Wichita ? A Kansas woman whose longtime male partner died has won a lawsuit alleging that she had been in a common-law marriage and deserved tax relief.

Theresa Beat, 70, now stands to collect about $3 million in tax refunds after jurors ruled in her favor this week in federal court in Wichita.

“I fought the IRS for eight years, and I’m just relieved that we won,” Beat said Thursday.

The Internal Revenue Service balked when Beat filed a return in 2002 that said no taxes were due on the $4.4 million estate of Dean Dyche. Beat had filed a joint return the year before and said she was the deceased farmer’s spouse.

The Wichita Eagle reported that the IRS said Beat and Dyche weren’t married and accused her of tax fraud.

Beat paid what the agency said she owed — $1.4 million in taxes, $1 million in fines for fraud and $434,000 in interest. She then sued.

Kansas law allows people without marriage licenses to be considered common-law spouses if they hold themselves out as a married couple.

Although the couple had a private ceremony and exchanged rings in 1991, they filed tax returns as single individuals for years and didn’t talk about their marriage. Still, Dyche had a will giving everything to Beat, whom he met after undergoing a divorce. Beat, a mother of seven, also had been married previously.

“They wore wedding rings, which to me is a universal declaration that you’re married,” Wichita lawyer Ken Peterson said.

After a judge in Kingman County wouldn’t declare the couple married after Dyche’s death, Peterson took over the case and went to the Kansas Court of Appeals.

“We convinced them to add a new dimension to common-law marriage in Kansas, and that is you can hold yourself out to being married without verbally saying so,” Peterson said.

Beat’s attorneys then took the case to federal court to recover the money the estate paid to the IRS.

Beat said it has been difficult to work on the case while continuing to run the 2,000-acre wheat farm that had belonged to Dyche.

“She still gets on a tractor, and during harvest time, she drives that tractor 14 hours a day,” Peterson said. “She’s running the farm. She has help, but she’s a hardworking woman.”