7 Mo. App. 272 | Mo. Ct. App. | 1879
delivered the opinion of the court.
This suit is to set aside and annul two certain deeds, one of them being from the plaintiff, then a married woman, through her trustee, to an intermediate grantee, and the other being from the grantee to the plaintiff’s husband, the defendant Frederick Stumpf, from whom she has since been divorced. The petition states that in February,
The answer of the defendant Stumpf, after a general denial, alleges that he purchased the property in question with his own money, in 1863; that in 1866 he caused such conveyances to be made as vested the title in Charles Blank, as trustee for the plaintiff; that the plaintiff, of her own free will, directed her trustee to reconvey the property to the defendant, intending thereby to reinvest him with the title of his own property. All the deeds mentioned were executed without any consideration paid. The answer also sets up in bar the decree of divorce between the parties. Upon final hearing, the court found the issues for the jdaintiff, and decreed the setting aside of the deeds as prayed for, with a further decree that an estate for life m the property be vested in the defendant Frederick Stumpf, with the remainder in fee in the plaintiff and her two children. The plaintiff afterwards moved for a modification of the decree so as to omit the vesting of a life-estate in the defendant, and to restore possession to the plaintiff. This motion was overruled. The defendant’s motion for a rehearing was overruled, and he appealed.
The defendant urges that the deed from the plaintiff to the intermediate grantee was valid, and should not be disturbed, because it was fouuded on a sufficient consideration, viz., the love and affection of the wife for her husband. He further insists that the alleged agreement between the parties is entitled to no consideration, because husband and wife cannot contract with each other. Waiving the apparent inconsistency of these two propositions, we And that both may be easily disposed of. If love and affection were the sole consideration for the conveyance, it might be sufficient. But when it is in evidence that a different consideration was the moving one, and that without this the deed would never have been executed, the case is of another sort. If the moving consideration was a fraud and an imposition on the grantor, the deed must fail in equity because of the fraud. The testimony in this case was ample to show that the moving consideration with the grantor arose from the false representations of the ultimate grantee, which the grantor implicitly believed.
Although at common law the general rule annuls all attempted contracts between husbands and wives, yet the jurisdiction of courts of equity to enforce, reform, or annul an agreement between husband and wife concerning her separate estate is too well understood to need comment. 2 Story’s Eq. Jur., sect. 1372.
In the present case an application of the rule, in either alternative, is fully sustained by the evidence. ' It appears that not only did the wife trust to the utmost the assurances of her husband that the will was effectual as an irrevocable conveyance of the remainder in fee to her and her children after his death, but that the defendant had previously, upon consultation with his scrivener, informed himself that he could at any time revoke the will, and thus defeat the remainder. We find no error in the court’s conclusions of fact from the testimony before it.
So much of the decree as vests in the defendant Stumpf a life-estate, with remainder to the plaintiff and her children, was not warranted by the principles of equity jurisprudence. The logical effect of the defendant’s fraud should be to vitiate and annul the conveyance obtained by its means, and to place the parties, respectively, in statu quo. It may be that the plaintiff would have been willing to convey to her husband a life-estate in the property, with remainder to herself and her children; but she neither did so, nor attempted to do so. Equity cannot make a new contract for her. It may find that the one, she is supposed to have made is- not her contract by reason of the fraud which procured it; and this leaves her without a binding contract or conveyance of any kind.
The judgment of the Circuit Court will be reversed, and a final decree will be entered here setting aside and cancelling the deed from the plaintiff’s trustee to Aloys Blank,