Contractor Gets Little Money in Dispute Over Cash in Homeowner's Walls
A contractor who threatened to sue over a stash of $182,000 in Depression-era cash he found in the walls of an Ohio home during a remodeling project will probably get about $5,000.
Contractor Bob Kitts reported his find last year to homeowner Amanda Reece, but the two were unable to agree on how to divide it. Reece offered 10 percent while Kitts wanted 40 percent. After news of the dispute hit the press, heirs of the home’s former owner filed suit.
Now a magistrate has resolved the dispute, and Bob Kitts has gotten less than Reece’s original offer, the Associated Press reports.
Last month a probate magistrate ruled on how to divide $25,000 of the money that remained, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports. Reece said in a deposition that she spent $14,000 on a trip to Hawaii and sold some of the money on eBay. She said about $60,000 was stolen from a shoe box in her closet. Reece gave up any claim to the money that was left.
The magistrate ruled the heirs would have been entitled to $157,000 found in envelopes marked with the former homeowner’s name, while Kitt would be entitled to about $25,000 in an unmarked cardboard box after Reece gave up her claim to the money, the AP story says. The magistrate apportioned the money based on a prorated share of what was left.
If the currency is sold at its appraised value of more than $38,000, Kitt will get $5,287 and each of the former homeowner’s 21 heirs will receive about $1,500, the AP story says.
Gid Marcinkevicius, a lawyer for the estate, told AP that he called the dispute “the greed case.”
“If these two individuals had sat down and resolved their disputes and divided the money, the heirs would have had no knowledge of it,” he said. “Because they were not able to sit down and divide it in a rational way, they both lost.”
