Now Thinnes has asked for another round of mediation.
Matt Mignanelli
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It's not unusual to drive down East Montecito and find Candy Tatum, barefoot in the street, talking to herself. Sometimes she shouts at other people, even when there's no one there. She's lived here for 23 years.
Like many 1950s Phoenix neighborhoods, East Montecito is freckled with high-dollar remodels, neighbored by all-original brick ranch homes. The home Melton bought from Thinnes has been renovated, with a fresh coat of paint and a modern interior. A Mercedes sits in the driveway.
A few feet away, in Tatum's drive, the back of an old Chevy pickup is packed with garbage, an uprooted bush, and Christmas lights. Long, brown grass grows up through a pool-chair in the middle of the front yard.
"Many neighbors are deathly afraid," says one neighbor of 20 years who asked not to be named. "The cops have been called out here so many times they don't even come anymore. She's harmless now, though. She hasn't acted up in ages."
Another neighbor who asked not to identified says Tatum is entertaining and loud but has never bothered him or his wife.
Experts interviewed for this story say this is the first buyer-seller lawsuit they've heard of involving the purported mental state of a neighbor.
The issue at hand is not whether Candy Tatum is mentally ill, says Richard Keyt, who has practiced real estate law in Arizona for 27 years. (He has had nothing to do with the Thinnes/Melton lawsuit.) It's whether or not she's a nuisance.
Disclosure lawsuits in Arizona hinge on the words "material fact." A suing buyer must prove the seller failed to disclose a material fact about the property, and "material" isn't limited to building materials. For example, if someone died in the home or if a neighbor was a convicted child molester, both would be material facts.
Under Arizona legal precedent, such material facts are just as relevant as lead paint or a leaky roof. So, Keyt says, a neighbor who's been a known nuisance for 20-plus years isn't much of a leap.
Keyt emphasizes that in the end, a jury decides whether a given problem is material or not. "We don't really know what material means until the jury says. If there was precedent, I could tell you. There's not."
In the end, he says, it may well come down to personalities. "If your neighbor has bad tendencies or is a major problem neighbor, I think that would be material fact that the seller should disclose," Keyt says. "It could get gray, though. What if the neighbor's only a problem to the seller? If this conduct is consistent, though, that would seem to me to be a material fact."
Six days after Candy Tatum was arrested for throwing potatoes, Glenn Melton closed on Thinnes' home. Kelly moved in, alone. According to Melton, she soon noticed regular occurrences of screaming and cursing from her neighbor. (Kelly could not be reached for comment.)
A year later, Melton learned just how notorious Tatum is in the Phoenix police precinct that serves the neighborhood. He and Thinnes entered mediation.
When Melton later learned that Thinnes himself had Tatum arrested just one week before closing, he was furious. "He maintained that he'd never heard of this, and it turns out he told the arresting officer that she's been threatening him and terrorizing his dog and that this behavior had been going on since he moved in five years ago. He lied," Melton says.
Thinnes says he never lied during the confidential mediation with Melton. He and his lawyer argue that Melton had 10 days of due diligence under Arizona law, when, after purchasing the home, they could have talked to neighbors and researched police reports.
On the advice of his attorneys, Melton decided to sue.
"I'm not looking to make legal history here," he says. "It's not really a convoluted point or philosophical issue. It's just that the guy had been there for five years. He says in his own words that she'd been driving him crazy, and he had the chance to unload the house on an unsuspecting young woman, and he did."
Melton describes himself as an old-school, shake-on-it-and-take-your-word-for-it businessman. He says he took the word of Thinnes, a salesman who lands commissions on multimillion-dollar properties.
"The fact is, we can't sell the house because we would now have to disclose the nuisance, and [Thinnes] should have disclosed it, too," Melton says.
He says the issue of Tatum's behavior, and whether it constitutes mental illness, is a straw man distraction by Thinnes and his attorneys. "Our position is that it doesn't matter if she's mentally ill or a Nazi or a member of the jackhammer society, the initial cause of the behavior doesn't matter to us. It's the behavior itself."
And that behavior, Melton says, is unacceptable. "It's unnerving if Candy's knocking on the door in the middle of the night and saying people are out there to get you. It's also concerning if she keeps weapons in the house and has thrown stuff through other people's windows," he says. "You wonder, could it be some night that she actually acts out something more aggressive?"
