Do you think they killed her mother?
The movie doesn't really touch on this, but they could have killed her mother to get the whole thing rolling. After all, Mike says he had been working on this for a year, and her mother would have been alive a year earlier; so at that point, she wouldn't have been as rich. Not as much to go around on a three-way cut. I think one of the three of them killed her!
"The cinéma is an invention without a future," said Louis Lumière.