking the Act may be, a declaration under the Act can provide closure, trigger insurance payouts, and facilitate estate administration. Sometimes, miracles happen, though: There have been “numerous … cases of persons who were declared by courts to have died, only to later reappear.” Wasylyk v. Wasylyk, 2012 ONSC 7029, para. 8. And the Act has a procedure for that happy outcome. We’ll see if anything like that happens in the next Ripley book—whenever I finally get to it.
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