Houses like the one Christopher Price bought three years ago can be found in neighborhoods across the country — ordinary houses not much different from those next door, except for the awful, abiding memories of what took place within their walls.
See that house over there? That’s where. …
Neighbors on either side of Price’s ranch-style house near Annapolis, Md. — old-timers who were there on that dreadful, long-ago morning when the bodies were discovered — never shared the history with him. Then, on a winter afternoon a couple of years back, Price found out that his perfectly lovely house has an unlovely past.
A man had been stabbed 17 times with a steak knife in the room that Price uses as an office. And in the room where he and his fiancee watch TV in the evenings, a woman was stabbed seven times before being bludgeoned with a wood-splitting maul. “It did keep us awake a couple of nights, thinking about it,” Price said.
On suburban cul-de-sacs and city streets, they are houses that neighbors point to, the ones they don’t forget. Long after the shock of murder wears off, long after the crime-scene tape comes down and life on the block resumes a peaceful rhythm, the memories linger, kept alive in whispers.
See that house? …
Real estate professionals call them “stigmatized properties” — houses that are structurally sound yet “psychologically impacted.”
To some who live in them, stigmatized houses are fascinating. “A conversation piece,” Price calls his. Others are loath to discuss their houses’ grim histories: They’re hoping their children won’t find out; they’re worried about their equity; they’re afraid that skittish relatives won’t visit if they hear what happened in the kitchen, the den, the master bedroom.
One woman said that after she and her husband contracted to buy their house, they were stunned to learn from a neighbor that the previous owners, a married couple, had been shot to death in the basement. More than a year after moving in, the woman recoils at the thought of publicity.
“No, no, no, no, no,” she said. “Absolutely not. … I have a daughter who would never set foot in my house again if she knew.”
Some buyers knew the facts beforehand, though, and didn’t flinch. Some used the stigmas to leverage discounts. As for buyers who heard the stories later — one man learned of a multiple murder under his roof only when his gardener brought it up — their reactions varied. Some were uneasy, others blase. Some took it as a spiritual challenge, a chance to bring joy to a house scarred by hate.
One couple talked openly about ghosts in their house.
Price, who lives in the Cape St. Claire community east of Annapolis, learned of his house’s notoriety while talking with a police officer. Then he immersed himself in old newspapers, absorbing more details, and read a book about the killings, “Sudden Fury,” by Leslie Walker, now a Washington Post business columnist.
The victims, Robert and Kathryn Swartz, had adopted their son Larry in 1973, when he was 6. Abandoned as a toddler, the boy had bounced from one abusive foster home to another before arriving in Cape St. Claire.
He was 17 when his anger exploded in parricidal violence on a January night in 1984, ignited, his attorneys said, by the repressive, demeaning discipline that the couple had imposed on him. He eventually pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, spent about a decade in prison and, at 38, died of a heart attack.
“The book goes on about the paramedics coming in, the police coming in, and they turned the corner and went down the stairs, and there was blood here and evidence there,” said Price, who paid $220,000 for the property, becoming the third owner since the Swartzes were murdered. The husband and wife who sold it to him had lived in the house for two years, unaware of its history.
“I can walk around my house and I can picture it, which is interesting,” Price said.
Bob Gneiser, 74, also has no qualms about living in a murder scene, although Gneiser wishes people would forget about his house, a brick-and-wood split-level in the Carderock Springs section of Bethesda, Md. Reporters and camera crews still show up at his door occasionally, revisiting one of the most enduring mysteries in the annals of local crime. And Gneiser, a retired radio and TV newsman, grudgingly tolerates them.
“I know what they want,” he said. “So I tell them, `Go ahead and get it, and get the hell out of here.'”
On a night three decades ago, a charming, 39-year-old State Department foreign service officer, William Bradford Bishop Jr. — a multilingual Yale graduate and former Army intelligence officer — went home from work and clubbed his family to death with a ball-peen hammer, police said.
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They said he loaded the bodies in a station wagon (his mother, his wife, his three young sons), drove them to North Carolina, piled them in a shallow hole and set them on fire. Then he vanished. Why it happened, and what became of him, are anyone’s guess.
Later that year, while house hunting, Gneiser and his wife, Carolyn, saw a Bethesda split-level that they loved. “I had covered the story like everyone else, but I had never been to the scene,” Gneiser said. “So it didn’t register with me.”
Their real estate agent broke the news: It was the Bishop place, put up for sale by estate lawyers. Carolyn Gneiser didn’t care. “It wouldn’t have mattered if you told her Ghengis Khan and Adolf Hitler lived there,” Gneiser said. “She wanted that house.”
They wound up paying $106,000, a stigma bargain. A smaller house next door had sold recently for $113,000.
“It’s been a great home for 30 years,” said Gneiser, now a widower. “I know some people get upset at these things,” he said of the house’s history. “In fact, my brother — he lives in Florida — he has refused to come up here and see me.” But so be it.
A person selling a house, and the seller’s agent, can wind up paying civil damages if they lie to the buyer about a death or other calamity that occurred on the premises. But in most of the country, unless the buyer asks whether any traumatic events took place in the house, the seller isn’t obligated to tell.
Many sellers of stigmatized houses choose not to volunteer the stories, real estate professionals said. And because sellers’ agents are bound by their clients’ wishes, they tend to keep quiet too.