Shaffer v. Cowden

• Decision Date: 16 November 1898
• Parties: SHAFFER v. COWDEN et al.
• Court: Maryland Court of Appeals

41 A. 786

88 Md. 394

SHAFFER v. COWDEN et al.

Court of Appeals of Maryland

November 16, 1898

Appeal from circuit court, Washington county, in equity; A. Hunter Boyd, Judge.

Bill by Jane Y. Shaffer against John A. Cowden and others to cancel a release of a mortgage for fraud. Decree for defendants, and complainant appeals. Affirmed.

Argued before MCSHERRY, C.J., and BRISCOE, BRYAN, PEARCE, PAGE FOWLER, and ROBERTS, JJ.

Alex. Armstrong, N. B. Scott, Jr., and W. J. Zacharias, for appellant. H. F. Wingert and Wm. Kealhofer, for appellees.

MCSHERRY C.J.

We entirely agree with the learned judge who decided this case below that it is one not free from difficulty. This difficulty arises, not because there is or can be any doubt as to the legal principles involved, but wholly in consequence of the flat conflict in the testimony of the two contesting parties. The undisputed facts are few. The appellant purchased from one Snyder a farm for the sum of $6,806, paying the whole of the purchase money. Under an arrangement of some sort between her and the appellee, who is her nephew, the deed conveying the title was made to the appellee, who thereupon gave to the appellant a mortgage upon the same property for the whole amount of the purchase money without interest. This mortgage bears date April 3, 1894. On April 14th of the same year this mortgage was released by the appellant, and the release was duly recorded the following day. The release was a short one, written at the foot of the mortgage. Confessedly, the debt secured by the mortgage was never paid by the mortgagor. On the 11th day of January 1897, the appellant filed a bill in equity, alleging that the release had been procured by fraud, and praying that it be vacated and annulled. The defendant answered, flatly denying the charges of fraud.

Quite a mass of testimony was taken, and much of it throws but little light on the actual issue between the parties. That issue is whether the release of the mortgage was procured by fraud. There are but two witnesses to the transaction, and they are the appellant and the appellee. As might be expected, their versions of what transpired at the time the release was signed differ as widely as contraries can differ. The testimony of the appellant is to the effect that when the paper, which she subsequently discovered to be a release of the mortgage, was signed, she was sick, and suffering with neuralgia. That the appellee was in Hagerstown that day, and came home in the evening. "He said: 'Aunt Jane, I want to borrow one hundred and fifty dollars. I cannot get it unless you go on this paper.' And I told him I would sign it in the morning, and he said that would not do; it would have to be signed that night. He said Mr. Wingert had got the paper out of the court, and it had to go back in the morning and he was going to take it to Clearspring that night, so that it could go back in the morning." She was next asked, "What did you do then?" and she replied, "I signed the paper that night for one hundred and fifty dollars." She further testified that the appellee did not tell her she was signing a release of the mortgage, and that she did not know she was executing such a paper. The appellee's account of the occurrence is thus given in his testimony: "When I took the mortgage home, I laid it on the table. I said, 'Here is that mortgage I got out of the court.' She asked me how it was to be signed,--whether with pen and ink or lead pencil. I told her, 'Pen and ink.' I laid it on the table. She picked up a chair, and sat down, and took off her spectacles, and wiped them off with her apron. I asked her where the ink was. She told me, 'In the front room of the house,'--the parlor. I went through two rooms and a hall, brought the pen and ink to her, and sat it down on the table. She was reading the mortgage or release at the time I put the pen and ink there. She said, 'Where must I sign my name?' I showed her. She signed her name, and, after getting through signing her name, as I had no blotter, I left it open to dry. She looked at it again, and read it over, and she turned around to me, and said, 'Now John, you have more than Will.' She said, 'You must relinquish your half in your mother's farm, so that both of you boys might have a farm.' I said I would; I was very willing to do that. She said, 'Now, John, I am going to Chambersburg, and your mother is going along with me; we are going to make our wills.' She told me she had made her will when she returned from Chambersburg."

Here, then, we have the appellant testifying that she did not know she was signing a release,--that she thought and believed she was signing a note for $150,--and the appellee swearing, with equal emphasis, that Mrs. Shaffer did know what she was signing, and that she read the release, both before and after signing it. Her signature to the release is admitted by her to be in her own handwriting. The burden of proof to establish the alleged fraud in the procurement of the release is, if no confidential relation existed between the parties, obviously on the one who assails its validity; and it is therefore necessary for Mrs. Shaffer to show, by a preponderance of evidence, that the charge which is the gravamen of her bill is sustained. There is not a particle of testimony tending to show that there existed any confidential relation between Mrs. Shaffer and her nephew, as the term "confidential relation" is understood in the well-known doctrine of a court of equity, and, without further comment, we may treat that contention as wholly eliminated from the controversy.

If the case stood alone on the testimony of the appellant and the appellee,--the one alleging the fraud and the other denying it,--and if neither one of them were corroborated or contradicted by other circumstances, the assertion of the one would be neutralized by the denial of the other, and, as a consequence, the plaintiff's allegations would not be proved. Keller v. Kunkel, 46 Md. 570. We must turn, then, to the other evidence in the record to ascertain whether the testimony of either of the parties is strengthened, and this requires us to go somewhat more fully into the facts.

It appears that Mrs. Cowden, who is a sister...