Bizarre divorce case lands man in jail for 11 years

(9/18/06) -- Slight, scholarly and enigmatic, H. Beatty Chadwick is doing this day what he has done for the past 4,093: He is sitting in a county jail outside Philadelphia.

<!--html1--> It is a place meant for run-of-the-mill crooks just passing through on their way to comparatively luxurious state prisons. Certainly not for anyone to stay 11 years -- not for the central figure in one of the most bizarre divorce battles in American history.

It hinges on a charge of civil contempt designed to force Chadwick to turn over $2.5 million the courts say he hid overseas all those years ago. Except he won't. Or can't, depending on whom you believe.

So Chadwick sits.

"He's an anomaly," says his lawyer, Michael Malloy. "They don't know what to do with him."

The case has produced an Everest of court papers -- a dozen pleas to the Delaware County courts, nine to state appeals courts, nine to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, 12 to federal courts, two of those to the U.S. Supreme Court.

<h4>Married in 1977</h4>

But before all that, there was a marriage: Chadwick, 39-year-old successful corporate lawyer, to Barbara Jean Crowther, just 22, in 1977. Not surprisingly, they disagree about the very nature of their union.

H. Beatty Chadwick insists the marriage was placid, happy -- at least until she became depressed in their later years together. He says he loved her very much. He smiled on her newfound hobby of painting.

But in past interviews, she has described a home life controlled intensely by her husband, with rationed toilet paper (six sheets per bathroom visit) and sex (7:30 a.m., Tuesdays and Thursdays).

She told Philadelphia magazine in 1994 that he once kicked her and caused her to fall down a flight of stairs and lose a child she had been carrying for 18 weeks.

H. Beatty Chadwick says it is all fiction, much of it dreamed up by his ex-wife's high-powered divorce lawyer, Albert Momjian.

Barbara Jean Crowther Chadwick is now Bobbie Applegate -- she made up the last name -- and at her home in Maine she politely refuses to discuss the details of the marriage, for fear of being sued by her ex-husband.

But she will talk about the day during a vacation to the south of France when she announced she would leave H. Beatty Chadwick. She says he vowed she would never see a dime. He used a term unfamiliar to her, she says: Scorched earth.

<h4>1992 Divorce Filing</h4>

"It sounded so comical to me," she says. "It's when you burn everything so that the enemy gets nothing." She filed for divorce in Delaware County on November 23, 1992.

This much is undisputed by everyone who knows Beatty Chadwick: He is intelligent, precise, careful with words.

Carl Fernandes, a retired North Carolina lawyer who met Chadwick in the Air Force four decades ago, 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, Pennsylvania, dismisses his stepmother's claims. He says his father 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 seems to strain credulity -- and Chadwick himself smiles at the suggestion.

His explanation: He pledged a $5,000 investment in 1990 in a limited partnership called Maison Blanche, designed to invest in the hot European real-estate market and run from the British territory of Gibraltar.

He says the catch was that the investment carried a risk of $2.75 million: Investors like Chadwick would be liable for that much if the Maison Blanche partners issued a capital call. He says a capital call is exactly what happened -- in January 1993, two months after his wife filed for divorce. The obvious question: 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 $2.502 million, he corrects.

"It was $5,000 to play," he says. "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."

<h4>Court Orders Return of $2.5M</h4>

In July 1994, the Delaware County courts ordered the $2.5 million sent back, into an court-controlled account, while the divorce played out.

Momjian showed the courts documentation that Chadwick's money wound up in Gibraltar, with some of it briefly returning to accounts in the United States, and eventually to Luxembourg and Panama. But that was 10 years ago. Momjian says the cash could be anywhere by now.

Chadwick insisted he couldn't pay up because the cash was no longer his. A county judge found him in contempt, and on November 2, 1994, he was ordered imprisoned. The deal from the courts: Give up the money and go free.

Chadwick failed to show up for court. Then, the following April, Mr. Fastidious kept a 7 a.m. dental appointment in Philadelphia.

The hygienist had seen a Philadelphia magazine piece about the marriage, recognized Chadwick and alerted sheriff's deputies. He was arrested in his dentist's office.

More than 4,000 days later, at the Delaware County courthouse, Chadwick's image pops up on a small television screen from the prison nearby. Prison rules prohibit an in-person interview.

<h4>Chadwick Talks</h4>

Traces of silver hair on either side of his head, his image is wan, his arms thin, but he looks healthy. He is wearing a blue prison-issue shirt, a white bracelet on one arm and a black wristwatch on the other.

He talks about biding his time -- he reads The Economist and The Wall Street Journal and just finished a biography of Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun. A melanoma victim, he frets about rampaging infections in the cells.

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 this 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. Time and again, frustration: He was denied at every turn, on overturned on appeal when he caught a break from lower courts.

And then, a lightning bolt: A. Leo Sereni, a former president judge of Delaware County appointed to follow the money with two accounting firms working for him, said he 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 said Chadwick should be set free. But the Delaware County courts ruled this February that Sereni overstepped his bounds, and found that Chadwick had failed to fully cooperate.

Sereni stands by the report. "After 10 years, it's fruitless," he says. "It's 11 years now. My God -- if he had stolen $2 million, he would have been out a couple of years ago."

<h4>Starting Over</h4>

These days Bobbie Chadwick lives with her new husband, a retired mathematician, in a modest home in the fog-shrouded village of Thomaston, Maine. Barefoot and curled up in a chair in her art studio, discusses the matter over ginger ale.

"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."

She says she doubts she'll ever see the money -- in any case she owes an enormous chunk of it to her lawyers.

Still: 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?

"This is just Beatty to a T," his ex-wife 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."

Chadwick thinks he might like to work in the legal profession again if he ever gets out. He says he is happy she has settled contentedly in Maine.

"It took me a long time to forgive what she has done," he says. "I still have to work at that. My own religious faith says that if I expect forgiveness from others, I have to forgive."p> Told this a few days later in Maine, the former Bobbie Chadwick throws her head back and laughs, long and loud.

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