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BUSINESS
Kentucky

Some houses of horrors sell undetected

Maureen Milford
The (Wilmington, Del.) News Journal
A home north of Wilmington, Del., that was the scene of a suicide several weeks after another suicide in January down the street.
  • Is homicide%2C suicide a %27material defect%27 home sellers must disclose to prospective buyers%3F
  • Lower courts%2C lawmakers differ on what about a property%27s history should be disclosed
  • Pennsylvania Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on one case next month

THORNTON, Pa. — On Halloween night in 2007, teenagers Ryan and Kendra Milliken were told of the gruesome events at their elegant $610,000 home.

In February 2006, a previous owner of the house had shot and killed his wife in the master bedroom before turning the gun on himself. But even before learning of the deaths, the Millikens had experienced many disturbing events in home, such as noises of a gun clicking.

The children's mother, homeowner Janet Milliken, said she at times felt like someone was sitting on the side on the bed or she was being poked in the back.

Daughter Kendra, then 13, heard footsteps. On two occasions, son Ryan, 14, saw a dark figure with a frightening face, including on Feb. 11, 2008, the second anniversary of the murder-suicide. The time on the clock read 11:34, which, when read upside down, looked like the word "HELL." Ryan was so upset that he woke up his family and they left the home.

Janet Milliken had a priest from a West Chester, Pa., church bless the house. But when both of her children remained fearful about living there, she sued the former owner, who had bought the home Oct. 31, 2006, knowing about the deaths and real-estate agents alleging fraud and the breach of the state's real-estate disclosure law.

She wants the deal to be undone, plus damages.

The case was struck down in the lower courts. But the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has taken it and is expected to hear oral arguments in Harrisburg, Pa., next month.

Now, the case is raising renewed focus nationally on house transactions involving so-called "stigmatized" or "psychologically damaged" properties, a murky area about which many people, including judges, disagree.

Former Delaware GOP Chairman Terry Strine feels exactly the opposite of Milliken about his home near Centreville, Pa., where a Delaware socialite was beaten to death in her first-floor bedroom in 1967. He finds it "totally illogical, irrational and psychologically crazy" that anyone would be spooked from buying the house where Katharine "Kaa" Thompson Wood died.

"Why would it bother me?" said Strine of the unsolved murder. "But I know one woman who would not come to my house because of it."

The previous owner, Wells Foster, admitted in 1983, that he had some trepidation buying the place.

"It bothered me to a certain extent," said Foster, who had known Wood since he was a child.

Get it in writing

Delaware has its share of homes tainted by death and crime:

• Along a stretch in one Delaware neighborhood less than two miles from the Pennsylvania border, a murder, two suicides and two suicide attempts have occurred.

• Another home in Hockessin, Del., was the scene of an ax murder.

• Earlier this month, police searched for evidence at a ouse near Newark, Del., the last place a woman lived whose skeletal remains were discovered in a Kentucky storage unit.

A property can be considered psychologically affected when it has been the scene of a murder or suicide, but the psychological effect also can extend to such things as a natural death, proximity to an ancient burial ground or a house's previous use as a funeral home.

The legal question raised in the Milliken lawsuit is whether a psychological impact creates a material defect in a home that sellers are required to disclose to prospective buyers.

Emergency personnel congregate at the scene of a double shooting on Jan. 9, 2013, north of Wilmington, Del.

Janet Milliken says it does.

Others say a murder or suicide is not a physical defect posing a risk to inhabitants, but an emotional issue dealing with a property's reputation. While some people wouldn't even look at a house where a violent crime has occurred, other people don't care or find it adventuresome, some say.

Lawmakers in most states have agreed that psychological damage is not a material defect to a piece of real estate.

A murder, suicide or other violent crime does not have to be disclosed in most states, according to Walt Molony, spokesman for the National Association of Realtors.

These stigma disclosure laws were enacted since the late 1980s when courts began to hand down controversial decisions involving disclosures related to homes where someone had been killed or that were known for being haunted, according to Stuart Edmiston in a paper for the UCLA Law Review in 2010.

The courts have been sensitive to the nature of psychological stigma, such as whether a site had been the scene of rape and the rapist was still at large or if it had been a methamphetamine lab, he writes.

Edmiston said the unstated rule from court decisions was that psychological stigmas are not material unless the event presents some risk of physical harm to the occupants.

Usually when a house is psychologically affected the issue is not the property's physical characteristics, but the fears of an individual buyer, said Janet Thoren, chairwoman of the law committee of the Association of Real Estate License Law Officials.

Carolyn Roland, a real-estate agent with Patterson-Schwartz Real Estate who specializes in historic properties in Delaware, Maryland and eastern Pennsylvania, said she often gets questions about whether a home she has listed has ghosts. She tells her clients to put their questions in writing.

"They never do," Roland said.

'Slippery slope'

This supports the reasoning President Judge Emeritus Kate Ford Elliott of Pennsylvania Superior Court used in 2012 when she wrote an opinion on the Milliken case.

"This sort of psychological damage to a house will obviously decrease over time as the memory of the murder recedes from public knowledge," Ford Elliott wrote in an opinion that upheld a lower court's dismissal of the case. "The passage of time has no similar curative effect on structural damage, legal impairments or hazardous materials."

Ford Elliott said allowing the consideration of possible psychological defects opens a can of worms to all kinds of other issues not physically related to a house, such as whether the neighbors are obnoxious, whether homes in the neighborhood have been burglarized or whether a sewage plant's stench wafts through the air in the backyard on some days.

"Indeed, one could identify numerous psychological problems with any house," the opinion says.

According to a recent survey by Realtor.com, 43% of people surveyed thought that a house located close to a battlefield could be haunted.

Under that belief, would a seller of a home in a neighborhood north of Wilmington, Del., have to disclose a murder, two suicides and two suicide attempts at homes nearby in the space of two years?

In January, Suzette Tabor died in a suicide pact with neighbor Nino Sciglitano Jr. at Sciglitano's house. Nino Sciglitano survived. The same house was the scene of a violent incident in 2011, when Sciglitano's mother, Donna, shot her husband, Nino Sciglitano Sr. to death, then attempted to kill herself with an overdose of pills. She survived and is serving a 15-year prison sentence.

A month after Tabor died, her husband, Tim Tabor, took his own life in his house down the street.

"It's hard to wrap your arms around the fact that the family that you grew up with, the home you grew up in, is essentially now a house of horrors," Donna Sciglitano's son, Joe, said at the time. He didn't want his surname used; it is different from his mother's.

According to Ford Elliott, the Internet and social media allow information about a house to be uncovered easily with a simple search. To consider possible psychological defects "starts a descent down a very slippery slope," she wrote.

"It requires the seller to warn not only of physically quantifiable but also utterly subjective defects," Ford Elliott writes.

To Ford Elliott, psychological damage is a homeowner concern best left to caveat emptor or "let the buyer beware."

Effect on value

Another question is how to put a monetary value on psychological damage, Ford Elliott wrote in her opinion.

Randall Bell, a stigma expert based in California whom Milliken hired, has said a murder-suicide in a house reduce its market value by 10% to 15% and increases the time a house sits on the market.

This home near Newark, Del., was the last place Doris Wood lived before she disappeared. Her bones later were found in a storage unit in Kentucky.

Larry Tarabicos, a Wilmington real estate lawyer, said if that's true, positive associations with a house raise its price. If a famous television actor grew up in a house, does that make it more valuable? Tarabicos asks.

"If the previous owner won the lottery, does that increase the value?" he wonders.

Ford Elliott said many people have no problem with living in former crime scenes. Indeed, 62% of those surveyed said they would consider or might consider buying a so-called haunted house, according to the Realtor.com survey.

Tarabicos said he represented a buyer of a house in Hockessin where an ax murder had occurred during a botched robbery in 1992. The buyer was a retirement communities company and had no issue with it, Tarabicos said.

Real-estate agent Roland said she listed a house in northern Delaware that had had a murder-suicide and an investor bought it.

An investor also is buying the Newark house that was the home of Doris Wood when she disappeared in 1997. Earlier this month, police with a cadaver dog searched the grounds looking for additional skeletal remains of the woman. Bones identified as belonging to Wood were discovered Oct. 3 inside a storage unit in Kentucky. The unit had been rented to Wood's husband, Bob Wood, who died in May.

Real-estate agent Melody Davis of ReMax 1st Choice in Middletown, Del., which has the listing, said the house is under contract to an investor.

"No one said anything to me about the (Wood) case," Davis said.

Similarly, a house in Bear, Del., that was the site of a June murder-suicide is now for sale, and the price is comparable to others in the neighborhood.

Just the same, when Roland handled a house where a murder had occurred she admitted it affected her.

"I didn't spend a lot of time in there by myself," Roland said.

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