The house stands on a barren corner lot, across from a vacant, industrial patch of Northeast Minneapolis. Nearby, the tracks of the Burlington Northern cut a swath to the Mississippi. And in the other direction, just around the corner, there is a busy grocery and liquor mart called Sentyrz, which one neighbor calls “the store of hard white people.” For its location in a dense, urban neighborhood, the smallish stucco house looks oddly isolated and vulnerable, on the way to all kinds of potentially terrible places.
Since April 15, 2003, the house has been empty. That’s when a young man named Jonathan Carpenter broke in through the back door window and murdered its occupants—an eighty-eight-year-old man and his fifty-year-old disabled daughter. Carpenter, who said he’d been up for twenty days straight snorting crystal meth, was in search of easy money. His father lived in the area, so it’s possible that he knew there was jewelry inside the house and thousands of dollars hidden in a filing cabinet. Or maybe he just happened to be passing by.
While the man and his daughter lay bleeding on the living room floor, their throats slit, Carpenter swept through the house gathering valuables. Then he summoned his accomplice, a man named Christopher Earl, who helped complete the robbery. With the money, the two bought a Ford Crown Victoria. Then they went on to kill another family, in Long Prairie, and got caught. Carpenter hanged himself in his cell. Earl went to prison.
Now, with the human drama largely concluded, what is left behind, the remnant of that awful night, is the house. The place where it happened. Sometimes, if a crime is bad enough, the home can’t overcome tragic events and is demolished—as was Jeffrey Dahmer’s Milwaukee apartment building. In other cases, such as the 1997 Heaven’s Gate mass suicide in Rancho Santa Fe, California, the street name is changed. Anything to give the illusion of a fresh start, to make people forget or at least allow them to feel a little distance.
Inside the lonely house in Northeast, the hardwood floors and linoleum and countertops have been replaced. The walls are freshly painted surgical white. Upstairs, there is new, plush carpeting. But the place still feels creepy. And I feel ghoulish for wanting to see it. (The Century 21 agent in charge of showings, who asked not to be identified or quoted, watches me with muted disgust.) I can’t help but imagine the brutal murder. I picture the murderers themselves, rummaging through drawers in the dark. As humans, we want to believe that the universe smiles down on us. At the very least, we don’t want to contemplate death. Yet there are echoes inside the house—or inside my head—whispering, this is where Carpenter put his arm through the window, this is where he dragged the old man from his recliner.
In Minnesota, real estate agents are required to disclose “physical conditions … that could adversely and significantly affect an ordinary buyer’s use or enjoyment of the property.” And the house, thus far, hasn’t sold. It’s been on the market since July in a neighborhood that’s considered hot in real estate circles, though not as hot as it was a year ago. Even the “price reduced” sign out front hasn’t drawn a buyer.
“Houses don’t have memories,” promised George Lutz to his wife in the film The Amityville Horror. And then his eyes turned red and the house itself—in a hoarse, angry voice—started yelling at priests to “GET OUT!” Houses do have memories. Or, certainly, we concoct memories for them. Even rational people will admit that some places feel good and some places feel bad. Homes are psychologically momentous. They protect us and keep us warm, exoskeletons made of brick and wood. When we lock the front door at night, it’s as much a symbolic as a practical gesture. I’m inside now, inside my world. So, when a house fails us or, in the worst case, becomes a vessel for burning evil, the best recourse is to move out, calmed by the knowledge that the house can’t pick up its foundation like a skirt and chase after us.
There is a little-known science to valuing these tainted houses, to calculating the cost of a breach in psychic comfort. Randall Bell, who calls himself a “real estate damage economist,” is known nationally as the “Master of Disaster.” Based in Laguna Beach, California, he measures in real dollars the intangible impact of violent tragedy. He was involved in selling the JonBenet Ramsey house, the Heaven’s Gate mansion, and Nicole Brown Simpson’s Brentwood condo, which languished on the market for more than two years before selling cheap. According to Bell, who says he got into the business to battle “junk science,” properties are rated on a salability scale of one to ten, ten being hopeless. Hopeless properties include the bombed-out Oklahoma City federal building and the San Ysidro McDonald’s where a gunman killed twenty-one people in 1984.
Depending on where the property falls on the “Bell Chart,” the stigma of a crime can linger for up to ten years. Owners who sell too soon, warns Bell, can expect to lose between ten and twenty-five percent of current market value. “Generally speaking,” he says, “you are not going to see any market activity for two to three years. It could sell, but at the biggest discount. If you wait, things will gradually get better.”
Bell is a font of practical advice. He recommends taking a renter for a while before putting a murder house on the market. “It’s more difficult to sell a house like this when it’s vacant,” he says. “There is a better sense of comfort when they are occupied, instead of that eerie empty feeling.” Bell handled the home where Charles Manson’s followers killed Sharon Tate in 1969. “Sharon Tate was a renter,” he says. “The owner moved back in and lived there for years. It was a smart move because he sold it for full value in 1990.”
For impatient, motivated sellers, there are two options. One is to renovate. Besides working to make the inside “spotless,” Bell recommends changing the home’s façade, so it doesn’t look the same as it did on the six o’clock news. That may mean painting the garage, planting trees, or maybe cutting trees down. At his suggestion, for example, before the Brown Simpson condo was listed, the landscaping out front was radically altered and a new retaining wall was built. “I’ve seen tourists take pictures of the house next door,” he says with pride.
The other strategy is to cut the price to the point of irresistibility. It’s an equation that sets practicality against superstition. In November, the price for the Northeast house dropped more than ten thousand dollars, from $235,000 to $224,900. But that still may be too high. Fair market value doesn’t mean much when it comes to houses like this one, because the others in the neighborhood haven’t been similarly “stigmatized.” In the end, even the grand Amityville Horror estate had to hit the astonishingly low price of $80,000—a quarter of its estimated value—before the Lutz family pushed aside their fears and moved in.
—Jennifer Vogel
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