Ms. West’s handwritten will stipulated that, her husband having died before her, her brother-in-law, Sol West, was to carry out the car burial. If he failed to do so, he was to be mostly disinherited. Mr. West “had other ideas for the Ferrari,” Mr. Orth wrote, but in the end the box went into the hole, and a pair of cement trucks went to work and encased it.
“The story is true,” said David Williams, Prancing Horse’s editor. “She was buried with her Ferrari.” The Ferrari register Barchetta.cc confirms that the owner of left-hand-drive chassis No. 5055, Sandra West, was “buried in car in San Antonio.”
Jim Dossey, a lawyer at Dossey & Jones in The Woodlands, Texas, said being buried with your car “is clearly allowed in Texas.”
He added: “You don’t have to be buried in a casket — there’s no law against an alternative container. Though cemeteries may have rules about it.”
Ms. West’s Ferrari had a history of its own. The Ferrari 330 GT Registry reports that the car was bought from Chinetti Motors in Greenwich, Conn., by the TV producer Burt Sugarman in 1964, and was originally painted “Grigio Notte” (midnight gray) with a beige interior. This was one of six or seven Ferraris that Mr. Sugarman said he had bought from Chinetti, and he recalls that he typically had them repainted in candy apple red metalflake. Mr. Sugarman was a good friend of the famous California customizer George Barris, and it was Richard Korkes, shop foreman of the Barris Kustoms shop, who repainted it that same year. A photo shows Mr. Korkes, who built cars for many celebrities, with Mr. Barris — and the now-red Ferrari.
Mr. Sugarman can’t remember if he sold the Ferrari directly to Ms. West, but he said that he had known her well, and that she had told him she loved the car and wanted to be buried in it. “Sandy was a piece of work,” he said.
And what of Ms. West’s other Ferraris? A 1974 246 GTS by Scaglietti, chassis No. 08454, was sold in 2016 at RM Sotheby’s Phoenix sale for $396,000.
