Kilpatrick Life Insurance Company

Kilpatrick Life Insurance Company

Kilpatrick Life Insurance Company was founded in 1947 in Shreveport, Louisiana, and remained under the control of the Shehee family for over 70 years. Virginia K. Shehee, the daughter of the original founders, led the company as CEO and President for decades, embedding the firm deeply into the fabric of Northwest Louisiana's business and philanthropic community. The firm operated as an ordinary-life carrier, writing life insurance policies and annuities, while maintaining a general-insurance agency arm that handled property, casualty, and personal-lines coverage. The company's balance sheet reflects a classic insurance-general-account investment strategy deployed at a regional scale. On the fixed-income side, Kilpatrick leveraged membership in the Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas, holding FHLB Dallas capital stock as part of its liquidity and funding framework. The firm supplemented bond holdings with direct ownership of commercial real estate, amassing a portfolio that includes its headquarters building in downtown Shreveport, additional mixed-use properties in the Shreveport market, and a dedicated set of commercial real estate holdings in Texas. A separate private-credit book, funded by policyholder reserves, generated yield through a portfolio of privately originated mortgage loans. In May 2019, Salt Lake City-based Security National Financial Corporation (NASDAQ: SNFCA), a diversified holding company with mortgage, life-insurance, and funeral-services subsidiaries, completed the acquisition of Kilpatrick Life Insurance Company (per public SEC filings, 2019). The deal folded Kilpatrick into Security National's existing family of life-insurance carriers, which already included Southern Security Life Insurance and Memorial Insurance Company of America. Post-acquisition, key family members including Vice President Margaret Shehee Cole remained involved in board-level governance, providing continuity for the local Shreveport commercial property portfolio and ongoing relationships with the Life Insurers Council and the Shreveport Committee of 100. Structurally, Kilpatrick now operates as a wholly owned portfolio company inside a publicly traded parent rather than as a standalone family-controlled asset owner. This makes its investment posture distinctive: the liability-driven general-account portfolio is governed by Security National's consolidated risk-management framework and NAIC risk-based capital requirements, constraining allocations to the same conservative mix of bonds, commercial mortgages, and real estate equity that defined its independence. The succession event transformed the entity from a second-generation, family-led community institution into a regulated yield engine inside a larger financial conglomerate — a path taken by many sub-scale mutual and fraternal life insurers across the American Southeast.