A testator who in his will bequeathed his entire estate to his wife without specifying exactly what the estate included, made, several years later, another will in which those assets from the testator’s estate that would be transferred to his wife were specified, all without revoking the first will or making any reference to the other assets.
The Court held that the first will is annulled due to a contradiction between the provisions of the two wills. Drafting a new will that contradicts the provision of the previous will constitutes an annulment of the previous will as a whole, even if the previous will has not been destroyed or explicitly annulled. Here, it is a case where the provisions of the first will applied to all the assets of the estate while the provisions of the later will only applied to some of the assets of the estate and were silent as to the rest of the assets of the estate. Since the assets that are included in the inheritance provision in the later will are included in the earlier will anyway, the correct interpretation of the testator’s intention is that only these assets are the assets that the testator requested to bequeath to his wife. This means that the provision in the later will contradicts the provision in the earlier will - and therefore the earlier will is annulled.