http://www.mansfieldnewsjournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071212/UPDATES01/71212004

Great case. The find ($182,000 face value) is vintage bills from the Depression era, hidden in the bathroom walls by a long-gone owner (his name, P. Dunne, was on the wrappings, so his heirs — if any — are possibly a player in this too…). The bills are in great condition and appraised for $500,000.

Contractor Kitts was hired to remodel a bathroom, and found a box behind a wall. He called the owner, Reece, who came home and together they found the additional money (equivalent to $2 Million+ in today’s purchasing power at the time it was hidden!) by tearing out other walls.

Reece offered Kitts 10%, but he refused that, asking for 40%. Reece said no. It’s now in state court in Ohio, where it will all turn on Ohio abandoned/lost property law. This is a straight-out-of-lawschool type case, where court decisions go back to pre-1800 English decisions — workers finding rings while cleaning fountains, etc. The decisions are sometimes contradictory, even misinterpreting prior decisions they purport to rely on.

Without looking through Ohio law, I think the owner, Reece, will be awarded this money — though she did nothing to earn it other than buying the house. The contractor is her agent that she hired — she owes him only what she contracted to pay for the job (assuming he finished the actual remodeling). It is she, the owner, that is doing the work, and she is doing the work by paying money to hire another set of hands. It’s Recce’s act, in the end, that tore into the wall, whether she paid for an axe and hit it herself, or paid a laborer to hit it for her.

As to the heirs of Peter Dunne, a known Depression-era business man who owned the house, I am afraid they are out of luck too — because the contents of the house (known and unknown) would have transferred ownership with the sale of the house. There are cases where people find things in secret compartments of a safe they just purchased, and the previous owners (who didn’t know about it either) have no claim.

So if we tentatively conclude that Recce will get the money, is that really the best public policy outcome? The big question here is whether the law (if I’m right about it), “encourages theft.” If the contractor had stayed silent and not called the owner, he might have recovered all the money and the owner would never have been the wiser. A lot of contractors will take note if this is the outcome, and owners will be less likely to recover unknown windfalls (or even worse — their own lost valuables) in the future.

If Ohio law takes the full implications of the policy choices into consideration, there may be a mandated “splitting” of the treasure, especially if it was completely unknown to the current owner (rather than just lost property the current owner can prove was hers — which is a somewhat weaker case for the contractor to share — maybe only a small finder’s fee would be appropriate there). But these sorts of compromises collide directly with entrenched property ownership and agency law, and would be a big exception to what I believe is the law in most states.

CNN has a good video with interviews here:

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2007/12/13/woio.money.found.wall.woio

B

UPDATE:

I did a quick search of Ohio law. I found no relevant statute (but I may have missed it). A quick search of case law revealed a couple of old cases (1946, and 1969 citing the 1946 case) that said that Ohio had no statute regarding “treasure trove.”

From Cisnarini vs. US (296 F. Supp. 3, 18 Ohio Misc. 1, 296 N.E.2d 3) (1969): In Ohio, there is no statute specifically dealing with the
rights of owners and finders of treasure trove, and in the
absence of such a statute the common-law rule of England applies,
so that “title belongs to the finder as against all the world
except the true owner.” Niederlehner v. Weatherly, 78 Ohio App. 263,
69 N.E.2d 787 (1946), appeal dismissed, 146 Ohio St. 697,
67 N.E.2d 713 (1946). The Niederlehner case held, inter alia,
that the owner of real estate upon which money is found does not
have title as against the finder. Therefore, in the instant case
if plaintiffs had resold the piano in 1958, not knowing of the
money within it, they later would not be able to succeed in an
action against the purchaser who did discover it. Under Ohio
law, the plaintiffs must have actually found the money to have
superior title over all but the true owner, and they did not
discover the old currency until 1964. Unless there is present a
specific state statute to the contrary, the majority of jurisdictions are in accord with the Ohio rule.

However, neither of these cases deal with a hired worker acting as an agent of the owner, so in this respect they are not entirely on point. The “independent contractor vs. employee” distinction may be relevant here, and would lean in favor of the contractor. Still, I feel it is the owner herself that, through the agency of the contractor’s bought and paid-for work, actually found the money. Very interested to see how this one comes out, and I will try to find out and update here.

B