Eck v. Hatcher

• Decision Date: 31 October 1874
• Citation: 58 Mo. 235
• Parties: JOHN ECK, by his Guardian THOMAS T. TAYLOR, Appellant, v. THOMAS E. HATCHER, et al., Respondents.
• Court: Missouri Supreme Court

58 Mo. 235

JOHN ECK, by his Guardian THOMAS T. TAYLOR, Appellant,

v.THOMAS E. HATCHER, et al., Respondents.

Supreme Court of Missouri.

October Term, 1874.

Appeal from Adair Circuit Court.

O. D. Jones & W. C. Hollister, with Harrington & Cover, for Appellant.

Pratte & McCabe, with Ellison & Ellison, for Respondents.

NAPTON, Judge, delivered the opinion of the court.

This is a suit instituted by a pauper, through his guardian, to set aside certain conveyances alleged to have been fraudulently obtained by the defendants, one of whom is his wife, the second a son-in-law of his wife, and the third a purchaser from the second.

The facts upon which the petition is based, and which seem to be beyond controversy, are these: The plaintiff is a German, at the time of the trial about seventy-five years old, speaking the English language imperfectly, and though a very good farmer, a man of excitable temperament, and of such occasional eccentricity of habits, as to raise a question of his sanity. He lived, in 1870, in Quincy, Illinois, and married a woman, one of the defendants, who was proved to be of bad repute and the keeper of a house of ill-fame, in which her daughter, the reputed wife of another defendant, played a conspicuous part. This woman was about forty years old, and Eck, the real plaintiff, who was seventy-two, was entrapped into a marriage with her. Eck was a man of considerable means, having from four to six thousand dollars in money or notes--and this was the lure which tempted the defendant, his wife, to marry him.

Eck and his wife, in 1871, removed from Quincy, and came to Lewis county and lived awhile with one Steffin, whose farm was near the town of Newark, in Knox county, and who was, I infer from his name, probably also a German by extraction or birth, and perhaps an acquaintance of Eck's. The object of Eck was to buy a farm, and after negotiating with McElhany, who was a farmer in Knox county, and had a farm for sale, and, concluding not to purchase it, he bought the farm of Brown, which was near Newark, for $2,800 or $3,000. Eck and his wife then moved from Steffin's place to this farm. The deed to the place was made to Eck, but this was not in accordance with the designs of his wife, who insisted that the deed should be made to her.

It seems that there lived at Newark, at the time, one James M. Balthorpe, who was an attorney at law, and a dealer in cattle, and that McElhany, who imagined that he had a right of action against Eck, for failing to comply with his alleged verbal promise to buy his farm (which Eck denied), employed this Balthorpe to bring a suit against him, or to threaten him with one. This occasioned frequent visits from Balthorpe to Eck's house, and as he knew, if he was a lawyer at all, that there was no foundation for any such action, he soon formed an alliance with Mrs. Eck, to aid her in driving her husband into the execution of a deed to his wife, which was finally effected on July 1, 1871, when Eck executed such a deed.

In the fall of 1871, John E. Grandy, another defendant in this case, who purported to be the husband of the daughter of Mrs. Eck (proved to have been a prostitute in Quincy by the chief of police of that city), with his wife, came over from that city and made their home at Eck's house.

After this accession to the household, the old man Eck seems to have succumbed, and, under various forms of persecution, devised by his wife and her son-in-law and their lawyer--aided by some neighbors, among whom the most prominent was Jeremiah Moore,--was finally intimidated into the execution of a deed to this son-in-law, on the 22d of February, 1872. It is not clear that Eck ever signed this deed--he swears on the trial that he did not--but whether he did or not is immaterial. There is no pretense that this deed or the one to his wife was based on any consideration whatever, unless we attach some importance to the pretension that he promised to convey all his property to his wife, previous to his marriage--a promise which, if proved, no sane man would ever comply with, and no court would ever compel him to comply with.

Thus, about the 1st of March, 1872, but little over a year after his purchase, the conspirators against Eck succeeded in getting the title to this land in this man Grandy, and then it became necessary as soon as practicable, to put that title in some innocent purchaser, for a valuable consideration without notice. It would have been manifestly a hopeless undertaking to find such a purchaser in the neighborhood of Newark, where Eck and his character, and the character of his wife and the pecuniary condition of her son-in-law, and the lawsuits and other controversies between the parties, were notorious. Accordingly Balthorpe starts to Palmyra, the county seat of a neighboring county, and calls upon the defendant, Hatcher, said to be a citizen of good standing and ample fortune, worth from seventy to eighty thousand dollars, and tells him of this farm being in the market at $1,800, and tells him (as he swears) that and nothing more. Hatcher agrees to buy, borrows of Balthorpe one thousand dollars, being at that time, short; dispatches Balthorpe with a letter to Jeremiah Moore, the neighbor of Eck, heretofore named, authorizing said Moore to purchase, and the purchase is consummated, and a deed to Hatcher made on the 20th May, 1872. And then Mrs. Eck and her son-in-law, Grandy and his wife, through the aid of this Jeremiah Moore, who loaned his horse and driver to assist them, immediately before day...