Slumlord millionaire: A love story?

Is it a story about love? A story about greed? That would depend on who’s telling it.

It’s primarily a story about family, but also one about storing up treasure and what happens when people get old and start to lose their wits, about what people need at the end of their lives and who gets what after they’re gone.

James Lester Goodwin died at the age of 81 at the Oakdale Heights Assisted Living Center in Greensboro in 2003. To all his acquaintances, he was simply known as Bill.

The following description of Bill Goodwin is not exactly charitable, but consider that it comes from a legal document filed on his behalf:

“Bill left school in the eighth grade partially because of the Great Depression. The Great Depression had a lasting effect on Bill, so much so that he always scavenged and foraged through the trash and garbage of others, never throwing anything away. If he could help it, Bill never paid for anything. When he did, it was always negotiated or ‘horse-traded.’ Bill’s livelihood was as a plumber, accumulating many of his properties through his plumbing work. Over several decades, Bill amassed dozens and dozens of rental houses. He did the absolute minimum to maintain them, and would collect rent in cash doing business out of his hip pocket. To describe Bill as frugal would be a euphemistic understatement. Bill was more aptly described as a ‘tight-wad,’ a ‘skinflint’ and a ‘slumlord.’ Bill was also steeped in the culture of the South at the turn of the Twentieth Century, believing in white supremacy and segregation. Bill was a bigot.”

At the time of his death, Bill’s estate was estimated by his daughter, Kelly Goodwin Clark, to be worth between $2.5 million and $6 million. Many of Bill’s renters were black.

It would seem to be a supreme irony that a man widely regarded as a racist slumlord would end up at the end of his life marrying an African-American woman half his age, someone who gave him affection, cared for him and managed his properties.

The description of Wesley Foust-Graham in those legal filings crafted by lawyers for Kelly acting on her father’s behalf are no more kind than they way Bill himself is described, and they exhibit the same literary flair:

“Between 2000 and 2001, Wesley Foust-Graham eked out a living as a licensed realtor, operating her own real estate and sales management company, Foust-Graham Realty Inc. She was in her early forties, and worked hard at looking much younger. She constantly dressed up, wearing tight-fitting clothes on a lean figure that was kept that way through working out at aerobics. Foust-Graham rode around southeast Greensboro looking for sales opportunities.”

Sally recalls how Bill first became acquainted with Wesley:

“He was in his right mind when he did this. She give him a card. And he later, after she left, he said, ‘She’s not a bad looking nigger woman.’ She came over to talk to Bill and she was helping him with his real estate.”

The manner in which Sally came to live with Bill seems typical of his unorthodox business relationships and the way he developed friendships with those with whom he worked.

Sally told me Bill came to see her one day at Bojangles, where she worked. His wife, Norma, had mentioned Sally’s name to Bill before she died. Sally eventually moved in with Bill and helped him with his business. In March 2002, she left him because of his verbal abuse. Sally called Wesley and asked her to come take care of Bill.

Five days after Bill’s death in October 2003, Wesley would visit Sally and record their conversation for posterity, with Sally’s knowledge and consent.

“I called Kelly several times and I talked to her about how her daddy was acting, cussing me and raising hell,” Sally says on the tape. “I said, ‘Kelly, you need to come down here.’ She says, ‘I ain’t coming down there to get cussed at and yelled at all the time.’” Bill had told her that he was afraid to be alone and, according to Sally, told her he was afraid he might fall or get kicked by one of his mules.

“I prayed over this before I left, you know,” Sally tells Wesley on the tape.

“Hallelujah,” Wesley says. “And that’s why I called you.” “I love the Lord.” Wesley says it was Bill’s idea to get married in a diary that she began after he went into the hospital. Wesley says Bill suggested that they go to the courthouse together to get married while they were downtown filing paperwork to remove Bill’s late wife’s name from some investment dividend checks.

Everyone agrees that Bill called John Waldrop, who performed general carpentry and maintenance on his houses, and Shirley Swaney, John’s girlfriend, asking them to come bail him out of jail. It was a joke, of course. When they arrived outside the courthouse, Wesley and Bill pulled up in Bill’s black pickup truck. All agree that while the four were waiting for a magistrate to conduct the ceremony Bill stated that Wesley was white, and that Shirley and Wesley had to correct him.

Wesley writes that when the magistrate “told Bill to repeat the vows after him, Bill looked at the magistrate. The magistrate told him to look at me. Bill did shortly but soon turned back to the magistrate. We went on. When the magistrate finished, he paused for Bill to say, ‘I do,’ and had to tell Bill to say, ‘I do.’… The magistrate said, ‘You may kiss the bride.’ Bill kissed me and did a little dance when we were finished. Shirley, John and I asked what that was, and he said something about that’s what you do.”

In an affidavit filed two months later, Swaney states, “I think Bill was coerced into marrying Wesley. Bill told me that Wesley wanted to have sex with him, but that God had spoken to her and told her that [she] could not have any kind of sex relationship with Bill unless they were married.”

The matter of race was raised during a trial in Guilford County District Court in early 2004.

In a subsequent motion to have a jury verdict set aside filed by Kelly, who was allowed to substitute herself as plaintiff on her father’s behalf, the defense’s tactics were described this way:

“In an attempt to inflame the jury, the defendant dealt the ‘race card’ by directly contending that the plaintiff made an issue out of the legality of racial marriage” — that’s the language in the filing. “If defense counsel wasn’t asking about whether Goodwin was completely out of it or insane, or totally incompetent, he was asking about the race of the defendant and using the ‘N’ word to prejudice black jurors.

Further, defendant’s counsel in summation improperly attempted to sway the emotions of the black jurors when he brought up the T-shirt made by County Commissioner Billy Yow, graphically describing the Southern white male with the Rebel Flag behind him, urinating on the letters ‘NAACP.’” We like to think of marriage as being about something more sublime and transcendent than sex, but sex turns out to be central to the legal question about whether a marriage is valid.

Wesley attempted to exclude any evidence of her “previous acts of sexual intercourse with persons to whom she was not married” in a motion filed before the trial.

A motion filed on Kelly’s behalf retorts, “Defendant’s motives are at issue in this case since Plaintiff contends that Defendant used undue influence to take advantage of Plaintiff’s vulnerable mental state. One of the Defendant’s major contentions is that God was directing her actions at all times pertinent to this action. The evidence of her unchaste behavior in the time period directly prior to her relationship with Mr. Goodwin, coupled with evidence that she was not involved in and rarely attended church, makes the existence of her claim that her life decisions were based totally on God’s direction less probable than it would be without the evidence.”

It’s easy to lose sight of what was at stake in the case, amidst the high-flown legal language, but buried deep in the plaintiff’s motion to set aside the jury decision is a key point: “By enticing Goodwin into a marital contract against his free will while under her control, and by the transfer of the property by deeds to entireties property, Wesley significantly reduced Goodwin’s intended inheritance to Kelly Goodwin Clark, the heir specifically identified in his will, especially as related to the home in which she was raised.”

Bill’s will, which was finalized in December 2000, left $100 to each of eight of his surviving children, with the remainder of his estate going to Kelly.

After Bill’s death, Wesley filed a claim for a share of the estate, asserting that as the surviving spouse she was entitled to $1 million.

The court asked the jury to answer four questions in determining whether Bill and Wesley’s marriage should be annulled: Did James Lester Goodwin lack sufficient mental capacity and understanding on April 12, 2002 to marry Wesley Foust-Graham? Did Wesley Foust-Graham marry James Lester Goodwin without his consent? Was James Lester Goodwin permanently and incurably impotent at the time of his marriage to Wesley Foust-Graham? And did the plaintiff enter into a contract of marriage with the defendant as a result of undue influence?

The jury answered “no” to the first three questions, and “yes” to the fourth.

On the basis of the jury’s finding that Wesley exerted undue influence over Bill in procuring the marriage, Judge A. Robinson Hassell ordered it annulled. The decision was upheld in 2005 by a three-judge panel of the NC Court of Appeals.

Judge J. Douglas McCullough cites Wake Forest University law professor Suzanne Reynolds’ widely respected treatise, 3 Lee’s North Carolina Family Law, in concluding that “it is generally accepted that in North Carolina a marriage procured under duress is voidable because one of the parties suffered from want of will.” McCullough goes on to state that “our Supreme Court has characterized duress as ‘the extreme of undue influence,’” but acknowledges that “neither the Supreme Court, nor this Court, has addressed whether undue influence is a ground for annulment.”

Reynolds, who made an unsuccessful run for the state’s Supreme Court last year, says the NC Court of Appeals’ decision to uphold Judge Robinson’s decision “expands the grounds for annulment.”

Until this case, Reynolds tells me, a court would have either had to find that one of the parties to the marriage was incapacitated and didn’t understand the consequence and results of the ceremony, or that the marriage had been obtained through duress, meaning there had been some kind of threat to overcome the free will of one of the parties.

She describes “undue influence” as “uncharted territory for annulment,” and told me: “I don’t know how many states do recognize undue influence as grounds for annulment, but I suspect it’s very few.”

Wesley told me she typed up an appeal to the Court of Appeals decision herself at a time when she was dependent on a welfare-to-work program for income, and hand-delivered it to the NC Supreme Court. The Supreme Court declined to review the lower court decision.

The Court of Appeals opinion sets out seven factors that are relevant to whether undue influence was in play in a marriage, and determined that there was evidence to support the jury’s decision in all seven factors. Here’s what the opinion says:

“Goodwin was elderly at the time of the marriage, and there was testimony tending to establish that he was suffering from dementia and/or Alzheimer’s disease. It is not disputed that he was subject to constant association and supervision by Foust-Graham and that he had little association with his family or friends in the months immediately preceding the marriage. The marriage left Goodwin’s previously existing estate plan in doubt and placed Foust-Graham in the position to take action that would substantially reduce the amount that Goodwin’s daughter would inherit. Further there was evidence that Foust-Graham procured the marriage, including Goodwin’s apparent confusion as to why he was at the magistrate’s office, the fact that Foust-Graham had driven Goodwin to the magistrate’s office, and the fact that the marriage was undertaken suddenly.”

The case recently lurched onto a new legal front when Wesley filed a new lawsuit against her lawyer, Norman B. Smith; against one of Kelly’s lawyers, A. Frank Johns; and against Kelly herself. Wesley variously claims that Smith impeded justice by denying her the right to testify on her own behalf, denying her witnesses the right to testify and withholding evidence from the court; that Johns “corrupted justice by the intentional torts of fraud and defamation,” entered false evidence into court records and was responsible for Wesley being libeled in the News & Record; and that Kelly committed “the tort of strict liability in commencing the lawsuit” that resulted in the annulment of her marriage.

Robert Wells, Johns’ co-counsel in the earlier cases, says he will be filing a response this week, and is asking the courts to dismiss the complaint. Reynolds told me she doesn’t expect the case to go very far.

Wells told me that Kelly would prefer to not relive the legal ordeal and was not interested in commenting for this story. Smith and Johns also declined to comment.

In the course of researching this story, I visited 211 E. Vandalia Road, the one-story brick ranch house where Wesley lived with Bill. A hand-lettered sign on the front door displays a phone number for Spud, who is Kelly’s husband, and directs callers to ask for an employee named Juan. I reached Juan and he gave me Kelly’s direct phone number. An outgoing message gives the name of a rental business in both English and Spanish. Sally Cross tells me that Kelly owns about 40 rental houses that she inherited from her father.

The various accounts entered into the legal record paint a picture of turbulent marriage between Bill Goodwin and Wesley Foust-Graham in the five weeks between the ceremony and when Bill went into the hospital. Bill went with his daughter to initiate a divorce from Wesley; he told Wesley he loved her and wanted her to be his wife; he called her a whore, prompting her to take her things and leave in the middle of the night; he apologized. In a word, his behavior seems erratic.

“I don’t believe Wesley tricked Bill into marrying her,” Sally Cross told me, also adding that she doesn’t think Bill ever overcame his prejudice. “I don’t know how to explain it, but Bill got to where his mind wasn’t so good. He told me that the Viagra that the doctor give him, he got headaches from it, and it made him dizzy and stuff. I don’t know how he overcome the color situation. I really don’t know, to tell you the truth, unless his condition got worse and he didn’t comprehend that Wesley was black.”

Bill and Wesley’s first separation took place May 6, 2002, the day Kelly took him to see a lawyer to file for divorce.

The next day, Wesley left a message on Bill’s answering machine saying he was welcome to call her back, but she was scared and confused about him telling her he didn’t want anything to do with her.

The recording made by Wesley also includes the conversation she had with Bill when he returned her call. He sounds conciliatory and remorseful about their breakup.

Here’s Bill talking about the divorce filing: “I did not set this up. I did not have a thing in the world to do with it. I’ve got one year before the divorce is final, they say. Like I told the lawyer, I’d be a damned fool as much as I think of you…. I’m so sick of them I could die. That’s all in the world they want me to do is for me to be shut of you. And honey, I love you as much now as I’ve been loving you.”

Wesley asks Bill why he signed the paper initiating the divorce. Bill’s response is that he was confused.

Bill says, “I’m going to tell you the honest-to-God truth. I told you before. When I went to a lawyer I wanted you to go with me. Honey, I’m a little bit old. I don’t know if you know it or not. I’m too old for you, I reckon. But nevertheless, I loved you, and I no more knew what went on in that office than you do.”

If Bill was confused when he initiated the divorce, it seems reasonable to ask whether he was in his right mind when he married Wesley.

In this conversation, there seems to be no question but that he wanted to be Wesley’s husband and that he fully understood the consequences of their marriage:

“And I told Kelly today: I said, ‘That’s my wife.

Y’all can cuss her, kick her and everything else you want to.’ But I said, ‘One of these days I’m going to get pissed off and I’m going to show you who’s boss around this place.’ I said, ‘She is as much entitled to this house, by God, as I am. She’s my wife and I’m going to keep her as my wife if I can get her to keep the name Goodwin. I’ll never deny she’s my wife.’” Bill also acknowledges that he’s at least aware that others have noted Wesley’s blackness:

“Kelly said, ‘I don’t see how in the world you love her; she’s black.’ I said, ‘I don’t give a damn if she’s purple; she’s mine — if she’ll have me.’” For her part, Wesley says she’s not going to be jerked around:

“You’ve taken my whole life. I’ve spent the last two months of my life strictly with you. I’ve given up all my business, and here I come yesterday after working all day, and I get told to get out. I have no source of income. I have nothing to depend on. You’re my only dependency. I am not a yo-yo. I can’t go through this.”

After Bill tells Wesley that everything he did the day before was a mistake, she prods him: “Well, you need to call that attorney’s office and tell them that. That’s your free will. I ain’t telling you what to do. That’s your free will.”

The next day, Bill and Wesley visited the law offices of Anthony McLaughlin and transferred two of Bill’s companies into joint ownership.

McLaughlin and two employees of his law firm later described the transaction in an affidavit. It reads:

“At the appointment it was obvious that there was a significant age difference between Mr. and Mrs. Goodwin, as well as the fact that Mr. Goodwin was white, and Mrs. Goodwin African American. As a result diligent inquiry was made as to Mr. Goodwin’s understanding of what he was doing. Following Mr. Goodwin’s arrival, there was no doubt among Anthony, Paige or Robin Rollinger, another employee who notarized the deeds, that Mr. Goodwin knew exactly what he was doing, and had every intention of transferring the property out of the corporations and into the joint names of he and his wife. No indication of any undue influence, overreaching, or lack of understanding or capacity was evident at all. Jokes regarding the age disparity were made and not only appreciated, but joined by Mr. and Mrs. Goodwin. When the Goodwins left the office everyone commented on the fact that they appeared to be very much in love and very happy with each other.”

‘That’s my wife. Y’all can cuss her, kick her and everything else you want to.’ But I said, ‘One of these days I’m going to get pissed off and I’m going to show you who’s boss around this place.’ I said, ‘She is as much entitled to this house, by God, as I am. She’s my wife and I’m going to keep her as my wife if I can get her to keep the name Goodwin. I’ll never deny she’s my wife.’

I asked Anthony McLaughlin about the affidavit, and he confirmed that he had swore it out with members of his staff, but said he wouldn’t know whether the statement had been doctored because the event took place so long ago.

“I believed Ms. Graham to be completely truthful at the time,” he told me. “She was a believable young woman. The whole situation was believable to me, and I didn’t think anything untoward was going on.”

Within a month of the aborted divorce, Bill was in the hospital. One afternoon, he took two Viagra pills and was soon complaining of a throbbing headache. He took a nap, and when he woke up he was confused and disoriented to the point where he held a conversation with Sally, and then hung up the phone and asked Wesley who he had been speaking to.

Affidavits by two certified nursing assistants provide an extremely disturbing picture of Wesley’s behavior towards Bill during his stay at the nursing home where he would live out the rest of his days.

Jennifer Leigh Bates says she checked on Bill in his room after Wesley left and found him lying in the bed completely naked with the bed soaked in sweat. Another time, she reported that she had words with Wesley after Bill said that Wesley wanted to keep playing with his genitals and he wanted her to leave.

Another certified nursing assistant, Vonee Boatwright, says Wesley’s repeated encouragement to Bill to drink some water prompted her to pay close attention to them one day in the cafeteria:

“I saw Mr. Goodwin spit a pill out of his mouth on to the table. Wesley picked the pill up from the table, and she looked at me, and I looked at her, and then she walked past me with the pill in her hand to the sink. Wesley then put her hand with the pill in the sink and washed the pill down the sink. Wesley then washed her hands and came back to the table.”

The Bates affidavit states that the incident “has created serious concern for Mr. Goodwin’s immediate safety and protection.”

Wesley told me recently that this was the first she had heard about the affidavits, and she dismissed them by saying, “The devil is a liar.”

These allegations dovetail with assertions by the plaintiff’s side that Wesley tried to have sex with Bill in the nursing home so that she could become pregnant and prevent the marriage from being annulled.

That’s nonsense, Wesley says. “I was on birth control. My medical records can be subpoenaed. I wasn’t try to get pregnant; I was trying to move my professional life forward. We had already consummated our marriage back at our house. I didn’t know anything about the law saying if you had a child your marriage couldn’t be annulled. I got into bed with Bill, and tried to cuddle, he didn’t understand that he was in a hospital. We cuddled in the bed.”

Bill lived another year. His death certificate lists aspiration pneumonia as the immediate cause of death.

Wesley, who is 47 now, lives in an apartment with a daughter who was born around the time the 2004 trial was taking place. After Bill’s death, Wesley told me she became involved with a man who she had been planned to marry, but he became abusive when some details of the trial came out. Wesley says she has been so devastated by the legal battle over Bill’s estate that she has been unable to work as a realtor.

I asked her how she was supporting herself and her daughter, and she replied, “I am not at all.”

The odds appear to be against the courts granting Wesley relief, and the final line of her complaint indicates that she is hedging her bets with a higher authority:

“I, pro se, Ms. Wesley Foust-Graham Goodwin thank you Honorable Superior Judge in Jesus name, Lord and Savior of all believers, God is real. Wesley Foust-Graham Goodwin, Child of God Almighty.”