By any measure, the Carvel case is a legal colossus. More than 40 lawyers have had a hand in it. Legal fees and commissions have already drained more than $28 million from the Carvel fortune, according to Leonard Ross, one of Agnes’ former lawyers. Save for Carvel’s widow, it is hard to find a guileless participant. Pamela casts herself as the selfless protector of her uncle’s millions and her aunt’s interests. To her opponents, she’s just a desperate relative out for a big financial score. In one of the many lawsuits involving estate funds, a state judge in Florida ruled that there was “strong evidence of fraud” in the way she once tried to collect more than $10 million from the estate. Still, Fred Welsh, a former New Jersey police detective hired by Pamela, tells me that he has uncovered enough circumstantial evidence—including the possibility that Carvel’s death certificate was forged—to warrant a homicide investigation.

The battle has played out in three U.S. district courts; state courts in New York, Delaware, and Florida; and in London. It enjoys a certain notoriety in the suburbs north of New York City, where Tom and Agnes Carvel lived in the gentle hills of Ardsley. Four trials have been held in Westchester County, New York; a fifth is ongoing. Four of Carvel’s executors have died. When I phoned the Westchester County Courthouse to ask about examining case files, a clerk told me, ­“I am making the sign of the cross now.­” I spent most of a day plowing through five large boxes bursting with pleadings and rulings before a court official said apologetically, “We’ve found more.”

Pamela claims that her uncle once told her that he was worth $250 million, which would mean that tens of millions of dollars in assets have vanished. One thing is certain: Events have not turned out as Carvel wished. His plan to provide for his widow and funnel millions to small charities in the towns that supported Carvel stores backfired, in part because of the unwieldy, complex nature of the estate that he himself approved after consultation with Davis, his lawyer. “He was always fearful that somebody was after his money,” says Ginny King, a longtime friend.

And in the end, he was right.

Born in Greece in 1906, Tom ­Carvel immigrated to New York with his parents and six siblings in 1910. As a young man, he test-drove Studebakers, played drums in the Borscht Belt, and fixed cars. After being diagnosed incorrectly with tuberculosis, he set out for the fresh air of Westchester, and with $15 borrowed from his future wife, he began selling ice cream from a beat-up vending truck. One hot weekend in 1934, he suffered a flat in the village of Hartsdale. Flagging down motorists to buy his melting ice cream, Carvel re­alized he could do more business from a fixed location. So he remained for the summer, eventually saving enough to make a down payment on a nearby building. It became the first Carvel shop.

With some tinkering, Carvel discovered how to instantly freeze ingredients to produce a creamy ribbon of ice cream at the flick of a switch. It was the first soft-ice-cream machine of its kind. One store grew to many, and by 1950, 21 stores were operating under the Carvel name. With that, Carvel joined a group of franchising pioneers, including A&W, White Castle, and Howard Johnson’s, that were creating roadside chains that served up what would become known as fast food. Still, the ice cream business was a warm-weather enterprise, and Carvel needed to generate store traffic throughout the year. Again, the ice cream gods intervened. Pieces of crumbled cookies accidentally fell into a vat of soft ice cream placed in a freezer, and when the hardened batch was discovered, it led to another innovation: the Carvel ice cream cake.

Carvel’s climb might have been even more astounding had he not rejected an invitation from a milkshake-machine salesman named Ray Kroc to join him in a fledgling California hamburger business named McDonald’s. “Tom claimed it was his biggest error,” says Thomas Kornacki, a Carvel vice president in the 1990s who worked for the company for 23 years.