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The Stigma of a Gruesome Crime Can Linger Over a House, But It Won't Scare Away All Buyers or Silence All Owners
[size=-1]By Paul Duggan and Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 5, 2006; C01
[/size]
Houses like the one Christopher Price bought three years ago can be found in neighborhoods all over the Washington area -- ordinary houses not much different from those next door, except for the awful, abiding memories of what took place within their walls.
See that house over there ? That's where . . . .
Neighbors on either side of Price's ranch-style house near Annapolis -- old-timers who were there on that dreadful, long-ago morning when the bodies were discovered -- never shared the history with him. Then, on a winter afternoon a couple of years back, Price found out that his perfectly lovely house has an unlovely past.
A man had been stabbed 17 times with a steak knife in the room that Price uses as an office. And in the room where he and his fiancee watch TV in the evenings, a woman was stabbed seven times before being bludgeoned with a wood-splitting maul. "It did keep us awake a couple of nights, thinking about it," Price said.
On suburban cul-de-sacs and city streets across the country, they are houses that neighbors point to, the ones they don't forget. Long after the shock of murder wears off, long after the crime-scene tape comes down and life on the block resumes a peaceful rhythm, the memories linger, kept alive in whispers.
See that house ? . . .
Real estate professionals call them "stigmatized properties" -- houses that are structurally sound yet "psychologically impacted."
To some who live in them, stigmatized houses are fascinating. "A conversation piece," Price calls his. Others are loath to discuss the grim histories: They're hoping their children won't find out; they're worried about their equity; they're afraid that skittish relatives won't visit if they hear what happened in the kitchen, the den, the master bedroom.
One woman said that after she and her husband contracted to buy their house, they were stunned to learn from a neighbor that the previous owners, a married couple, had been shot to death in the basement. More than a year after moving in, the woman recoils at the thought of publicity.
"No, no, no, no, no," she said. "Absolutely not. . . . I have a daughter who would never set foot in my house again if she knew."
Some buyers knew the facts beforehand, though, and didn't flinch. Some used the stigmas to leverage discounts. As for buyers who heard the stories later -- one man learned of a multiple murder under his roof only when his gardener brought it up -- their reactions varied. Some were uneasy, others blase. Some took it as a spiritual challenge, a chance to bring joy to a house scarred by hate.
One couple talked openly about ghosts in their house.
Fury in the Family
Price, who lives in Anne Arundel County's Cape St. Claire community, learned of his house's former notoriety while talking with a police officer. Then he immersed himself in old newspapers, absorbing more details, and read a book about the killings, "Sudden Fury," by Leslie Walker, now a Washington Post business columnist.
The victims, Robert and Kathryn Swartz, had adopted their son Larry in 1973, when he was 6. Abandoned as a toddler, the boy had bounced from one abusive foster home to another before arriving in Cape St. Claire.
He was 17 when his anger exploded in parricidal violence on a January night in 1984, ignited, his attorneys said, by the repressive, demeaning discipline that the couple had imposed on him. He eventually pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, spent about a decade in prison and, at 38, died of a heart attack in Florida.
"The book goes on about the paramedics coming in, the police coming in, and they turned the corner and went down the stairs, and there was blood here and evidence there," said Price, who paid $220,000 for the property, becoming the third owner since the Swartzes were murdered. The husband and wife who sold it to him had lived in the house for two years, unaware of its history.
"I can walk around my house and I can picture it, which is interesting," Price said.
He enjoys talking about it, he said. When he met a woman from Annapolis at a computer conference in Orlando recently, he asked her whether she recalled the murders. "And she was like, 'Oh, yeah, yeah.' . . . And I said: 'Yeah? Well, I live in that house now!' "
Bob Gneiser, 74, also has no qualms about living in a murder scene, although Gneiser wishes people would forget about his house, a brick-and-wood split-level in the Carderock Springs section of Bethesda. Reporters and camera crews still show up at his door occasionally, revisiting one of the most enduring mysteries in the annals of local crime. And Gneiser, a retired radio and TV newsman, grudgingly tolerates them.
"I know what they want," he said. "So I tell them, 'Go ahead and get it, and get the hell out of here.' "
On a night three decades ago, a charming, 39-year-old State Department foreign service officer, William Bradford Bishop Jr. -- a multilingual Yale graduate and former Army intelligence officer -- went home from work and clubbed his family to death with a ball-peen hammer, police said.
They said he loaded the bodies in a station wagon (his mother, his wife, his three young sons), drove them to North Carolina, piled them in a shallow hole and set them on fire. Then he vanished. Why it happened, and what became of him, are anyone's guess.
Later that year, while house hunting, Gneiser and his wife, Carolyn, saw a Bethesda split-level that they loved. "I had covered the story like everyone else, but I had never been to the scene," Gneiser said. "So it didn't register with me."
Their real estate agent broke the news: It was the Bishop place, put up for sale by estate lawyers. Carolyn Gneiser didn't care. "It wouldn't have mattered if you told her Ghengis Khan and Adolf Hitler lived there," Gneiser said. "She wanted that house."
They wound up paying $106,000, a stigma bargain. A smaller house next door had sold recently for $113,000.
"It's been a great home for 30 years," said Gneiser, now a widower. "I know some people get upset at these things," he said of the house's history. "In fact, my brother -- he lives in Florida -- he has refused to come up here and see me." But so be it.
"The only way I'm leaving," Gneiser said, "is in a box."
A person selling a house, and the seller's agent, can wind up paying civil damages if they lie to the buyer about a death or other calamity that occurred on the premises. But in most of the country, including the Washington area, unless the buyer asks whether any traumatic events took place in the house, the seller isn't obligated to tell.
Many sellers of stigmatized houses choose not to volunteer the stories, real estate professionals said. And because sellers' agents are bound by their clients' wishes, they tend to keep quiet, too.
On a shaded cul-de-sac in the Layhill area of Silver Spring, a 3,200-square-foot brick house stood empty for two years, a pall hanging over it.
Mildred Horn, who was divorced, lived there with her 8-year-old son, Trevor, who had suffered brain damage and was kept alive by a respirator. On March 3, 1993, police said, an ex-con hired by the boy's father broke into the house, shot Mildred Horn and a nurse, then pulled out Trevor's breathing tube and smothered him.
Police said the father, Lawrence Horn, then 54, a former Motown Records engineer, wanted control of his son's $1.7 million trust fund from a medical malpractice settlement. Now, he and the hit man are serving life in prison.
For years, "when March third came, we subconsciously knew we were depressed for a reason," said Eugene Sprehn, 65, who lives nearby. "And the third of each month . . . we would remember."
The current owners, a husband and wife in their late forties, first saw the empty house in 1995. They thought, "Oh, this seems nice," said the wife, a corporate recruiter who did not want her name published. Then, while she and her husband were waiting for the real estate agent to arrive, they got to talking with a neighbor, who let on about the murders.
Their decision to buy wasn't easy, the wife said. But "tragic as it was, you move on." She said a stigma price break "made it more affordable, and we could get into the market." In 1990, Mildred Horn had paid $388,000 for the place; her estate sold it for $315,000.
"For the first couple of years after we bought it, every anniversary, people would be showing up," the wife said. But no more.
Now she and her husband have a young son and daughter. There's a basketball hoop in front of the house; there are toys in the yard and flowers. The gloom has lifted.
It was "a nightmarish thing," she said. "But out of that often comes the ability to create some good."
Haunting Visitors
A ghost story:
By August 1998, Natarajan Ramachandran, 40, an investment adviser, had run up $10 million in debts, some to casinos, and was under investigation for passing $2 million in worthless checks. For him, death was a way out -- and he wasn't going alone.
In his 5,000-square-foot tract mansion in Herndon, he gathered his family in the master bedroom -- his wife, Kalpara; their daughter, Reha, 11; and their son, Raj, 7 -- and ended their lives and his with a 9mm Ruger rifle.
"I believe there's a place between this life and life ever after," said the house's current owner, Jerome Peters, 52. "People's energy or spirits can get tied up in that."
Which explains the spectral presence of Raj and Reha in the 20-room house, he said. His wife, Brenda, 56, said, "We feel they haven't passed over yet."
The Peterses were living in Herndon and shopping for a bigger house in 2002 when they toured Ramachandran's former residence in the Crossfields neighborhood.
"We put the down payment down," Brenda Peters said, "and then I got to thinking. . . ." Two of her daughters had gone to school with a brother and sister from Crossfields who were murdered. "I just wondered if this was the house," she said.
She asked her agent, who didn't know. The seller's agent didn't know, either, and asked the seller, who had bought the house in 1999. The seller confirmed it.
To Jerome Peters, who owns an information technology company, "it was just a house -- it didn't matter what happened." But his wife said: "I had to think about it. I mean, to know a family was killed in your house, in your bedroom, it's a little unsettling."
They stuck to the deal, for a full-market price of $746,000, and arranged for a Baptist minister to stop by and bless the place.
"Call it an energy or some kind of presence or some being -- I don't know what it is," Jerome Peters said. But "we don't find it frightening at all."
Weeks and months go by with no hint of Raj and Reha, the couple said, and then, suddenly, fleetingly, the dead children are there, in glimpses, in wisps of sound.
Brenda Peters said her son's girlfriend came bounding up from the finished basement a while back, mystified and shaken, saying a small boy had just walked past her and into a bathroom, which was empty when she looked in. Her son wasn't surprised, Brenda Peters said. He told his girlfriend that he had seen the boy before.
"I've heard them," said Jerome Peters. Home by himself, "I've heard footsteps. . . . I've heard the sounds of children."
Brenda Peters said: "I was in the sunroom. A movement caught my eye at the top of the stairs. And I saw the little girl walk into the bedroom. I saw the long hair in a braid, and she was Indian. . . .
"It was so clear."
As for the siblings' murdered mother, there has been no sign of her, the couple said.
"Every time I make changes in the house, I wonder if she'd approve," Brenda Peters said. "We feel she's still here, too."
Staff researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.
[size=-1]By Paul Duggan and Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 5, 2006; C01
[/size]
Houses like the one Christopher Price bought three years ago can be found in neighborhoods all over the Washington area -- ordinary houses not much different from those next door, except for the awful, abiding memories of what took place within their walls.
See that house over there ? That's where . . . .
Neighbors on either side of Price's ranch-style house near Annapolis -- old-timers who were there on that dreadful, long-ago morning when the bodies were discovered -- never shared the history with him. Then, on a winter afternoon a couple of years back, Price found out that his perfectly lovely house has an unlovely past.
A man had been stabbed 17 times with a steak knife in the room that Price uses as an office. And in the room where he and his fiancee watch TV in the evenings, a woman was stabbed seven times before being bludgeoned with a wood-splitting maul. "It did keep us awake a couple of nights, thinking about it," Price said.
On suburban cul-de-sacs and city streets across the country, they are houses that neighbors point to, the ones they don't forget. Long after the shock of murder wears off, long after the crime-scene tape comes down and life on the block resumes a peaceful rhythm, the memories linger, kept alive in whispers.
See that house ? . . .
Real estate professionals call them "stigmatized properties" -- houses that are structurally sound yet "psychologically impacted."
To some who live in them, stigmatized houses are fascinating. "A conversation piece," Price calls his. Others are loath to discuss the grim histories: They're hoping their children won't find out; they're worried about their equity; they're afraid that skittish relatives won't visit if they hear what happened in the kitchen, the den, the master bedroom.
One woman said that after she and her husband contracted to buy their house, they were stunned to learn from a neighbor that the previous owners, a married couple, had been shot to death in the basement. More than a year after moving in, the woman recoils at the thought of publicity.
"No, no, no, no, no," she said. "Absolutely not. . . . I have a daughter who would never set foot in my house again if she knew."
Some buyers knew the facts beforehand, though, and didn't flinch. Some used the stigmas to leverage discounts. As for buyers who heard the stories later -- one man learned of a multiple murder under his roof only when his gardener brought it up -- their reactions varied. Some were uneasy, others blase. Some took it as a spiritual challenge, a chance to bring joy to a house scarred by hate.
One couple talked openly about ghosts in their house.
Fury in the Family
Price, who lives in Anne Arundel County's Cape St. Claire community, learned of his house's former notoriety while talking with a police officer. Then he immersed himself in old newspapers, absorbing more details, and read a book about the killings, "Sudden Fury," by Leslie Walker, now a Washington Post business columnist.
The victims, Robert and Kathryn Swartz, had adopted their son Larry in 1973, when he was 6. Abandoned as a toddler, the boy had bounced from one abusive foster home to another before arriving in Cape St. Claire.
He was 17 when his anger exploded in parricidal violence on a January night in 1984, ignited, his attorneys said, by the repressive, demeaning discipline that the couple had imposed on him. He eventually pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, spent about a decade in prison and, at 38, died of a heart attack in Florida.
"The book goes on about the paramedics coming in, the police coming in, and they turned the corner and went down the stairs, and there was blood here and evidence there," said Price, who paid $220,000 for the property, becoming the third owner since the Swartzes were murdered. The husband and wife who sold it to him had lived in the house for two years, unaware of its history.
"I can walk around my house and I can picture it, which is interesting," Price said.
He enjoys talking about it, he said. When he met a woman from Annapolis at a computer conference in Orlando recently, he asked her whether she recalled the murders. "And she was like, 'Oh, yeah, yeah.' . . . And I said: 'Yeah? Well, I live in that house now!' "
Bob Gneiser, 74, also has no qualms about living in a murder scene, although Gneiser wishes people would forget about his house, a brick-and-wood split-level in the Carderock Springs section of Bethesda. Reporters and camera crews still show up at his door occasionally, revisiting one of the most enduring mysteries in the annals of local crime. And Gneiser, a retired radio and TV newsman, grudgingly tolerates them.
"I know what they want," he said. "So I tell them, 'Go ahead and get it, and get the hell out of here.' "
On a night three decades ago, a charming, 39-year-old State Department foreign service officer, William Bradford Bishop Jr. -- a multilingual Yale graduate and former Army intelligence officer -- went home from work and clubbed his family to death with a ball-peen hammer, police said.
They said he loaded the bodies in a station wagon (his mother, his wife, his three young sons), drove them to North Carolina, piled them in a shallow hole and set them on fire. Then he vanished. Why it happened, and what became of him, are anyone's guess.
Later that year, while house hunting, Gneiser and his wife, Carolyn, saw a Bethesda split-level that they loved. "I had covered the story like everyone else, but I had never been to the scene," Gneiser said. "So it didn't register with me."
Their real estate agent broke the news: It was the Bishop place, put up for sale by estate lawyers. Carolyn Gneiser didn't care. "It wouldn't have mattered if you told her Ghengis Khan and Adolf Hitler lived there," Gneiser said. "She wanted that house."
They wound up paying $106,000, a stigma bargain. A smaller house next door had sold recently for $113,000.
"It's been a great home for 30 years," said Gneiser, now a widower. "I know some people get upset at these things," he said of the house's history. "In fact, my brother -- he lives in Florida -- he has refused to come up here and see me." But so be it.
"The only way I'm leaving," Gneiser said, "is in a box."
A person selling a house, and the seller's agent, can wind up paying civil damages if they lie to the buyer about a death or other calamity that occurred on the premises. But in most of the country, including the Washington area, unless the buyer asks whether any traumatic events took place in the house, the seller isn't obligated to tell.
Many sellers of stigmatized houses choose not to volunteer the stories, real estate professionals said. And because sellers' agents are bound by their clients' wishes, they tend to keep quiet, too.
On a shaded cul-de-sac in the Layhill area of Silver Spring, a 3,200-square-foot brick house stood empty for two years, a pall hanging over it.
Mildred Horn, who was divorced, lived there with her 8-year-old son, Trevor, who had suffered brain damage and was kept alive by a respirator. On March 3, 1993, police said, an ex-con hired by the boy's father broke into the house, shot Mildred Horn and a nurse, then pulled out Trevor's breathing tube and smothered him.
Police said the father, Lawrence Horn, then 54, a former Motown Records engineer, wanted control of his son's $1.7 million trust fund from a medical malpractice settlement. Now, he and the hit man are serving life in prison.
For years, "when March third came, we subconsciously knew we were depressed for a reason," said Eugene Sprehn, 65, who lives nearby. "And the third of each month . . . we would remember."
The current owners, a husband and wife in their late forties, first saw the empty house in 1995. They thought, "Oh, this seems nice," said the wife, a corporate recruiter who did not want her name published. Then, while she and her husband were waiting for the real estate agent to arrive, they got to talking with a neighbor, who let on about the murders.
Their decision to buy wasn't easy, the wife said. But "tragic as it was, you move on." She said a stigma price break "made it more affordable, and we could get into the market." In 1990, Mildred Horn had paid $388,000 for the place; her estate sold it for $315,000.
"For the first couple of years after we bought it, every anniversary, people would be showing up," the wife said. But no more.
Now she and her husband have a young son and daughter. There's a basketball hoop in front of the house; there are toys in the yard and flowers. The gloom has lifted.
It was "a nightmarish thing," she said. "But out of that often comes the ability to create some good."
Haunting Visitors
A ghost story:
By August 1998, Natarajan Ramachandran, 40, an investment adviser, had run up $10 million in debts, some to casinos, and was under investigation for passing $2 million in worthless checks. For him, death was a way out -- and he wasn't going alone.
In his 5,000-square-foot tract mansion in Herndon, he gathered his family in the master bedroom -- his wife, Kalpara; their daughter, Reha, 11; and their son, Raj, 7 -- and ended their lives and his with a 9mm Ruger rifle.
"I believe there's a place between this life and life ever after," said the house's current owner, Jerome Peters, 52. "People's energy or spirits can get tied up in that."
Which explains the spectral presence of Raj and Reha in the 20-room house, he said. His wife, Brenda, 56, said, "We feel they haven't passed over yet."
The Peterses were living in Herndon and shopping for a bigger house in 2002 when they toured Ramachandran's former residence in the Crossfields neighborhood.
"We put the down payment down," Brenda Peters said, "and then I got to thinking. . . ." Two of her daughters had gone to school with a brother and sister from Crossfields who were murdered. "I just wondered if this was the house," she said.
She asked her agent, who didn't know. The seller's agent didn't know, either, and asked the seller, who had bought the house in 1999. The seller confirmed it.
To Jerome Peters, who owns an information technology company, "it was just a house -- it didn't matter what happened." But his wife said: "I had to think about it. I mean, to know a family was killed in your house, in your bedroom, it's a little unsettling."
They stuck to the deal, for a full-market price of $746,000, and arranged for a Baptist minister to stop by and bless the place.
"Call it an energy or some kind of presence or some being -- I don't know what it is," Jerome Peters said. But "we don't find it frightening at all."
Weeks and months go by with no hint of Raj and Reha, the couple said, and then, suddenly, fleetingly, the dead children are there, in glimpses, in wisps of sound.
Brenda Peters said her son's girlfriend came bounding up from the finished basement a while back, mystified and shaken, saying a small boy had just walked past her and into a bathroom, which was empty when she looked in. Her son wasn't surprised, Brenda Peters said. He told his girlfriend that he had seen the boy before.
"I've heard them," said Jerome Peters. Home by himself, "I've heard footsteps. . . . I've heard the sounds of children."
Brenda Peters said: "I was in the sunroom. A movement caught my eye at the top of the stairs. And I saw the little girl walk into the bedroom. I saw the long hair in a braid, and she was Indian. . . .
"It was so clear."
As for the siblings' murdered mother, there has been no sign of her, the couple said.
"Every time I make changes in the house, I wonder if she'd approve," Brenda Peters said. "We feel she's still here, too."
Staff researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company