Hidden treasure found in walls of home
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Talk about found money. If you missed the Associated Press recounting ‘Cash Stash Enriches No One’ in your Sunday L.A. Times reading, here’s the gist from the print edition:
A contractor who found $182,000 in Depression-era currency hidden in a bathroom wall has ended up with only a few thousand dollars.... The windfall discovery amounted to little more than grief for contractor Bob Kitts, who couldn’t agree on how to split the money with homeowner Amanda Reece.
Essentially, because the pair couldn’t figure out how to divvy up the loot, it became public knowledge and must be split with the 21 descendants of the wealthy businessman who hid the money in the first place. More from AP:
‘If these two individuals had sat down and resolved their disputes and divided the money, the heirs would have had no knowledge of it,’ said attorney Gid Marcinkevicius, who represents the [Patrick] Dunne estate. ‘Because they were not able to sit down and divide it in a rational way, they both lost.’ Kitts was tearing the bathroom walls out of an 83-year-old home near Lake Erie in 2006 when he discovered two green metal lockboxes suspended inside a wall below the medicine chest, hanging from a wire. Inside were white envelopes with the return address for ‘P. Dunne News Agency.’ ‘I ripped the corner off of one,’ Kitts said during a deposition in a lawsuit filed by Dunne’s estate. ‘I saw a 50 and got a little dizzy.’ He called Reece, a former classmate who had hired him for a remodeling project.... She offered 10%. He wanted 40%. From there, things went sour.
End of story? Monday an update from the Associated Press moved on the wire:
A Cleveland woman who ended up in a feud over $182,000 in Depression-era currency found in the walls of her home has filed for bankruptcy.
If anyone has similar tales of valuables hidden in Southern California houses, I’d love to hear from you.
--Lauren Beale
Thoughts? Comments?
