Home where family found strangled auctioned
WATERLOO -- Only one bidder turned out for the Tuesday auction of the white, blue-shuttered, lakeside house where police believe a former bodyguard strangled his wife and two young sons in the upstairs bedrooms.
Wells Fargo Bank put in a $256,420 offer, snapping up the house where it already held the mortgage on the three-bedroom dwelling some neighbors in the well-manicured subdivision in Columbia had hoped to see razed.
Weary of the gawkers the house has attracted in the year since the killings, many neighbors wondered who would want to buy it -- often the million-dollar question with dwellings that have become crime scenes and therefore unattractive, even creepy, to potential buyers.
Illinois law requires foreclosures to be sold "as is," meaning the graffiti Christopher Coleman allegedly spray-painted on a living room wall before the slayings is still there. Potential bidders, however, didn't have a chance to see the interior before the auction.
Not that any showed up. The only person there was a trustee for the subdivision's homeowner's group, watching the proceedings simply out of curiosity. Susan Walla thought the lack of bidders might reflect that "no one really wanted to buy it" -- or maybe that folks just found it "creepy."
But although local residents may be well aware of such properties' history, not all buyers are warned.
Two states -- Alaska and South Dakota -- require sellers to disclose whether there was a murder or suicide on the property in the previous year. At least six other states -- Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, New Hampshire, North Dakota and Oklahoma -- require such information be revealed if the buyer directly asks, according to the National Association of Realtors.
But in most states, there are no laws compelling sellers to volunteer the information, forcing buyers worried about such things to quiz police and neighbors before they sign. Or they can ask the seller and see what happens.
Pam Westhoff wishes she had done that.
When she and her husband, John, bought a ranch home in 2000 in the Kansas City area community of Leawood, Kan., they didn't know a man had been bludgeoned to death and his wife badly beaten there with a baseball bat the previous year. It was a crime so gruesome the prosecutor told jurors blood covered "every inch" of the place.
Pam Westhoff, 63, heard about it later -- weeks after they'd already taken out a $209,000 mortgage -- from a contractor installing a garage door opener.
"I almost went to my knees. It was a shock," Westhoff said Monday by telephone from the home she says still gives her unease, partly because the murder victim was similar in age to her late father. When asked if she would have bought the place knowing its violent history, her answer was sharp and immediate: "Absolutely not."
The Westhoffs sued, arguing they were victims of misrepresentation and a violation of Kansas' consumer protection laws. But no Kansas law requires real-estate professionals to disclose that a home or apartment was where anyone came to a violent demise, and the Westhoffs dropped their $5.7 million lawsuit in 2004, realizing it was futile and expensive.
The couple hope to move once the housing market rebounds, and Pam Westhoff said she will be upfront about its history.
"I don't think I could live with myself if I didn't tell prospective buyers that someone was murdered here," she said. "You don't want your little children going to school and hearing it from a classmate."
Walla could empathize. She said she'd never feel comfortable living in a home like the Coleman's and thought prospective buyers should be told about the killings.
"I think they should know," she said.
But she also said she would do her best to welcome any new occupant of the house the Colemans bought in 2005 for $212,000, well less than the $230,000 plus interest Wells Fargo said lately that Coleman owes.
A St. Louis-area spokesman for Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, Tom Goyda, said after the auction he could not talk specifically about the bid, but usually foreclosed properties get put back on the market.
"Whether there's any rehab or work will depend on the property, and I don't know if we've made those decisions yet" with the Coleman home, he said.
Others that were notorious crime scenes have been torn down.
Millionaire Dell Dunmire bought the Kansas City home made notorious by serial killer Bob Berdella, who lured young men to his home in the 1980s, then drugged and tortured them to see how much pain he could inflict while still keeping them alive. Those victims who died were cut up by the art collector and antiques dealer and put out with the trash.
Berdella confessed to six killings in a deal sparing him the death penalty and died in prison in 1992, a year before Dunmire bought his old house and had it razed after a lengthy battle with the local neighborhood association.
The suburban Chicago house where John Wayne Gacy tortured and strangled young men in the 1970s before burying many in a crawl space was torn down, and a new house was built on the lot in the late 1980s. And the three-story Oxford apartment building in Milwaukee where searchers found the remains of 11 of the 17 people Jeffrey Dahmer confessed to killing was demolished in 1992 at the behest of Dahmer's victims and community leaders. The site remains a vacant lot.