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Fleming v. Spencer2/4/2002
UNPUBLISHED
Norman Spencer appeals the trial court's decision to award certain real property to Sheila Fleming, his companion for many years. He argues that a meretricious relationship did not exist between them and that the trial court erred in distributing the property to her at the end of their relationship. Because we conclude that they had a meretricious relationship and that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in awarding the property to Fleming, we affirm.
FACTS
Spencer and Fleming met and became intimate in 1982, while Spencer was separated but not yet divorced from his wife. He moved into Fleming's cottage in the summer of 1983. That same year, he purchased real property in Sultan with borrowed money for the down payment and the balance carried on a real estate contract. Spencer rented the Sultan property out for year before moving to it in 1984. Fleming moved to the Sultan property the same year. When Spencer and his wife formally divorced in July 1985, he received the Sultan property in the decree. According to the trial court's findings, however, Spencer 'paid off' the property entirely by the joint earnings of the parties.
From 1984 to 1991, Spencer and Fleming lived at the Sultan property without interruption. In 1991, however, Spencer went to work in Alaska for about a year. He returned in 1992 and lived with Fleming at the property until 1995, when he went back to Alaska for work purposes. By 1996 or 1997, he returned to live at the property with Fleming. He became disabled in 1997 and has collected disability benefits since then.
Meanwhile, Fleming worked intermittently during the 1980s by milking cows, managing a convenience store in Monroe and working at a Safeway grocery store. She received a $10,000 personal injury settlement in addition to disability benefits for an injury. In the 1990s, she attended various local colleges and eventually graduated from Seattle University. She enrolled in the Thomas Cooley Law School for one year between 1996 to 1997 and lived in Michigan during that time. During law school, she accumulated $27,000 in student loans. She returned to Sultan and worked at her sister's child care business until opening her own child care business on the Sultan property in 1999. Spencer and Fleming remodeled the property for this purpose.
The couple filed joint income tax returns throughout the 1990s, and in 1994, named each other executor and heir to any property remaining after specific bequests. In October 1994, Spencer quitclaimed the Sultan property to Fleming to shelter it from a potential lawsuit. Over six years later, however, Spencer had Fleming quitclaim the property back to him in December 1998.
As stated many times in the record, the parties ceased being intimate in 1997. They continued to live together, but in separate parts of the house. According to Fleming, Spencer had become religious and felt that he was still married to his first wife:
{H}e told me one evening that he felt in his heart that he was still married to his first wife because of his beliefs in the church, and that he would never marry me, wasn't in love with me, and that he just wanted to be in a friendship relationship at that point. So we terminated sexual relations. Report of Proceedings, at 74.
Yet, they continued to file joint income tax returns until 1999.
In the summer of 1999, Spencer would not let Fleming clear a field on the Sultan property for horses and a garden. A few months later, Fleming sought out her attorney. She sued Spencer for dissolution of their meretricious relationship. Although Spencer was able to retain an attorney for pretrial matt
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