A jury did not buy it 30 years ago, but Melvin Dummar's attorney says the story dramatised in 1980's Academy Award-winning Melvin and Howard has become a lot more believable.

The attorney, Stuart Stein, told a federal appeals court on Wednesday that Dummar deserves another shot at the money because of pilot Robert Diero, who came forward in 2004 to say he flew Hughes to a brothel in Nevada around the time and the place that Dummar said he found Hughes.

Mr Stein, an estate-planning lawyer from Albuquerque, New Mexico, with a radio show, argued that Hughes' associates knew about Diero but did not disclose it at the original probate trial in 1977-78.

'The judgment was obtained by fraud,' Mr Stein told a three-judge panel of the 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.

Dummar's lawsuit seeks the money from two men who benefited from Hughes' will, one of whom is deceased. Randy Dryer, an attorney for one of the estates, told the appeals judges that Mr Stein's allegations of fraud are based on 'speculation and conjecture.' And Dryer said that even if a jury heard from Diero and believed the story, 'It doesn't necessarily follow that the jury would have concluded that the (will) was valid.

'They could have easily concluded that Mr. Dummar saw a golden opportunity to reward himself for his good deeds,' Dryer said.

Dryer also argued the will already has been determined to be a forgery, saying that it does not contain the authentic writing of Hughes. -- AP