November 8, 2023 • 20 mins
On a freezing day in 2017, host Matt Marinovich walked past an ordinary-looking stucco home in Leonia, N.J. that had a shocking history. Since then, he’s been obsessed with crimes that happen where we least expect: in peaceful looking homes on quiet tree-lined streets. Take a walk with Matt to the end of the block, to the home everyone whispers about. Empty homes that real estate agents term “stigmatized” for the shocking murders that occurred there.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Murder Homes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
I think a stigmatized home has to do with energy.
But if a murderer has lived in your current home,
is his energy still there?
Speaker 1 (00:13):
That voice you just heard was Cindy Hagley. She's a
real estate agent in northern California that specializes in stigmatized properties.
According to the National Association of Realtors, these are properties
that are quote psychologically impacted by an event which occurred
or was suspected to have occurred on the property end quote.
At the top of this list would be a home
(00:35):
where a murder occurred. We'll be talking to Cindy Moore
in a few minutes, but first I want to explain
how I got interested in murder homes and stigmatized properties.
It all started when I temporarily moved in with my
soon to be ex girlfriend Leonia, New Jersey. We stayed
in a ran style home her mother owned. Leonia is
(00:56):
a bedroom community suburban about a fifteen minute drive from
the George Washington Bridge and New York City. I'd spend
my week in Brooklyn and drive out to Lionia on
the weekends. This was early January. There were patches of
snow in the suburban lawns out there. Her home was
located near the end of a dead end street. Beyond
that a high fence, a twenty four hours shell station,
(01:20):
the distant white noise of traffic on north Bergen Boulevard.
Board I type in Leonia and see what came up
on Google. I had discovered that a body had been
found in Overpeck Park the year before a robbery had
happened a few streets away. But one of those nights
I found myself googling more and an older crime popped up.
(01:42):
It turned out that a one freezing winter day in
January nineteen seventy five, Leonia had been infamous. Just before
noon on January eighth, nineteen seventy five, a father and
son pretending to be insurance salesman had knocked on the
door of one twenty four Glenwood Avenue. As soon as
(02:02):
it was opened, they burst in and held eight people hostage.
When they finally left later that afternoon, a young nurse
named Maria Fashing would be dead, and Leonia, a community
where everyone kept their doors unlocked, would never be the same.
But reading about a crime is one thing. Seeing the
house where it took place as another This is Murder Holmes,
(02:24):
I'm at Marinovitch. One twenty four Glenwood was an eight
minute walk from where I was living. Being curious, I
(02:46):
walked over there with Ray, who turned out to be
the perfect partner. I felt I looked a lot less
suspicious with the dog as I stopped and stared at
the home. One twenty four Glenwood is a two story,
four bedroom home with a stucco exterior, a detached garage
sandwich between two other homes. There's a large tree in
the front yard that leans towards the shingled roof. In
(03:09):
black and white photographs taken after the murder, that same
tree is there. The home looks exactly the same. There
is something you sense in the air when you walk
by a murder home, Like Cindy Hagley said, it's a
kind of energy. I don't believe in ghosts, so it's
not that, but I feel like there's this pull that
(03:30):
the home can't shake. What happened so long ago. No
matter how much carpet has been ripped up and laid down,
no matter how many fresh coats of pain have been
slapped on, the history is still there. This gaping hole.
The home is a survivor of the crime just as
much as anyone else, and it wants to tell its
story to anyone who will listen. My interest in one
(03:53):
twenty four glen Wood and the dramatic events that happened there,
brought to mind other murder homes that I had read
about over the years, and as I delved into them,
the term quote stigmatized property came up again and again.
You might be familiar with some other famous stigmatized addresses.
Eight to seventy five South Bundy Drive, the Nicole Simpson
(04:15):
home one zero zero five zero Cielo Drive, where Manson
followers murdered Sharon Tate and her friends. One twelve Ocean Avenue,
the home in Amudeville where Ronald de Fayo Junior killed
his parents and four siblings. A murder home can sell
for as much as twenty five percent off its market value,
So for a home that might look as well kept
(04:36):
as any other on the street, you might be getting
the bargain of a lifetime, as long as you don't
mind knowing what happened inside its walls.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
But I was distigmatized home number one. I want multiple
offers I want the home pristine. I advertise and market
it just like a regular home.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
That's Cindy Hagley, the real estate agent who specializes in
stigmatized properties that we heard from at the beginning of
this episode. After my visit to one twenty four Glenwood,
I decided it was time to talk to some experts
about stigmatized properties, so I called her up to ask
her more about her process.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
My goal is to get multiple offers, pit the buyers
against each other for the highest price. When that competitive
edge comes in and we've chosen a contract to accept,
at that point, I will disclose that, hey, something's happened here,
or three kids were murdered here in the living room
in nineteen sixty eight. Whatever I need to disclose, I
(05:35):
will disclose it. But at that point, after the buyers
have bitted against each other, and it's usually a two
or three day process, and in the state of California
we have a shortage of homes. I have never lost
a deal because I've disclosed something that's terrific.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
I want to ask a quick follow up to that, though,
do you find most buyers then say I don't want
to hear anything more about what happened here? Or do
you get buyers who will say, I'd tell me more.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Oh, they don't get a novel like Warren Peace telling
them what happened. It's like, by the way, somebody died
in the house, like six years ago. Oh okay. Some
people ask questions. If they ask questions, they get top
of the tree responses. If they ask more detailed questions,
I will tell them anything and everything they want to know.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Okay, And you said you got into this niche? How
did that happen? Just specifically with stigmatized homes? How do
you get into a niche? As an agent?
Speaker 2 (06:27):
The first stigmatized home that I dealt with was a
little two story turn of this century home in northern California.
I got a call and listed the property, had it
for sale. During the first open house, I'm sitting at
the dining room table and I think I'm seeing something
(06:48):
moving on the stairway. And I kept sensing this and
I would look up and there's nothing there. And this
happened two or three times, and I was convinced that
there was somebody in the home, even though at that
moment I knew I was alone. Went upstairs, looked around
and there was nobody there. So a couple hours later
when the owner came home, I said, you know, this
(07:09):
is going to sound really weird, but I kept seeing
things at the top of the stairs and she says, oh,
you met my ghost. Okay, well tell me about that.
And apparently there had been sightings in this home by
her and her boyfriend for several years, and she decided
not to mention it to me, which was fine because
(07:29):
in the state of California, you don't have to report
a death in the house after two years. But I'm
a buy the book kind of broker, so I felt
this needed to be disclosed. But anyway, somebody did buy
the house. We did disclose that we thought it was haunted,
and not only did the buyer buy the home, they
(07:51):
insisted the cat and the home came with them, which
I thought.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Was odd and stigmatized and a cat with it.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Is there one that sticks out as being particularly difficult
as far as it stigmatized home because of what had
happened there particularly challenging.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Yes, there is a home here in northern California that
had a very very high profile murder. It was an
attorney and they were building this beautiful new home, just
a gorgeous home on a hill, and they had a
mobile home on the premises where they were living while
this home was being built. Well, at some point a
(08:32):
kid in the neighborhood decides that he needs to kill
these people for whatever reason. I think he was looking
for drug money. The attorney was at work, his wife
and maybe a child were a home, but they came
in and just bludgeoned them. They just bludged the family
to death. So all over the news from every angirl,
helicopters on the ground, you knew where this home was in.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
What looked like.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
And I really don't want to mention the home or
the city, but that home set on the market for
at least two to three years, and when I first
walked the property, I knew exactly what the issue was.
You walk into the property and over to the left
from the gate, you could still see the inprint from
where the mobile home sat, so everybody knew where this
(09:17):
murder occurred. And you had to pass this spot to
get up to the main house. So I only had
one suggestion, make that go away. Replant, put in a fountain,
put in flowers, do absolutely anything you need to do
to not make it obvious that that's where the murder occurred.
They did it. I think it took them a couple
(09:39):
of weeks to do the landscaping. It sold sixty days
after that.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
That's fascinating. And that's the only time you've really staged
like a murder home specifically because of a portion of
the home had been involved in this crime scene. Oh.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
I staged homes all the time. Like if I have
somebody swinging from a chandelier in the dining room, that
dining room is going to be stack age to the tea.
I want them to fall in love with that dining
room and not imagine what happened there. Okay, Also, when
a death occurs on the property, I'm not saying, oh, yeah,
this occurred in the master bedroom, or you know, he
stabbed himself with the corkscrew in the kitchen or dining room.
(10:15):
I'm not saying that. I just say a death has occurred,
but forever that death has occurred, in case somebody asks
or a neighbor comes through, I make sure that area
is as warm and inviting as possible.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Do you find that people buyers are coming to you
to buy stigmatized property? Do you have a buyer, for instance,
who might say I'm looking for a stigmatized property, a
murder home.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Anyone that comes to me specifically looking for stigmatized home
is batshit crazy, and I run. There are people out
there that think they can buy homes, stigmatized homes, decrepit homes, whatever,
for pennies on the dollar. But in today's reality, you
can't do that. My homes always sell above market because
(11:04):
I'm a salesperson, not just a walter, and you can't
pick up a stigmatized home for pennies on the dollar.
Every stigmatized home that I have sold has been at
market value or greater. So no, the people that come
looking for the haunted house or whatever, I will not
deal with. I'll give them to someone on my team
to deal with a buyer's agent. But those that I'm
(11:26):
aware of have never turned into a transaction.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
We'll be back after a short break. We're back with
murder homes. After my conversation with Cindy, my head was spinning.
I wondered if the current occupants of the house and
Leonia even knew of the murder that had happened there.
Did the real estate broker disclose it to the buyers.
(11:52):
Did they have to? I also wondered about my own home,
or any home.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
More.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Sleuthing on Google led me to the website site died
in Home. For a fee, the website will find out
if a death occurred in your home, and once you
have that name, you can find out if it was
a natural death or something more sinister. I reached out
to the man behind the website, Roy Condrey. I wanted
to find out more about his story and the people
(12:18):
who use his website. He told me that he started
the website after he discovered his own home was stigmatized.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
I had a couple of royal properties and I was
managing it myself and I knew the tenants, and she
text me in the middle of the night and she said,
did you know your house is haunted? So I just
replied back and I was like, whoa, Okay, I said, well,
what do you mean, tell me more? But you never
replied back. But the next day I thought about it
and I got online and I was looking for like
(12:48):
a carfax for homes. So I couldn't find any tool
that would tell you if your house was haunted. But
I saw the results of my Google search saying, how
do I find out my house is on it? How
do I find out if someone's died in my house?
And then I did find where realtors were giving advice
(13:08):
how to do it, and they're saying, you know, ask
a realtor, ask the neighbors, go check, you know, public
records and so forth. So that's easier said than done,
because when you go look, you're typically finding the owner
of the house. I'm not really finding the roommates necessarily,
or the kids or whoever that's lived in that house,
(13:32):
and maybe they've passed away in that house. So it's
really time consuming. But I did go down the path
and I didn't find anything in that house, but I
found out my other rental property that two people died there.
So it just shocked me, like, well, everybody feels differently
about it death in the home, and so me, I
might be a little more skittish than the normal person.
(13:52):
But I can live with peaceful death in the home.
I could live with that. But my wife, on the
other hand, she doesn't want any death home. And then
you've got just different levels of that. It can be
just tragic, horrifying events. I definitely don't want to be
in there, and I know a lot of people that don't.
So I just feel like this information needed to be
disclosed to home buyers. But I found out that it
(14:15):
doesn't have to in most states. There's a lot of
states have laws. I'm in South Carolina. It has a law,
but it's not worth the ink, and it says if
the buyer asked the seller and the seller knows, then
they should disclose the information. And that goes for the realtorials.
They should disclose the information, but there's no legal action
(14:37):
can be held against them.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
For not I asked Roy if there were any homicides
like the one in Leonia that he had come across
on his website at the time.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Twenty thirteen, there was a house in Burton, Pennsylvania, And
what happened is lady her and her husband and children
lived in California. She's from Pennsylvania, but they live in California.
Her husband passed away and she decided moved back home
with their kids and they bought a home, really nice
home in a cul de sac, like six hundred and
fifty thousand dollars or something like that. They moved in
(15:09):
and it within like two months, she was claiming in
that time for him, she was witnessing paranormal experiences behavior.
But then like two months later, her kids are told
that there was a murder suicide in that house like
a year earlier, and that information wasn't disclosed to her,
and she wasn't comfortable with it. But what happened is
(15:30):
the murder suicide happened. They tried to sell it. I
guess too many people were aware of it, and no
one bought it. And then the investors bought it, and
they asked that they were aware, and they asked that
we have to disclose this, and the relitior said no,
and so they bought it for a discount and they
flipped it to her and didn't disclose it, but they
sold it to her for the price of a normal home.
That a murder didn't happen, and so she wasn't comfortable.
(15:53):
She took them to court, and in the end it
went to New York's Supreme Court, and the judge he
said something like, I understand you lost like one hundred
and fifty thousand in equity equity, but there's no law
disclosing that they had to state and that they had
to disclose that information to you, so she was stuck
in her home.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
Roy told me that he sometimes gets emails from people
upset about the information in their report.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
You know, well, it's kind of private to them. Maybe
it just happened recently, I don't know. But on the
opposite side of that, we have people sending us their
certificates of their family and asking us to put their
home in the database. I'm presuming they've moved out of
the property, but we have people informing us, and we
want to verify the data, especially when people give it
to us. So I asked for some kind of DEUS
(16:39):
certificate or news story or something like that.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
Right, I was just going to ask you, are buyers
using your website to get deals on stigmatized property?
Speaker 3 (16:49):
Yes, and I have some examples of that. So our
theory is, so when you first present this to people,
it's not something you always think about, especially when you're
talking about real estate or the realtor the seller. As
you know, you're cleaning your house up, you're staging it,
you're making it look nice and new and staying positive.
And the buyer they're excited because they're about to get
(17:09):
a new house. That's a positive thing. And you don't
typically ever think about has someone died in this house
unless it looks scary. You know, maybe it's an old
Victorian Howison, you're not used to buying those or something.
I don't know. So people they don't think about it.
But I know that people have different thoughts of what
bothers them. I'm not trying to say that it doesn't
(17:31):
house bothers everybody. So there's people that don't think they
believe or think they care, but I believe a lot
more and more do. But if you don't care that
there was a death in a home, then there's people
like on the paramo normal side, you know, Amie Bille Horror,
all those things and the dark energy and what have you.
There's those people that make care every one level and
(17:52):
the other another. If you don't care about any of that,
these stigmatized properties have proven to be devalued. You know.
Realture dot Com at twenty twenty one said you can
expect to pay ten to twenty five percent less of
regular price. Some homes sell them for more. But I
(18:13):
think that's all about location and demand. You know, it's
like you're in New York City, and I believe that
the short is there. People can look past it. But
if you're out where I live, and you have two
homes and they're identical, and one had a murder suicide
in it and he knew about it, and you had
the other one, that was fine. I believe most people
aren't going to live in the murder suicide one.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
And then I thought I might ask Roy a very
obvious question. You know, I guess it might be darkly
funny for the show to find out if I'm living
in a murder home, you know, so I can give you.
I can give you my address if you want. Okay,
go ahead, we'll be back after a short break. We're
(18:58):
back with murder homes. So I gave Roy my address,
although I heavily doubted it was stigmatized, because I'd heard
nothing from my neighbors, who seemed to know everything that
had happened in my Brooklyn neighborhood, way back to when
it was a whole lot less gentrified. That night, I
started thinking about what Roy had said, how some people
(19:19):
are fine sleeping in a room where a murder suicide
had happened, and others like himself and his wife are
much more skittish. What if you lived in a home
where a murderer had happened and heard strange noises at night,
felt the presence of something sinister in the air. Because
there's a whole lot of murder in the United States.
(19:40):
On every block, on every quiet, tree lined street, something
bad has happened inside at least one home. And next
week we'll learn all about one completely unnerving murder home
that was just recently on the market. Was the real
estate agent honest about it? We'll find out. And there's
one more thing. Roy Condrey sent the report on my
(20:02):
home to one of my producers. He said, not to
be too freaked out.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
So yeah, so no one has actually died or no
one's murdered.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
That's the good news. Bye. This is Murder Holmes. Thanks
for listening. Murder Holmes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
(20:32):
For more shows from iHeart Podcasts, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Murder Homes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
I think a stigmatized home has to do with energy.
But if a murderer has lived in your current home,
is his energy still there?
Speaker 1 (00:13):
That voice you just heard was Cindy Hagley. She's a
real estate agent in northern California that specializes in stigmatized properties.
According to the National Association of Realtors, these are properties
that are quote psychologically impacted by an event which occurred
or was suspected to have occurred on the property end quote.
At the top of this list would be a home
(00:35):
where a murder occurred. We'll be talking to Cindy Moore
in a few minutes, but first I want to explain
how I got interested in murder homes and stigmatized properties.
It all started when I temporarily moved in with my
soon to be ex girlfriend Leonia, New Jersey. We stayed
in a ran style home her mother owned. Leonia is
(00:56):
a bedroom community suburban about a fifteen minute drive from
the George Washington Bridge and New York City. I'd spend
my week in Brooklyn and drive out to Lionia on
the weekends. This was early January. There were patches of
snow in the suburban lawns out there. Her home was
located near the end of a dead end street. Beyond
that a high fence, a twenty four hours shell station,
(01:20):
the distant white noise of traffic on north Bergen Boulevard.
Board I type in Leonia and see what came up
on Google. I had discovered that a body had been
found in Overpeck Park the year before a robbery had
happened a few streets away. But one of those nights
I found myself googling more and an older crime popped up.
(01:42):
It turned out that a one freezing winter day in
January nineteen seventy five, Leonia had been infamous. Just before
noon on January eighth, nineteen seventy five, a father and
son pretending to be insurance salesman had knocked on the
door of one twenty four Glenwood Avenue. As soon as
(02:02):
it was opened, they burst in and held eight people hostage.
When they finally left later that afternoon, a young nurse
named Maria Fashing would be dead, and Leonia, a community
where everyone kept their doors unlocked, would never be the same.
But reading about a crime is one thing. Seeing the
house where it took place as another This is Murder Holmes,
(02:24):
I'm at Marinovitch. One twenty four Glenwood was an eight
minute walk from where I was living. Being curious, I
(02:46):
walked over there with Ray, who turned out to be
the perfect partner. I felt I looked a lot less
suspicious with the dog as I stopped and stared at
the home. One twenty four Glenwood is a two story,
four bedroom home with a stucco exterior, a detached garage
sandwich between two other homes. There's a large tree in
the front yard that leans towards the shingled roof. In
(03:09):
black and white photographs taken after the murder, that same
tree is there. The home looks exactly the same. There
is something you sense in the air when you walk
by a murder home, Like Cindy Hagley said, it's a
kind of energy. I don't believe in ghosts, so it's
not that, but I feel like there's this pull that
(03:30):
the home can't shake. What happened so long ago. No
matter how much carpet has been ripped up and laid down,
no matter how many fresh coats of pain have been
slapped on, the history is still there. This gaping hole.
The home is a survivor of the crime just as
much as anyone else, and it wants to tell its
story to anyone who will listen. My interest in one
(03:53):
twenty four glen Wood and the dramatic events that happened there,
brought to mind other murder homes that I had read
about over the years, and as I delved into them,
the term quote stigmatized property came up again and again.
You might be familiar with some other famous stigmatized addresses.
Eight to seventy five South Bundy Drive, the Nicole Simpson
(04:15):
home one zero zero five zero Cielo Drive, where Manson
followers murdered Sharon Tate and her friends. One twelve Ocean Avenue,
the home in Amudeville where Ronald de Fayo Junior killed
his parents and four siblings. A murder home can sell
for as much as twenty five percent off its market value,
So for a home that might look as well kept
(04:36):
as any other on the street, you might be getting
the bargain of a lifetime, as long as you don't
mind knowing what happened inside its walls.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
But I was distigmatized home number one. I want multiple
offers I want the home pristine. I advertise and market
it just like a regular home.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
That's Cindy Hagley, the real estate agent who specializes in
stigmatized properties that we heard from at the beginning of
this episode. After my visit to one twenty four Glenwood,
I decided it was time to talk to some experts
about stigmatized properties, so I called her up to ask
her more about her process.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
My goal is to get multiple offers, pit the buyers
against each other for the highest price. When that competitive
edge comes in and we've chosen a contract to accept,
at that point, I will disclose that, hey, something's happened here,
or three kids were murdered here in the living room
in nineteen sixty eight. Whatever I need to disclose, I
(05:35):
will disclose it. But at that point, after the buyers
have bitted against each other, and it's usually a two
or three day process, and in the state of California
we have a shortage of homes. I have never lost
a deal because I've disclosed something that's terrific.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
I want to ask a quick follow up to that, though,
do you find most buyers then say I don't want
to hear anything more about what happened here? Or do
you get buyers who will say, I'd tell me more.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Oh, they don't get a novel like Warren Peace telling
them what happened. It's like, by the way, somebody died
in the house, like six years ago. Oh okay. Some
people ask questions. If they ask questions, they get top
of the tree responses. If they ask more detailed questions,
I will tell them anything and everything they want to know.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Okay, And you said you got into this niche? How
did that happen? Just specifically with stigmatized homes? How do
you get into a niche? As an agent?
Speaker 2 (06:27):
The first stigmatized home that I dealt with was a
little two story turn of this century home in northern California.
I got a call and listed the property, had it
for sale. During the first open house, I'm sitting at
the dining room table and I think I'm seeing something
(06:48):
moving on the stairway. And I kept sensing this and
I would look up and there's nothing there. And this
happened two or three times, and I was convinced that
there was somebody in the home, even though at that
moment I knew I was alone. Went upstairs, looked around
and there was nobody there. So a couple hours later
when the owner came home, I said, you know, this
(07:09):
is going to sound really weird, but I kept seeing
things at the top of the stairs and she says, oh,
you met my ghost. Okay, well tell me about that.
And apparently there had been sightings in this home by
her and her boyfriend for several years, and she decided
not to mention it to me, which was fine because
(07:29):
in the state of California, you don't have to report
a death in the house after two years. But I'm
a buy the book kind of broker, so I felt
this needed to be disclosed. But anyway, somebody did buy
the house. We did disclose that we thought it was haunted,
and not only did the buyer buy the home, they
(07:51):
insisted the cat and the home came with them, which
I thought.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Was odd and stigmatized and a cat with it.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Is there one that sticks out as being particularly difficult
as far as it stigmatized home because of what had
happened there particularly challenging.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Yes, there is a home here in northern California that
had a very very high profile murder. It was an
attorney and they were building this beautiful new home, just
a gorgeous home on a hill, and they had a
mobile home on the premises where they were living while
this home was being built. Well, at some point a
(08:32):
kid in the neighborhood decides that he needs to kill
these people for whatever reason. I think he was looking
for drug money. The attorney was at work, his wife
and maybe a child were a home, but they came
in and just bludgeoned them. They just bludged the family
to death. So all over the news from every angirl,
helicopters on the ground, you knew where this home was in.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
What looked like.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
And I really don't want to mention the home or
the city, but that home set on the market for
at least two to three years, and when I first
walked the property, I knew exactly what the issue was.
You walk into the property and over to the left
from the gate, you could still see the inprint from
where the mobile home sat, so everybody knew where this
(09:17):
murder occurred. And you had to pass this spot to
get up to the main house. So I only had
one suggestion, make that go away. Replant, put in a fountain,
put in flowers, do absolutely anything you need to do
to not make it obvious that that's where the murder occurred.
They did it. I think it took them a couple
(09:39):
of weeks to do the landscaping. It sold sixty days
after that.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
That's fascinating. And that's the only time you've really staged
like a murder home specifically because of a portion of
the home had been involved in this crime scene. Oh.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
I staged homes all the time. Like if I have
somebody swinging from a chandelier in the dining room, that
dining room is going to be stack age to the tea.
I want them to fall in love with that dining
room and not imagine what happened there. Okay, Also, when
a death occurs on the property, I'm not saying, oh, yeah,
this occurred in the master bedroom, or you know, he
stabbed himself with the corkscrew in the kitchen or dining room.
(10:15):
I'm not saying that. I just say a death has occurred,
but forever that death has occurred, in case somebody asks
or a neighbor comes through, I make sure that area
is as warm and inviting as possible.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Do you find that people buyers are coming to you
to buy stigmatized property? Do you have a buyer, for instance,
who might say I'm looking for a stigmatized property, a
murder home.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Anyone that comes to me specifically looking for stigmatized home
is batshit crazy, and I run. There are people out
there that think they can buy homes, stigmatized homes, decrepit homes, whatever,
for pennies on the dollar. But in today's reality, you
can't do that. My homes always sell above market because
(11:04):
I'm a salesperson, not just a walter, and you can't
pick up a stigmatized home for pennies on the dollar.
Every stigmatized home that I have sold has been at
market value or greater. So no, the people that come
looking for the haunted house or whatever, I will not
deal with. I'll give them to someone on my team
to deal with a buyer's agent. But those that I'm
(11:26):
aware of have never turned into a transaction.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
We'll be back after a short break. We're back with
murder homes. After my conversation with Cindy, my head was spinning.
I wondered if the current occupants of the house and
Leonia even knew of the murder that had happened there.
Did the real estate broker disclose it to the buyers.
(11:52):
Did they have to? I also wondered about my own home,
or any home.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
More.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Sleuthing on Google led me to the website site died
in Home. For a fee, the website will find out
if a death occurred in your home, and once you
have that name, you can find out if it was
a natural death or something more sinister. I reached out
to the man behind the website, Roy Condrey. I wanted
to find out more about his story and the people
(12:18):
who use his website. He told me that he started
the website after he discovered his own home was stigmatized.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
I had a couple of royal properties and I was
managing it myself and I knew the tenants, and she
text me in the middle of the night and she said,
did you know your house is haunted? So I just
replied back and I was like, whoa, Okay, I said, well,
what do you mean, tell me more? But you never
replied back. But the next day I thought about it
and I got online and I was looking for like
(12:48):
a carfax for homes. So I couldn't find any tool
that would tell you if your house was haunted. But
I saw the results of my Google search saying, how
do I find out my house is on it? How
do I find out if someone's died in my house?
And then I did find where realtors were giving advice
(13:08):
how to do it, and they're saying, you know, ask
a realtor, ask the neighbors, go check, you know, public
records and so forth. So that's easier said than done,
because when you go look, you're typically finding the owner
of the house. I'm not really finding the roommates necessarily,
or the kids or whoever that's lived in that house,
(13:32):
and maybe they've passed away in that house. So it's
really time consuming. But I did go down the path
and I didn't find anything in that house, but I
found out my other rental property that two people died there.
So it just shocked me, like, well, everybody feels differently
about it death in the home, and so me, I
might be a little more skittish than the normal person.
(13:52):
But I can live with peaceful death in the home.
I could live with that. But my wife, on the
other hand, she doesn't want any death home. And then
you've got just different levels of that. It can be
just tragic, horrifying events. I definitely don't want to be
in there, and I know a lot of people that don't.
So I just feel like this information needed to be
disclosed to home buyers. But I found out that it
(14:15):
doesn't have to in most states. There's a lot of
states have laws. I'm in South Carolina. It has a law,
but it's not worth the ink, and it says if
the buyer asked the seller and the seller knows, then
they should disclose the information. And that goes for the realtorials.
They should disclose the information, but there's no legal action
(14:37):
can be held against them.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
For not I asked Roy if there were any homicides
like the one in Leonia that he had come across
on his website at the time.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Twenty thirteen, there was a house in Burton, Pennsylvania, And
what happened is lady her and her husband and children
lived in California. She's from Pennsylvania, but they live in California.
Her husband passed away and she decided moved back home
with their kids and they bought a home, really nice
home in a cul de sac, like six hundred and
fifty thousand dollars or something like that. They moved in
(15:09):
and it within like two months, she was claiming in
that time for him, she was witnessing paranormal experiences behavior.
But then like two months later, her kids are told
that there was a murder suicide in that house like
a year earlier, and that information wasn't disclosed to her,
and she wasn't comfortable with it. But what happened is
(15:30):
the murder suicide happened. They tried to sell it. I
guess too many people were aware of it, and no
one bought it. And then the investors bought it, and
they asked that they were aware, and they asked that
we have to disclose this, and the relitior said no,
and so they bought it for a discount and they
flipped it to her and didn't disclose it, but they
sold it to her for the price of a normal home.
That a murder didn't happen, and so she wasn't comfortable.
(15:53):
She took them to court, and in the end it
went to New York's Supreme Court, and the judge he
said something like, I understand you lost like one hundred
and fifty thousand in equity equity, but there's no law
disclosing that they had to state and that they had
to disclose that information to you, so she was stuck
in her home.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
Roy told me that he sometimes gets emails from people
upset about the information in their report.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
You know, well, it's kind of private to them. Maybe
it just happened recently, I don't know. But on the
opposite side of that, we have people sending us their
certificates of their family and asking us to put their
home in the database. I'm presuming they've moved out of
the property, but we have people informing us, and we
want to verify the data, especially when people give it
to us. So I asked for some kind of DEUS
(16:39):
certificate or news story or something like that.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
Right, I was just going to ask you, are buyers
using your website to get deals on stigmatized property?
Speaker 3 (16:49):
Yes, and I have some examples of that. So our
theory is, so when you first present this to people,
it's not something you always think about, especially when you're
talking about real estate or the realtor the seller. As
you know, you're cleaning your house up, you're staging it,
you're making it look nice and new and staying positive.
And the buyer they're excited because they're about to get
(17:09):
a new house. That's a positive thing. And you don't
typically ever think about has someone died in this house
unless it looks scary. You know, maybe it's an old
Victorian Howison, you're not used to buying those or something.
I don't know. So people they don't think about it.
But I know that people have different thoughts of what
bothers them. I'm not trying to say that it doesn't
(17:31):
house bothers everybody. So there's people that don't think they
believe or think they care, but I believe a lot
more and more do. But if you don't care that
there was a death in a home, then there's people
like on the paramo normal side, you know, Amie Bille Horror,
all those things and the dark energy and what have you.
There's those people that make care every one level and
(17:52):
the other another. If you don't care about any of that,
these stigmatized properties have proven to be devalued. You know.
Realture dot Com at twenty twenty one said you can
expect to pay ten to twenty five percent less of
regular price. Some homes sell them for more. But I
(18:13):
think that's all about location and demand. You know, it's
like you're in New York City, and I believe that
the short is there. People can look past it. But
if you're out where I live, and you have two
homes and they're identical, and one had a murder suicide
in it and he knew about it, and you had
the other one, that was fine. I believe most people
aren't going to live in the murder suicide one.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
And then I thought I might ask Roy a very
obvious question. You know, I guess it might be darkly
funny for the show to find out if I'm living
in a murder home, you know, so I can give you.
I can give you my address if you want. Okay,
go ahead, we'll be back after a short break. We're
(18:58):
back with murder homes. So I gave Roy my address,
although I heavily doubted it was stigmatized, because I'd heard
nothing from my neighbors, who seemed to know everything that
had happened in my Brooklyn neighborhood, way back to when
it was a whole lot less gentrified. That night, I
started thinking about what Roy had said, how some people
(19:19):
are fine sleeping in a room where a murder suicide
had happened, and others like himself and his wife are
much more skittish. What if you lived in a home
where a murderer had happened and heard strange noises at night,
felt the presence of something sinister in the air. Because
there's a whole lot of murder in the United States.
(19:40):
On every block, on every quiet, tree lined street, something
bad has happened inside at least one home. And next
week we'll learn all about one completely unnerving murder home
that was just recently on the market. Was the real
estate agent honest about it? We'll find out. And there's
one more thing. Roy Condrey sent the report on my
(20:02):
home to one of my producers. He said, not to
be too freaked out.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
So yeah, so no one has actually died or no
one's murdered.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
That's the good news. Bye. This is Murder Holmes. Thanks
for listening. Murder Holmes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
(20:32):
For more shows from iHeart Podcasts, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Host
Matt Marinovich