BX092_06B2_9.JPG

Elmo and Meliitta Marquette

(Steve Duin)

To understand how Elmo and Meliitta Marquette came to sell that infamous two-acre lot for pennies on the dollar, let me introduce you to the neighbor who didn't buy the property: Wayne Shoultz.

A view of the lot that the Marquettes sold to neighbors Michael Leland and Sandra Bittler for one-tenth of its $220,000 real-market value.

Shoultz has lived next door to Elmo on Southwest Garden Home for 40 years and, he says, "You couldn't ask for a better neighbor. We just take care of each other. If he had crab, he gave me crab. When I had fish, I gave him fish. I'd hate to ever lose him. You only run into neighbors like that once in a lifetime."

Yet if Elmo, 86, is often generous to a fault, Shoultz knew something was wrong last November when the retired plumber swung by and offered to sell him those two undeveloped acres for $5,000.

Marquette had recently received his Multnomah County tax bill on the property -- meadow and scrub trees -- which abuts both of their homes. He was ticked off. Shoultz got that: Elmo is a tightwad. "Tighter than hell. He once drove around for four hours to save $3 on a tool."

Elmo didn't want to pay the $2,612 tax bill. But why the $5,000 sales price?

"He said, 'That's what it's appraised for,'" Patty Shoultz, Wayne's wife, says.

Wayne and Patty told Elmo that couldn't be right. (It wasn't: The assessed value of the two acres is $108,360, the real market value $220,400.) And it wasn't the first time they'd seen evidence that Elmo was "getting mixed up with numbers.

"We've noticed him sliding for a couple years," Wayne says. "He has good days and bad days It's hard to explain things to him." And, Patty sighs, "That's part of aging."

Elmo corrected his mistake on the appraisal later that day, then returned in the morning with a stunning announcement:

Elmo Marquette bought this 1923 home on Southwest Garden Home Road 58 years ago.

He'd just sold the property, he said, to another neighborhood couple, Michael Leland and Sandra Bittler.

"Did you get $225,000?" Wayne Shoultz asked.

"220," Wayne heard Elmo say.

And, Shoultz recalls, thinking that was a "a heck of a buy" for Leland and Bittler: "I thought it was the buy of a lifetime. I just figured (Leland and Bittler) had written him a check for $220,000."

And he kept believing that until he read my Sunday column.

That column -- which detailed the Marquettes' discovery that they actually sold those two prime acres for $22,000 -- prompted Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum to call Monday for an investigation by her consumer protection unit.

"When I read your story, my heart was broken," says Ellen Klem, Rosenblum's director of consumer outreach and education, said. But she was neither shocked nor surprised:

"People are taken advantage of every single day. The latest stat we have, nationally, is that for every case of financial exploitation we hear about, 43 others go unreported."

"I don't want to act as judge and jury," says Portland city Commissioner Nick Fish, "but on its face, this has the potential for elder abuse. Older adults are attractive targets because of memory loss, impairment and disability. It's quite common as you get older to not know the value of your assets.

"The question that concerns me is how we police these things? How do you set up the legal responsibilities so that someone has the duty to blow the whistle?"

Another angle on the property sale that has sparked an investigation by the Oregon AG's consumer protection unit.

As James Johnson, a retired physician who worked extensively with the elderly at the Broadway Medical Clinic, notes, the issue is complicated by the fact that the aging often aren't looking for assistance.

"People really value independence and autonomy when they get to that age," Johnson says. "This elderly couple was not nearly as independent as they liked to believe, and needed more help than they wanted to admit."

Leland, the president of Mortgage Trust, and Bittler maintain they were totally up front with the elderly couple -- Meliitta is 88 -- while negotiating a closing in which the Marquettes were unrepresented by realtor, attorney or family adviser.

"I do feel comfortable they understood the sales price," Leland said last week. "Is it worth more than $20,000? Absolutely. We said, 'It's worth a heck of a lot more than that.' (But) their main goal was accomplished. Nothing is going to get built on that property while they were alive."

"Did you get that in writing?" Wayne Shoultz remembers asking Elmo.

"No," Elmo said.

Oregon First fired Bittler Saturday when the firm discovered she never submitted any record of the transaction with the Marquettes to her employer, as required by state law.

Lynn Wells, Meliitta's son from a previous marriage, said he only learned about the sales price while reading my column.

"My blood pressure went through the roof," Wells says. "I've felt confident up to this point about (them managing) their affairs. I told my mother, 'Please, from now on, talk to one of your children.'"

Why didn't Elmo and Meliitta do that in November? "Elmo's pride," Wells says. "And my mother's trust. 'They're our neighbors. They're our friends.' And their generation doesn't talk about this stuff."

That pride, trust and silence often serves all the wrong neighbors.

-- Steve Duin