For sale: Scene of infamous crime Catherine Rampell USA Today Aug. 7, 2006 08:15 AM Almost 10 years after the body of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey was found in the basement of her Boulder, Colo., home, the Tudor-style house at 749 15th St. is on the market again. "It's stigmatized. It's 'always' been stigmatized," says Joel Ripmaster, president of Colorado Landmark Realtors. Ripmaster has represented the last four owners of the property, all who purchased or sold the house at below-market value since JonBenet's slaying in 1996. "It's worth a couple million dollars," Ripmaster says, "but now we're asking for only $1.7 million." advertisement That's because some buyers consider more than just location, location, location. For certain places, history, history, history can turn a dream house into a nightmare. These houses are the sites of notorious and often grisly crimes - houses that, with the help of the evening news, become as much a character in the crime as the victims and their killers. Whether the Ramsey house or the condominium in Los Angeles where Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were killed, the home remains long after evidence of the crime is gone. Sometimes, the house - and the lot - stay empty for years. That's what happened at serial killer John Wayne Gacy's place in the Norwood Park Township outside of Chicago. The house was razed in 1979, and the lot sat vacant for a decade before a house was built in 1988. Other times, new owners try to change the look of the place, inside or out. Some opt to change the address, ostensibly to fool the gawkers. Buyers have plenty of reasons to shun such properties, says Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist who testified in the trials of serial killers Jeffrey Dahmer and Joel Rifkin. "People are superstitious. They're afraid of bad luck or ghosts, or that the house is cursed," says Dietz, who has visited dozens of crime scenes and investigated hundreds more through videos and photos. "Or they have a more rational concern that the tragedies will be more salient to them. It may be on their consciousness and decrease their joy in living." Randall Bell, author of an upcoming book on real estate called "Bottom Line Results," has a name for what Dietz describes. Bell calls it "crime scene stigma," which he defines as "the reluctance on the part of the real estate market to pay full price for a property associated with a horrific crime." Bell, who says he's sometimes called "Dr. Disaster" by clients and colleagues, is a real estate consultant who specializes in assessing disaster-damaged properties. Most of his business focuses on assessing the value of properties damaged by environmental disasters such as the hydrogen bomb testing at Bikini Atoll. He has also consulted with owners of the Ramsey house, the condominium where Brown Simpson and Goldman were killed in 1994, and the compound in Southern California where 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult committed suicide in 1997. Based on dozens of cases, Bell says a house in which a murder or other bloody crime took place typically will stay on the market from two to seven years longer than it would otherwise. About half of the states require sellers to disclose a home's traumatic history to buyers, Bell says, but some regulations mandate disclosure for only a short period of time. The California Civil Code, for example, decrees that a death on a property need not be disclosed if it occurred three years before a sale. In South Dakota, sellers must disclose a "human death by homicide or suicide" only if it occurred within 12 months of the sale, according to state statutes. Many homes, lots sit empty Real estate agents and homeowners consult Bell's company, Bell Anderson & Sanders LLP, on how much to discount properties and ways to reduce the stigma to sell the home faster. Sometimes Bell suggests extensive remodeling. For example, the front of Brown Simpson's condo was redone, so gawkers could no longer identify the facade once plastered across TV screens. Some of Bell's other clients have changed the street addresses of houses or demolished them, and some of the most notorious may not be redeveloped for years. The Oxford Apartments, the building in Milwaukee where Dahmer murdered most of his victims in 1990 and 1991, was razed in 1992 and remains a vacant lot. "I've heard that people still walk across the street to avoid walking next to the lot," Bell says. At the site of the Heaven's Gate suicides in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., the street name was changed (from Colina Norte to Paseo Victoria), the house was razed, and "every blade of grass was removed," he says. Several years ago, Bell says he was offered the Heaven's Gate mansion "for a reasonable price." When he suggested it to his wife, he says, "she looked at me like I was the village idiot." Even if buyers don't mind a home's stigma, they may find that their kids do. "Some parents I know had trouble getting kids to come over for birthday parties," Bell says of clients who moved into a house where a teenager had slaughtered his parents. A special kind of homebuyer So who does buy these homes? Sometimes they're purchased by bargain hunters looking for fixer-uppers. Other times, Bell says, police officers or other buyers with strong stomachs might be willing to live there. Take, for example, Neal Smither. Smither is the founder and president of Crime Scene Cleaners, which he says cleans up 3,000 to 7,000 crime scenes across the country each year. Some of the jobs are simply meth labs set up in hotel rooms, and others are "just too bizarre for anyone else to touch." He founded Crime Scene Cleaners in 1996 while studying to be a mortician. "I was watching "Pulp Fiction" the scene where Harvey Keitel is called in to clean up the bloody car. It looked like a pretty good idea to me. I figured, if I can stuff a body, I can clean a mess." Smither says he "couldn't care less" about whether his home has a traumatic history. He won't offer details but says the previous owner of his house, which his company had cleaned, suffered a "very gruesome" death - though one he says was devoid of foul play. Like Smither's home, the Beverly Hills house where Lyle and Erik Menendez killed their wealthy parents in 1989 has had at least one subsequent owner suited to its sordid past: a murder mystery writer. William Link, who co-wrote "Columbo," "Murder She Wrote" and scores of other TV shows and films, moved into the home with his wife, Margery, several years after the Menendez murders. He and his wife lived there for almost a decade. He says he had a few friends who didn't want to visit because they were "afraid that one of the people killed would still be stalking like a ghost at 3 in the morning." He never worried about unwanted visits from the supernatural. "When you're dead," he says, "you're dead." Link says he purchased the mansion at 722 Elm Drive because of its "great beauty" and admits he became more interested in its history only after purchasing it. He rattles off the names of other celebrities who rented the home, including Michael Jackson and members of the band U2 before he mentions the Menendez family. He says most of his friends thought his choice of residence was a "funny coincidence." Tourists seem to agree. The Menendez house is one of the featured stops on the Dearly Departed Tours, where "Director of Undertakings" Scott Michaels plays a recording of Lyle Menendez's 911 call as his tour bus passes the house. Link recalls hearing his resume broadcast, too. The Dearly Departed tour of the Los Angeles area also includes sites of celebrity sex scandals, but the highlights, Michaels says, are the death sites that pepper Hollywood. "I bring people to the news," Michaels says. "People say, 'Oh my God, the killers passed this very street sign, and I grew up hearing about it!' " Tourists can't get enough Michaels, who also founded the celebrity death database www.findadeath.com, says tourists have an insatiable appetite for morbid stories about stars, thanks to the "tabloid culture we live in." He laments that many of his more popular landmarks are being torn down. The Cielo Drive mansion where Charles Manson and his followers brutally murdered pregnant actress Sharon Tate in 1969 has been bulldozed and replaced with a new Italian-style villa. Michaels says he is grateful that the tree and telephone pole from which a cult member cut the phone lines still stand. In Hollywood, residents may be inured to the attention of tour buses, but owners elsewhere still go to great lengths to ward off gawkers and morbid entrepreneurs. Shortly after JonBenet's murder, for instance, friends of the Ramseys got together and bought the property from father John Ramsey's relocation service. "They didn't want it to get into the hands of speculators who'd start charging admission," says Ripmaster, who sold the house to the group. "They wanted to wait till things settled down because it was nuts around here back then. They held onto it for a few years and then decided to sell it off." Boulder County property records show the address of the house was changed - from 755 15th St. to 749 15th St. The next two owners of the house - a coach at the University of Colorado, then a family with four children - both decided to sell the home after job transfers, Ripmaster says. The murder of the Clutter family in 1959, a horror recounted in Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood, "still attracts tourists to the home where they were killed in Holcomb, Kan. The current owners of the house fended off unwanted visitors for years before opening their home - for $5 per person - to tours on Sundays. (They stopped giving the tours several years ago, according to local newspapers.) Some other homes have also appreciated in value because of the fame and notoriety. The Miami oceanfront mansion where Gianni Versace lived, for example, once held the Miami-Dade County record for highest sale price at $19 million. The property is now a hotel and club. In 1997, Versace was murdered outside the home by Andrew Cunanan. "It definitely added value to the home that (Versace) lived there and was killed there," says Carlos Justo, the SOL Sotheby's International Realty agent who sold the house. "We had more people wanting to see it than we could show it to. It was the only home in my whole career where we had a screening process for buyers to get through," Justo says. "It even took two weeks for a Saudi prince to get clearance." Why did the home's value increase after tragedy while other similar sites depreciated? "I don't know," Justo says. "I think it was because he was killed outside of his house, on the steps, and not inside it." As for finding a new owner for the 15-room home where JonBenet Ramsey lived and died, real estate agent Ripmaster says he's looking for a big family to move in. Or, perhaps, someone looking for a "great remodeling opportunity." Ripmaster says he's going through all the "normal" channels to advertise the house. Not that he needs to. As he sees it, "It's hard for this particular house to remain anonymous."
I personally couldn't buy a home that anyone had been murdered in, Greenleaf, even if it was changed from top to bottom. I did envy Bill Kurtis when he was walking through the Ramsey house in one of those TV videos. This I definitely would have done, because I would have wanted to climb those spiral stairs, and take a good look at that basement window, and the wine cellar/ windowless filthy room. What a sham, the Ramseys have an open house for the public, and a filthy maze of a basement cordoned off for sure. Just the right place for an intruder to get lost. Maybe he is still trapped in there, folks. squashed into the safe on the flthy dirty floor. After all he would have fitted in there just fine. I've forgotten which one of the seven dwarves was chosen for this crime. Anyone know? Doc, Sleepy, Grumpy, Happy,Sneezy, Bashful and Dopey (?). I did read this article before, Greenleaf, but thank you for posting it and letting me sound off.
Retired sleuths heat up cold cases http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-08-07-cold-case_x.htm?csp=34 From Los Angeles to Maryland, the hot trend in cold cases is special units of retired detectives who are coaxed off the golf course to comb old files for new leads. These retreaded sleuths usually work two days a week as unpaid volunteers to bone up on DNA evidence and other new wrinkles in a case. They combine science with their street savvy in questioning witnesses to relieve overloaded staff detectives of some of law enforcement's most tedious work. :uthere: Smit, who investigated the 1996 slaying of 6-year-old JonBenét Ramsey in Boulder, Colo., says he has set up retiree cold-case squads south of Colorado Springs in Pueblo County, Colo., as well as in Titusville, Fla., and Laurel, Md.
Gosh, thank y'all for stealing these articles from their rightful owner gutter candy and bringing them here. I guess I'd have to be in the home before I could decide if I could live there, in general. But I couldn't possibly stay in the hellhole. I actually don't think I could even visit Boulder. Colorado is iffy.... I guess Smit gave stun gun detecting lessons to all the old geezers, complete with a pit barbecue afterwards, to hide the...you know...evidence....
KK - something is very weird over There......none of these new articles have a thread. Not even for the new update from Steve Thomas, the one man they just can't get off their minds for an assortment of reasons. RR
He's great for them because they can bash him as revenge for every hunk who ever rejected them in High School!
ofergawdsake, who gives a rat's as$ what those fools think? Just reading the support letters written by law enforcement people at Steve's website proves that he is held in high regard, not only by his peers but also by people not in LE. These are the people who count - not the mental midgets at the swamp. The worst travesty about this whole case is that a damn good cop is no longer out there watching out for our kids, and all because of dirty DA's and assistant DA's, not to mention greedy, corrupt lawyers. My daughters are grown, now, but if I were still raising little girls, or boys, for that matter, my hope would be that there would be detectives as dedicated to finding the truth as ST was to finding the truth about JB's murder. He knows more about integrity than Lou Smit will ever know.
The only thing that interests me in what those morons have to say is that it gives you a good indication of how a defense attorney would approach the anti-Ram evidence. Smit reminds me of the "infallibility" argument: the idea that a person's past makes them above reproach in the present.
DITTO Punisher, DITTO regarding ST and the RST response to him, although I don't think it's limited to high school rejection. In Candy's case, it's a lifetime of rejection
I still think he was too nice in his letter. Could the RST (dare I say it) be right? Could he be ready for a comeback? Too much to hope for, I think.
I personally wouldn't buy the house, no. Too tragic and all those annoying on-lookers would drive me nuts, even with the fence surrounding the house. The house will always have curious tourists snapping photos of the house and it will always be "stigmatized." Nothing can be done to erase that. But like everyone, I would love to tour the house and I wouldn't be afraid to spend a night there either! Does anyone know the reason as to why no one stayed in the house for long? (Besides annoying tourists?) I've heard rumors the house was haunted. Heck, I'll believe in that when I see it. -LA
Well, the house is haunted, even if just in the memories of the horrible things that happened there. You want a ghost story? If someone told the truth of what happened that night...the actual, factual, first person truth...THAT'S a ghost story.... Once upon a time, there was a happy family, living right smack in the middle of the American Dream. Money. Power. Beauty. Education. Professional and social standing. Lots of friends and family. Traveling hither and yon, enjoying the best life has to offer.... Alas, as most fairy tales do, it all came to an end one fateful night.
Koldkase Koldkase: "Once upon a time, there was a happy family, living right smack in the middle of the American Dream. Money. Power. Beauty. Education. Professional and social standing. Lots of friends and family. Traveling hither and yon, enjoying the best life has to offer...." OK, KK, that's the beginning paragraph of your book on the case. I want the first signed copy. :leaf:
