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http://realestate.msn.com/article.aspx?cp-documentid=23504393&page=0
Here's the first part of the story:
Here's the first part of the story:
Homes with sordid pasts: Creepy, but great bargains
Murder. Suicide. Homes with dark histories can be difficult to sell and often suffer severe drops in value. Here’s how to learn whether a home has a sketchy past and how to mitigate the stigma if you own one.
By Marilyn Lewis of MSN Real Estate
Chris Butler had a list of “musts” when he went house shopping in 2005 in Summit County, Ohio, near his hometown of Cleveland.
“I had a pretty strict list,” he says. “I play rock ’n’ roll and I was tired of having the neighbors yell at me.” The house needed to have:
● Plenty of space to accommodate his band mates.
● Distance from neighbors, so he could make music without getting angry phone calls.
● Ground-level living quarters, in case his aging mom needed to move in.
It was a tall order in this part of Ohio, outside Akron, where the style is Ralph Lauren and the real-estate market is replete with two-story colonials, Butler recalls.
Imagine his happiness, then, when his agent showed him a stunning, 2,000-square foot split-level home atop a rocky hill on a two-acre lot deep in the woods near the town of Bath. The house was a stylish, well-built 1950s specimen, with a flat roof, wrap-around deck and expansive windows overlooking Cuyahoga Valley National Park. The price — $269,000 — seemed ridiculously low.
The other shoe dropped when Butler’s real-estate agent called. The seller’s agent had made an important disclosure: The house had been the childhood home of serial murderer Jeffrey Dahmer and it was there — in 1978, while Dahmer was in his late teens — that he had committed his first murder. Butler, a native of the region, knew that Dahmer had lived somewhere nearby. But the news that a homicide had happened in this house that he’d fallen in love with was a startling disappointment.
Chris Butler purchased serial killer Jeffrey
Dahmer’s childhood home in Bath, Ohio, at a
deeply discounted price. Dahmer committed
his first murder there. // © Chris Butler
“My initial shock was, ‘I can’t do this,’” he says.
Then he looked at it differently: In a way — an offbeat way — the home’s bizarre and outcast persona resonated with his own. “After I got over it, it was like, ‘I can’t not do this.’ It fits my alternative lifestyle, my musician-artist nature,” he told himself.
He also understood a rule of thumb in the real-estate market: Homes that have a stigma are harder to sell. They spend more time on the market and, when they do sell, it’s usually at a discount. Some are never purchased and the owner must destroy them to recoup any of the value from the property. The sellers of Dahmer’s childhood home were at a disadvantage, Butler sensed, so he offered even less than the low asking price and purchased the house for $245,000.
. . . Back in Ohio, Chris Butler continues to enjoy his “unbelievably cool pad,” along with any ghosts and stigma still clinging to it. Some neighbors still won’t set foot inside. But Butler says he believes the home’s notoriety may be fading. Meanwhile, he hosts an annual Halloween bash and shares the tale of his home’s past.
