Murder, She Sold

Real estate is not without its small (sometimes large) intrigues.

I had not been in real estate long when I called another office and told them I needed to show a particular home. The agent on the other end of the phone said, "You know there was a suicide in that house, right?"

It's a requirement that one disclose a violent death occurring in a home.

"What's the story," I asked.

Apparently a disgruntled husband had had enough of whatever was going on between he and his wife at home. So, he shot his wife, then shot himself. He died, the wife didn't and now she was selling the house. She was definitely getting the last laugh.

I wondered what it was like to be responsible for selling a home where such craziness had occurred. We see lots of difficult circumstances, but rarely violence as it's a small community and that sort of thing doesn't go on a lot.

Until lately, it seems.

Mr. B. and his girlfriend came to my office and said they were considering buying a house. They wanted out of Little Rock because it was crowded and sometimes unsafe. They desired a quieter life out of the crush of the city.

I spent the day with them. He was a quiet, nice man, a writer and psychologist who worked in some way with the criminal field. I think he worked with sex-offenders and did some sort of research having to do with that particular type of crime. The girlfriend was odd and I was having a little trouble figuring her out, deciphering a relationship I couldn't quite sort out at the first few glances.

Didn't matter, though. It made my job a little more difficult but not impossible. When you're selling real estate one of your big tasks is to figure out the relationship dynamic -- who is the decision maker, who signs the checks, who is the driving force, etc. Their relationship still seemed quite new -- he was the one buying the house, they had their own apartments, but he seemed to be letting her pick out the house for purchase.

I went about my way showing them houses and we spent the good part of a day together. I found them something really nice that they liked and they made an offer on it. Between the time of writing the contract and the closing there were some strange interactions I had with the girlfriend and it seemed like she was inebriated quite frequently. We had some difficult conversations on the phone that only made half sense. She was aggressively friendly with me but at the same time... something else. It was strange and hard to understand.

About a year and a half later an agent of mine was telling me about a house she was about to list where a murder had occurred. A man had picked up a homeless lady on the street, ended up marrying her and months later they divorced and somewhere in the timeline she ended up shooting him. She described the house which didn't sound familiar to me.

I didn't think much of it at the time beyond the details of making sure who had the right to sell the home. There was some intrigue there as somehow his first wife ended up as executrix of the estate. I wanted to make sure we got all the details perfect so as not to cause problems down the road when we sold the house.

And still wasn't giving it much thought until Brenda showed up at my house one weekend afternoon. I was sitting at the kitchen table as she described going through the house, described how the dead man had lain where he was shot, in his recliner in the living room, for three weeks before anyone realized he was dead. She described the river of goo that flowed across the floor as the integrity of his body failed over time and he eventually turned to liquid and foul rot.

I was fine with all that. I was fine until she told me about finding in the contents of the house an orange folder that had my card stapled to it. The room tilted slightly sideways as I began to understand what that meant. Whenever I conduct a transaction, I always put copies of the buyer's papers into a folder and staple my card to the tab of the file. He was my buyer. One of my buyers had been murdered in a house I sold him.

"What did you say the name was?" I'm sure I must have stammered. "Was it Bill B.?"

She nodded.

I reflected back on all the stories she had told me about the circumstances before I knew who the dead man was -- how this woman had killed him, how he supposedly turned out to be a deviant sex pervert himself, how the woman who killed him was apprehended, etc. None of it seemed to match Mr. B. himself at all.

My head was reeling at the thought that I'd spent much of a day with these people and Brenda was saying she was surprised they didn't drag me off into the woods and have their way with me considering some of the stories she had heard.

When people get interviewed after murders they always say, "He seemed so normal, such a nice man..." and now I get why they do that. It just seems so messed up and wacky that it all turned out the way it did.

A few months later, the house is well on its way to being sold, dried goo and all. Nothing much left but a vandalized house, some human crust stuck to the floor, some neighborhood intrigue and the memory of a couple who were not what they seemed.

And then there is me, forever left wondering who I'm driving around in my car and wondering as they sign papers how it will all turn out for them in the long run.