People.com – By Alex Tresniowski
They were, to say the least, an odd couple, and not just because they were born more than four decades apart. J’Noël Gardiner, 42, was also several inches taller than her husband of one year, Marshall Gardiner, 86, and far brawnier. When Marshall suffered a fatal heart attack aboard a flight to Baltimore in August 1999, his wife “picked him up out of his seat and put him on the floor of the airplane, which is a little strange,” says Joe Gardiner, 52, Marshall’s only child. “I don’t think my wife could pick me up and put me on the floor of a plane.”
Things would get stranger still. When a battle broke out over Marshall’s $2.7 million estate, Joe and his attorney had a private investigator dig into his stepmother’s past. What they found was a plot twist worthy of The Crying Game: J’Noël was actually a man named Jay Ball, or had been until a sex-change operation in 1994. Joe Gardiner’s reaction: “This happens in the movies. What a great plot! What a riveting story! But it’s your own life.”