Carol and Allen pose in front of the Glen Ridge, New Jersey, house they were going to buy, in April 2002.   (Photo: Courtesy of Carol Myerson)

Within hours of winning the body battle, Jean ordered a headstone for her brother. Jewish custom calls for the unveiling of a headstone at the first anniversary of death, but Jean “wasn’t taking any chances,” as she puts it, that Carol might erect her own tombstone. And so in October, a tall slab of granite was placed at the grave in Queens that reads BELOVED SON, BROTHER AND UNCLE. “We felt that said it all,” says Jean.

“Tell me,” says Carol, “how I’m going to take his children to see that tombstone.”

On September 23, Carol’s birthday, she received notice of the lawsuit filed by Allen’s sisters in New Jersey Superior Court. Even in the initial filings, it was clear that the Myersons were loaded for bear. The main legal issue was whether Allen’s suicide note could be considered a valid will—the courts would have to determine that he was “of sound mind” when he wrote it, a dubious prospect but one that has yet to be ruled on. Later the sisters would level scurrilous allegations about Carol, including alleged details of her personal life in the years before she married Allen Myerson. The sisters also wanted their share of Allen’s possessions.

“We have nothing of my brother’s, not even a shoe,” Jean Myerson said in January. They prepared a list of demands. They wanted, among other things, his stamp collection, his trombone, the “five silver coins” mounted in blue velvet from his Bris, his prayer shawl from Jerusalem, their grandmother’s optometry chest and the needlepoint pictures she’d made a century ago in Russia, and his baby pictures. Carol argued that some of these items should be passed on to Allen’s children one day. But the biggest fight was over the wedding ring Allen had placed on Carol’s finger fifteen years before. The Myersons felt it was a family heirloom, their grandmother’s diamonds, and should rightfully be returned to the family. Carol, who still wears the ring, was incensed: “They’re accusing me of stealing my own wedding band.”

Then came the DNA battle. The sisters, one of whom is a doctor, wanted a paternity test done on the twins—in utero. The idea was quashed by the judge, after Carol’s OB/GYN wrote a letter saying, “This is not only extremely dangerous but one of the more absurd requests I have ever encountered in twenty years of practice.” (Carol agreed to do it after she gave birth.)

But this was all a warm-up for what occurred on February 13, when the parties gathered with their lawyers in a bank office building in New Jersey for a settlement conference. Carol, at this point eight months pregnant, and Jean, wearing one of her justice for allen buttons, crossed paths in the ladies’ room. “She was trying to give this button to me,” says Carol, “and saying I killed Allen. And I responded by saying, ‘Whoever convinced Allen to leave his pregnant wife is the person who killed Allen.’ And she just hauled off and hit me, really hard, across the face.”

Jean claims her pregnant sister-in-law attacked her: “She saw the button and started spewing profanities at me. ‘Up your ass, you little bitch!’ So I said, ‘His blood is all over you.’ And she came charging at me. I mean, charging at me. And so I defended myself—let’s put it that way. All I could think was, My God, this is what my brother lived with.”

The police were called to the bank. Though the police report identifies Carol as the “victim,” Jean has since filed a criminal-assault complaint against Carol. And Carol has reciprocated in kind.

After his suicide, Allen's friends would be tormented that they didn't sense a plea for help in his final days. But he gave none of them enough of the puzzle--though each of them had a piece.

In his last weeks, Allen was shedding weight, had lost his appetite, and was battling insomnia, according to one therapist’s notes (which were requested by the court and obtained by New York). He also “worried over obsessing about his personal problems as interfering with his ability to perform at work.” Only after his death, when Carol and Kevin Buckley went to pick up a suit to bury him in, and later when lawyers for both sides had to traipse through to itemize the possessions in dispute, did anyone see how he was living. The apartment he had once shared with Carol was a filthy mess, with clothes and papers strewn all over, the home of a severely depressed person, though he had continued to show up for work dressed fastidiously to the very end. Jean believes the condition of the apartment was “clearly staged by Carol”—to add to her case that he was not of sound mind—a charge Carol calls “ludicrous.”

But where were the shrinks? Records show he had been seeing at least three therapists (not including the psychological testing at the clinic) regularly throughout the spring and summer, one of whom was a psychiatrist who prescribed the anti-depressant Celexa and the anti-anxiety drug Xanax. But the prescribing doctor, who’d recently changed Allen’s dosage, was on vacation when he jumped; it was August, after all.

Later, all of his friends would be tormented that they didn’t sense a plea for help in his final days. But Allen gave none of them enough of the puzzle, though each of them had a piece.

On the weekend of August 10, soon after an ugly fight with Carol in front of the movers, he went to the Hamptons to stay with his friends Mark and Mary Leeds. “She doesn’t want me anymore,” Allen told them, according to Mark. “He kept saying ‘She’s such a pretty lady’ and ‘I miss her already,’ and that he didn’t want ‘to lose her. How could this be happening to me? We were so much in love.’ ”

The following Tuesday, August 13, he had much different things to say over dinner with Gilbert Kahn and his wife, Bernice. The Kahns were thrilled when, “out of the blue,” Allen had called them. It had been fifteen years since Gilbert’s refusal to be the best man at Allen’s marriage to a non-Jew had caused a rift in their friendship. The Kahns admit that when he told them why he was calling—that he and Carol were divorcing—they weren’t disappointed.

At dinner on the Upper West Side, he talked mostly about his plans for his new life. “He said he wanted to be with a Jewish girl the next time,” says Bernice. “And we laughed, and I told him that we would get on it.”

He told them that the wife he was divorcing was pregnant. “But he wasn’t sure he was the father,” says Gilbert. Moreover, in his version to the Kahns, “it was she who precipitated the divorce.” And Allen said that only after they split up had she told him, “And oh, by the way, I’m pregnant.”

He implied that he was really just the sperm donor—if the child was his. “The conversation was so fascinating,” says Gilbert. “He said, ‘It’s almost like I was used. I may just walk away from this thing.’ ”

Allen also told the Kahns, says Gilbert, that “the best thing that happened as a result of the divorce was that he had reconnected with his family. He really felt his family coming back.”

Two nights later, Allen met Bill Pinzler for dinner. Pinzler didn’t know him that well; they had met at an opening at the Museum of American Financial History. But in Allen’s last weeks, he reached out to Pinzler. That night, they went to see two rental apartments Pinzler had found for him. Then they went to Gabriel’s for dinner—where Allen proudly showed him his new “Patron of the Opera” card and “half seriously” expressed his wish to be the music critic at the Times.

That Saturday, August 17, he visited his family in Westchester to celebrate Natalie’s 79th birthday. Through the course of the birthday party, Allen and Jean had several whispering conversations in the kitchen. He repeated what he’d been saying for months, that he never wanted the house or the pregnancy, but also ratcheted it up a notch.

“He said that she threatened that if he tried to have anything to do with this baby, she would turn the child against him, make it hate its father,” says Jean. “He said he despised her so much he was willing to give over full custody.” He also gave Jean a copy of an unsigned document that he said he and Carol had drawn up, stating that he “not be considered the legal father of the child.” (Carol denies any involvement in creating that document.) In any event, it all should have seemed terribly contradictory: He was accusing her of threatening to keep the child from him at the same time as he was saying he didn’t want the responsibility. Natalie, in particular, was worried about the baby. “Allen, this is your child,” she told him. Couldn’t they work it out? But he told his mother, “If I go back to her now, I’ll never leave, I’ll never get out of that marriage.”

Jean responded with specific advice: He’d better have his lawyer do something about getting rid of the other frozen embryos. He needed to “protect himself”—that is, protect his assets, his job. “I said, ‘Allen, she is such a loose cannon. What if she accuses you of hitting her?’ ” She told him he’d better get tough.

The following Monday, Allen sent a long e-mail to his divorce lawyer that began: “Carol’s strategy, I believe, will be this,” followed by three pages of single-spaced rage in which he hit many of the points Jean had coached him on in the kitchen: They’ve got to get rid of the other embryos. How should he protect all his assets? And did he mention that she “dislikes Jews”?