MARFA — Beauregard “Beau” Brite White died Monday in Bastrop, Texas, after a battle with cancer, according to family members. White, 71, was an heir to the massive Brite Ranch southwest of Marfa that has been embroiled in some seven years of legal battles among siblings over the fate of the land. Beau grew up in Marfa and attended Marfa High School, although he centered his later life with his wife Kathleen Hartnett White, who died in August 2024, in Bastrop. The Big Bend Sentinel did not receive an obituary by press time.

It’s unclear how Beau’s death will impact the August 18 retrial over claims that his brother Jim White breached his fiduciary duty as the trustee that ran the 65,000-acre Brite Ranch. On the same day that Beau died, a Bastrop district judge ruled that Geoff Connor — Beau and his brother Mac’s adopted son — would assume the role of “temporary administrator” of Beau’s estate. Jim’s children, intervenors in the trial, have claimed that Beau and Mac’s adoption of Connor, in 2022 at the age of 59, was a sham intended to dilute their inheritance.

In other recent legal action, attorneys for Beau and Mac filed a pleading stating that Jim’s son, Cuatro, is a co-conspirator in the breach in fiduciary duty that left siblings Beau and Mac — and a sister, Hester Ann — without the distributions of money they deserved. A jury in the summer of 2023 agreed with the claims against Jim and stripped him of his role of trustee, but he won an Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals decision out of El Paso that nullified that ruling, forcing the new trial. The pleading against Cuatro could — if a judge agrees — make him a defendant in the trial in August.

On Thursday, June 26, visiting 394th District Court Judge Tryon Lewis will hear a motion from Cuatro for a change of venue to Brewster County after Cuatro argued it was impossible to have an impartial trial in Presidio County (at the Marfa courthouse) because of “extensive” media coverage from The Sentinel. It also will be a preview of the issue of the courthouse’s accessibility — with an unreliable elevator — and danger of extreme temperatures, with no air conditioning at the courthouse, which may play into the motion.

For more coverage of the Brite Ranch legal proceedings, see our archive of coverage at bigbendsentinel.com/brite.