Judge Rejects Heiress's Claims To Squatter's Rights At Georgica

An heiress to a billion-dollar fortune lost her case pleading squatter’s rights this week when a Suffolk County judge said her arguments “lack any merit and therefore must be rejected.”

Katherine Rayner sued East Hampton Village in an effort to take ownership of a public path that runs alongside her family’s 12-acre estate on West End Road. The village had purchased the 50-foot strip of land from the Keck family to maintain public access from Georgica Pond to the beach.

The heiress and her mother, Anne Cox Chambers, installed a pool heater, fencing and pillars on the public land over the years. In 2013, the Village Zoning Board of Appeals made an agreement to let the homeowners maneuver around local regulations and install drainage pools, a retaining wall and a swimming pool on their property, as long as they agreed to remove those unwanted structures.

When the village tried to enforce that deal, however, the heiress sued, claiming “adverse possession”—a way of gaining legal title to the property by claiming to have continuously used it as her own.

In December 2014, Village Attorney Linda Riley said, “We want a decision from the judge that we have a good title and notwithstanding that they have stuff on the property, and furthermore we’re looking for injunctive relief from the court, meaning the court would tell them to move their structures back on their property.”

And that’s exactly what the village received. Justice Ralph Gazzillo wasn’t buying Ms. Rayner’s argument, pointing out in a July 1 decision that she has “no valid claim of adverse possession to the strip, which is owned … by the Village of East Hampton.”

The “remaining argument that the conditions placed on the variance are arbitrary, capricious or outside of the Zoning Board’s jurisdiction are completely unpersuasive,” Justice Gazzillo wrote, ordering that the structures to be removed.

Ms. Rayner, whose late grandfather James M. Cox founded the large newspaper business Cox Enterprises, is heiress to the $18.6 billion Cox Media Group fortune.