Woodruff v. Woodruff, 2070602.
| Decision Date | 08 May 2009 |
| Docket Number | 2070602. |
| Parties | Chivers Richard WOODRUFF, Jr. v. Julia Mariani WOODRUFF. Julia Mariani Woodruff v. Chivers Richard Woodruff, Jr. |
| Court | Alabama Court of Civil Appeals |
Stephen R. Arnold of White Arnold & Dowd, P.C., Birmingham, for appellant/cross-appellee Chivers Richard Woodruff, Jr.
Sara J. Senesac, Birmingham, for appellee/cross-appellant Julia Mariani Woodruff.
This appeal arises from postdivorce proceedings in the Jefferson Circuit Court. Chivers Richard Woodruff, Jr. ("the husband"), appeals from the order of the trial court as to the parties' respective petitions for a rule nisi; Julia Mariani Woodruff ("the wife") cross-appeals. On January 14, 2008, the trial court held an ore tenus hearing on the parties' respective petitions and amended petitions. After the hearing, the court entered an order requiring the husband to pay the wife $27,539.55 "for her share of the net proceeds from the sale of the [parties'] house, the [husband] being solely responsible for the indebtedness on the house" pursuant to the terms of the original divorce judgment. The trial court also ordered the wife to pay the husband $10,000 for property that the husband was to have received pursuant to the original divorce judgment.
The evidence adduced at the hearing of this matter tended to show the following. The parties were divorced on April 10, 2006. Before the divorce judgment was entered, the parties had drafted an agreement ("the agreement") indicating, among other things, the manner in which their assets, including both real property and personal property, were to be divided. Many of the provisions of the agreement included in the record had handwritten notations beside them, and portions of some of the provisions were deleted. In entering the final judgment of divorce, the trial court noted that the judgment was "based on the pleadings, the oral testimony of the [husband] and [wife] and the [agreement] filed." The trial court included the provisions of the agreement in the final judgment, but the language of the agreement was not always included verbatim. Neither party appealed from the final judgment of divorce.
On September 15, 2006, the husband filed a petition for a rule nisi alleging that the wife had failed to comply with a number of the provisions of the divorce judgment. On November 17, 2006, the wife filed a counter-petition for a rule nisi claiming, among other things, that the husband had not cooperated with her in the sale of a rental house the parties owned.
One of the terms in the original divorce judgment provided as follows:
When the parties purchased the Willoughby Road house, they took title as joint owners with the right of survivorship. Both signed the mortgage on the house, but only the husband signed the promissory note. During the marriage, the parties rented the Willoughby Road house, and the rental profits were used for the benefit of the marriage.
The Willoughby Road house was placed on the market pursuant to the divorce judgment. The husband continued to make the mortgage payments on the house. In late 2006, while the petitions in the underlying proceedings were pending before the trial court, the wife and a potential buyer had discussions about the house. An informal offer was made for the purchase of the house. The wife told the husband about the offer, and he replied by e-mail that the offer sounded reasonable. As the wife was negotiating with the potential buyer, she also indicated to the husband that she was interested in purchasing the husband's share of the equity in the Willoughby Road house. The husband said he would consider any written offer, but he did not hear back from the wife.
The husband asked the wife about the status of the sale of the Willoughby Road house, including whether a closing date had been set, but he heard nothing further from the wife. On December 4, 2006, the wife entered into a contract for the sale of the house for $265,000. She represented to the purchaser that she was the sole owner of the house, and at the January 17, 2007, closing on the house, she alone signed the warranty deed conveying the house to the purchaser. After the mortgage and closing costs were paid, the wife received $101,135.19. She had also previously received $1,500 in earnest money from the purchaser. The husband said that he had no knowledge of the sale, that he was not present at the closing, and that he did not receive any portion of the net proceeds of the sale.
On October 24, 2007, ten months after the sale of the Willoughby Road house, the husband amended his petition, seeking what he claimed was his portion of the net proceeds from the sale. On December 24, 2007, the wife amended her counter-petition, claiming for the first time that the husband had failed to satisfy the mortgage on the Willoughby Road house and that she had suffered an economic loss as a result.
As to the items of personal property and money the husband claimed he had not received, the husband testified that he had not received all of the coins in a coin collection that he had been awarded in the original divorce judgment. He also testified that the wife had not given him other items that were specifically awarded to him, including bottles of wine, photographic equipment, tools, and dishes and serving pieces that had belonged to his parents. The wife testified that she did not have several of the items the husband claimed. For example, she said that she had delivered all of the coins that were in the collection and that there was no inventory of the coins to show that any were missing. She also testified that she was under no obligation to "deliver" items to the husband and that she had allowed him access to the house to retrieve them, but, she stated, he had been "too tired" or "too upset" to look for some of them and had never returned to the house to retrieve the property at issue.
There was also evidence indicating that the wife had fraudulently endorsed two checks to withdraw money from an investment account that had been awarded to the husband and that she had charged personal purchases to accounts awarded to the husband after the divorce.
On appeal, the husband contends that the trial court improperly construed the term "net proceeds" as the parties had contemplated that term in the agreement and as it was used in the divorce judgment regarding the sale of the Willoughby Road house. Specifically, the husband asserts that the trial court improperly determined that the divorce judgment required the husband to pay off the mortgage in its entirety, from the husband's own assets, before the parties equally divided the proceeds from the sale of the Willoughby Road house.
Conversely, at the hearing on the petitions and on appeal, the wife contends that because she did not join the husband in signing the promissory note for the debt on the house on Willoughby Road, he was solely responsible for paying that debt. Because the husband did not pay off the mortgage in its entirety before the sale of the house, the wife claimed she suffered an economic loss because the proceeds from the sale of the Willoughby Road house were reduced by the amount required to pay off the mortgage.
As previously noted, the Willoughby Road house sold for $265,000. After the mortgage indebtedness and closing costs were paid, the wife received $101,135.19 at the closing plus $1,500 in earnest money that she had received earlier. We note that, in the wife's brief to this court, she refers to the $101,135.19 she received at the closing as the "net proceeds." The wife calculated that, after closing costs were paid, the "net sales price" of the Willoughby Road house, which she defined as the gross sales price minus closing costs only, was $260,349.49. The wife claimed that, pursuant to the divorce judgment, she was entitled to half that amount, $130,174.74. Because she only received a total of $102,635.19, which included the purchaser's earnest money, at closing, the wife claimed that the husband still owed her an additional $27,539.55 to make up that difference. The trial court ordered the husband to pay the difference.
As to the house on Willoughby Road, the divorce judgment stated:
(Emphasis added.)
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