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Bizarre divorce saga: A man, a woman and missing millions

By ERIN McCLAM
The Associated Press
MEDIA, Pa. - The inmate to his lawyer: “Do you have any news for me?”
Four thousand ninety-three days have passed. The answer never changes.
“No.”
Not the news H. Beatty Chadwick wants, anyway. For 11 years now he has sat, worked, read, written, then sat some more in a county jail in Delaware County, outside Philadelphia.
The place is a lockup in the old-fashioned sense: holding cells, essentially, not much light. It’s meant for run-of-the-mill crooks, many just passing through on the way to comparatively luxurious state prisons.
What it was never meant for is inmates like H. Beatty Chadwick, the slight, scholarly, enigmatic central figure in one of the most bizarre divorce cases in American history.
The charge is civil contempt of court. It is meant not to punish but to coerce - in this case, to force Chadwick to turn over $2.5 million the courts say he hid overseas in a vicious divorce dispute.
Except he won’t. Or can’t, depending on whom you believe.
The standoff has given Chadwick, now 69, the record for the longest imprisonment on a civil contempt charge in U.S. history.
“He’s an anomaly,” says his lawyer, Michael Malloy. “They don’t know what to do with him.”
They don’t - not the judges, not the lawyers, not even the ex-wife, who has moved on quite happily to a remarried life and a painting career on the coast of Maine and says she doesn’t think of him much.
So Chadwick sits.
—
Before the dozen pleas to the county courts, nine to state appeals courts, nine to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, six to the nearby federal court, four to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and two to the U.S. Supreme Court, there was a marriage.
It began in 1977. Chadwick and the former Barbara Jean Crowther - known as Bobbie - settled in Philadelphia’s wealthy Main Line suburbs. He was 39, well into a highly successful career as a corporate lawyer. She was 22, with a degree in religion.
In past interviews, she has described a home life controlled intensely by her husband, tight as a tourniquet.
She has said she was kept on a strict allowance, told to dress revealingly at the lavish dinner parties she put together for him. She has said he restricted sex to twice a week, at 7:30 a.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays, and in one position.
She told Philadelphia magazine in 1994 that he once threw a dictionary at her in a rage, and another time kicked her feet out from under her, causing her to fall down a flight of stairs and lose a child she had been carrying for 18 weeks.
She has claimed he rationed her toilet paper - six sheets per bathroom visit.
Chadwick denies all of this. He notes that the sordid details came out in the media after his ex-wife hired Albert Momjian, a high-powered Philadelphia attorney, and began divorce proceedings.
Barbara Jean Crowther Chadwick is now Bobbie Applegate - she made up the last name out of whole cloth - and in an interview at her home in Maine she politely refuses to discuss the details of the marriage.
“If I open my mouth, he’ll sue me,” she says. “My life needs to go on.”
But she will talk about the end. The day when, clinically depressed and in a marriage she says had amounted to a 15-year prison term under her husband’s thumb, she took her life back.
It was a bump, of all things - a root or a rock, whatever she rolled over on a biking expedition around a lake near their summer home in Michigan. There was release, a surge of adrenaline. She burst out laughing.
“I said, `Oh, my God, I don’t have to stay married to him for the rest of my life,’” she recalls now. She was elated and terrified. She wondered: “Do I get out of this, or do I kill myself?”
On a vacation to the south of France, Aix-en-Provence, she decided: She would leave. And it was two months later, in November 1992, back in Pennsylvania, she says, when he vowed to her she would never see a dime.
He had a term: Scorched earth. She had never heard it. So he defined it for her.
“It sounded so comical to me,” she says. “It’s when you burn everything so that the enemy gets nothing.”
Bobbie Chadwick filed for divorce in Delaware County on Nov. 23, 1992.
—
H. Beatty Chadwick insists the marriage was placid, happy - at least until she became depressed in their later years together. Today he and his ex-wife disagree on almost every aspect of their marriage and subsequent court battle.
What is undisputed by his friends, his family members, his lawyer, his ex-wife - and what is evident within minutes of talking to the man - is that he is intelligent, precise, careful with words.
Carl Fernandes, a retired North Carolina lawyer who met Chadwick in the Air Force in 1959 when he was a squadron commander and Chadwick on the legal staff, describes Chadwick as an excellent, methodical attorney.
“He was always very well-prepared, no hyperbole,” Fernandes said. “He had a very good reputation as a lawyer and as a human being. She has destroyed that.”
Chadwick’s son Bill, a 38-year-old data manager in King of Prussia, concedes his father “can be slightly controlling,” but dismisses his stepmother’s claims as outrageous.
Both the son (who supports his father’s case to this day and says he speaks with him by telephone once a week, if not more) and the ex-wife say Chadwick was also a conservative investor, slowly building a personal fortune of several million.
Which is why Chadwick’s explanation for what happened to the money strains credulity. He himself smiles in acknowledgment at the suggestion.
His story goes like this: He pledged a $5,000 investment in 1990 in a limited partnership called Maison Blanche, run from the British territory of Gibraltar off the coast of Africa. It was to invest in the hot European real-estate market.
The catch, Chadwick says, was that the $5,000 investment carried with it a risk of $2.75 million: Investors like Chadwick would be liable for as much as that huge sum if the Maison Blanche partners issued a capital call.
He says that is exactly what happened - in January 1993, two months after his wife filed for divorce.
Asked why on earth he would put up $5,000 to a partnership that would later call in $2.5 million, Chadwick first flashes his penchant for precision: “It was slightly over that,” he says. “$2.502 million.”
And he offers this explanation: “It was $5,000 to play. And I anticipated there would be more requested, but it was never even in my wildest imaginations what they ultimately wound up asking me for.”
In July 1994, Bobbie Chadwick alerted the Delaware County courts that her husband had wired $2.5 million out of the country, and three days later the courts ordered it sent back, into an account controlled by the courts, while the divorce played out.
Momjian showed the courts documentation that Chadwick’s money did wind up in Gibraltar, with some of it briefly returning to accounts in Chadwick’s name in the United States, and eventually to Luxembourg and Panama.
But that was 10 years ago. Momjian concedes Chadwick could have shifted the cash anywhere by now.
When Chadwick insisted he couldn’t pay up - he claimed, and still does, that the cash was no longer his - a county judge found him in contempt. On Nov. 2, 1994, the judge ordered him imprisoned.
Chadwick fled - sort of. He failed to show up for court hearings but remained in touch with his family.
“He told my brother and I that there were some unusual things about the case,” his son Bill says. “And he couldn’t show up for those hearings. He knew if he did, he’d be arrested and taken to jail.”
In February 1995, Philadelphia magazine published a lengthy story detailing the anguished marriage from Bobbie Chadwick’s point of view - the abuse, the bizarre restrictions on their sex life, the tight leash, scorched earth, all of it.
And then in April, Mr. Fastidious kept a 7 a.m. dental appointment in downtown Philadelphia. The hygienist had seen the magazine story and alerted sheriff’s deputies. They arrested Chadwick in his dentist’s office.
He remains a prisoner to this day - a prisoner, the courts insist, who has the keys to his own cell. Give up the money, the courts have said for 11 years, and you’re free to go.
—
Four thousand ninety-three days after that morning in the dentist’s office, Chadwick’s image pops up on a small television screen in a narrow conference room of the Delaware County courthouse in Media.
Because of prison rules, a reporter is allowed to speak to him only by videoconference hookup, not in person - so Chadwick smiles, somewhat futuristically, from in front of sound-studio padding at the prison in nearby Thornton.
With traces of silver hair on either side of his head, his image is wan, his arms thin, but he looks relatively healthy. He is wearing a simple blue prison-issue shirt, with a white bracelet on one arm and a plain black wristwatch on the other.
He talks about biding his time in prison - he reads a lot, The Economist and The Wall Street Journal, a biography of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun.
He frets about his health: Chadwick has had recurrences of melanoma, first in his arm and recently in his face and neck, and while he is allowed out of prison for medical visits, he says he worries constantly about rampaging infections in the cells.
He speaks of his long incarceration, thinking of himself as a latter-day Rip Van Winkle, and watching as downtown Philadelphia has changed over many years, viewed through his sporadic doctor visits.
And he talks about his case. If he is lying, he knows his story by heart.
“It’s been written frequently that I could get out of jail if I only told where the money is,” he says. “And that’s never really been an issue. Everybody knew where the money went.
“The issue has always been whether I have the power to get it back. I’ve maintained that they have to prove that I had the power to get it back. I can’t prove that I didn’t.”
Ever the lawyer, Chadwick busies himself with research and brief-writing on his own behalf, and he worked for a time in the prison’s law library. (That job ended several months ago - Chadwick says he was “helping people too much in the library,” but his son says Chadwick was abusing telephone and fax privileges.)
Half a dozen times he has sought relief at the district level of the federal courts. In the federal system, the maximum prison term for contempt of court is 18 months.
In 2002, he appeared to have succeeded: Judge Norma Shapiro ordered his release, ruling that there was no hope that keeping him behind bars would ever force him to pay the money.
Then the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals - in a decision written by Judge Samuel Alito, now a Supreme Court justice - overturned her, finding there was no reason to stop the incarceration as long as courts found Chadwick had the ability to pay up.
Chadwick pressed on - more filings, more hearings. And then, a lightning bolt.
With the consent of Chadwick and his ex-wife, A. Leo Sereni, a former president judge of Delaware County, was appointed to follow the money. And 18 months later, in October 2005, Sereni came back with a bombshell report.
The retired judge, with two accounting firms working under him, could find no trace of the money beyond where Bobbie Chadwick’s lawyers had traced it - to Maison Blanche, and a small fraction back into some U.S. accounts. But most of it … nowhere.
Sereni went a step further: He said Chadwick should be set free.
“I have no doubt in my mind that initially Mr. Chadwick attempted to hide money,” Sereni says in a recent telephone interview.
“But it appeared to me that although the wife had a plausible reason initially in assuming that money was hidden, it is equally plausible now to conclude that he took a gamble on a very reckless investment, not caring what would happen.”
The Delaware County courts threw out the report in February of this year, ruling that Sereni overstepped his bounds in suggesting Chadwick should be freed, and finding that Chadwick had failed to fully cooperate, including not granting full power of attorney to the investigators and withholding old tax returns.
Sereni stands by the report.
“The purpose of a contempt order is to coerce,” he says. “After 10 years, it’s fruitless. It’s 11 years now. My God - if he had stolen $2 million, he would have been out a couple of years ago.”
—
After the divorce, Bobbie Chadwick says, she used to cry when she saw Martha Stewart on television - the perfect homemaker, exactly the woman she says her husband ordered her to be.
These days she is more than happy to keep a low profile, living with her new husband, a retired mathematician, in the fog-shrouded village of Thomaston, Maine. They have a modest home there, with an adjoining studio for her to work on her oil paintings.
Barefoot and curled up in a chair in the studio, somewhat reluctantly discussing the matter over ginger ale, she says she doubts she’ll ever see the money - and even if she does, she owes an enormous chunk of it to her lawyers.
It is not even really about her anymore, she says. It’s more a battle between her ex-husband, the cagey lawyer, and the court system he was once a part of. A battle of wills, no end in sight.
Remarkably, she says the entire ordeal has been worth it.
“I’m totally free,” she says. “I was a kept little girl when I left him. Frightened of everything. I have lived through intense fear. I’ve learned to make a living. I’ve bought a house. I’ve given up a major part of my life that was really hurting me.”
—
On Jan. 28, 1998, a 50-year-old man named Odell Sheppard walked out of a Chicago jail after serving 10 years for civil contempt of court. He had insisted he knew nothing about the whereabouts of his daughter, who had disappeared in 1984. He was released when the child’s mother died.
It was believed to be the longest jail term of its kind. Chadwick passed it more than a year ago.
But why?
Suppose Chadwick does control the money - a sum that, responsibly invested, has probably grown past $8 million by now, the courts estimate.
Why not give it up and get out?
His ex-wife likens it to days-long silent treatments she says he would give her when he was unhappy during their marriage.
“This is just Beatty to a T,” she says. “It’s the biggest tantrum you’ll ever see anyone throw. And he’s real good at throwing tantrums. He can’t - just like he couldn’t let me go - he can’t let a single penny go. It’s his.”
Her lawyer, Momjian, describes Chadwick as steel-willed but says he will press on with the case. He continues to make hay over a letter sent to Chadwick by Fernandes, his North Carolina friend, which offered help in setting up a numbered account in the Cayman Islands.
Chadwick and Fernandes both now say the account was planned so Chadwick would have a safe place to store his money, Social Security checks and the like, once he leaves prison.
Momjian believes Chadwick is still well-connected and concedes he may never find the money.
“It may be under a mattress in his son’s house. We don’t know,” he says.”
Chadwick admits to thinking about what it might be like to die behind bars. He thinks he might like to work in the legal profession again if he ever gets out.
By videoconference, he says he is happy his ex-wife has settled contentedly in Maine.
“I don’t think of her much at this point,” Chadwick says. “It took me a long time to forgive what she has done. I still have to work at that. My own religious faith says that if I expect forgiveness from others, I have to forgive.”
A few days later in Maine, told that Chadwick is saying he forgives her, the former Bobbie Chadwick throws her head back and laughs, long and loud.

September 16, 2006 12:15 PM

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