Dara Daugherty Faces Angry Neighbors in Court as City Seeks Injunction

For the first time since the City of St. Louis accused her of masterminding a massive illegal rooming house scheme, Dara Daugherty took the stand in court yesterday, telling a judge that she no longer owns one of her portfolio's most squalid holdings.

Daugherty testified she recently sold the home with the Dutch gambrel roof on Virginia Avenue, a nuisance property that was the bane of its neighbors and where the city claims Daugherty housed an ad-hoc, unpaid labor force that worked on her slum empire's "fixer-upper" properties.

Yesterday’s hearing came as part of the city’s ongoing civil lawsuit against Daugherty and five of her family members and associates who are accused of running an illegal rooming house scheme that spanned 39 properties across nine south city neighborhoods. At issue yesterday was the city’s request that Circuit Court Judge Judge Jason Sengheiser order Daugherty to cease operations at the Virginia Avenue property and clean it up.

Sengheiser was still weighing the request as of press time.

In court, Daugherty’s attorney Elkin Kistner argued that an injunction was totally unnecessary given that his client no longer owns the house and the new owner has begun cleaning it up. He alluded to the fact that this wasn’t the only one of her properties she’s sold, as she'd come to the conclusion in recent months it might be a good idea to let a few holdings go.

Daugherty testified that in the past few weeks she sold the Virginia Avenue house to Patrick Timmerman for $75,000. Timmerman appears to be the same man who was arrested for credit card fraud in 2009.

Daugherty testified that she did not know Timmerman prior to the sale, an assertion Assistant City Counselor Toni Mullenix seemed dubious of. In her cross-examination of Daugherty, Mullenix asked repeatedly about Daugherty's use of LLCs, which the city has argued in the past were used to obfuscate many of the true owners of properties involved in the scheme.

Prior to taking the stand, Daugherty spent the better part of the afternoon listening in the courtroom as Virginia Avenue neighbors, police officers with the city’s Problem Properties Division, and even one of her former tenants took the stand against her.

Daugherty, wearing a gray short-sleeved shirt, occasionally wrote notes on a pad of paper but largely showed no emotion, even as she was accused of overseeing a situation akin to “modern-day slavery” at the Virginia Avenue house. On the table in front of her, there was what appeared to be a Louis Vuitton purse and wallet — the latter of which sported what looked a lot like a rubber-banded stack of cash peeking through the open zipper.

The neighbors’ testimony mirrored what has been reported publicly and what the city has included in their various court filings. The city has accused Daugherty of renting rooms in condemned houses to members of the city’s most vulnerable populations, in many cases forcing those tenants to work for her to earn the roof over their heads, even as in some instances Daugherty pilfered their government aid.

“It seemed like modern-day slavery to me. They were working for her and not getting paid,” said neighbor Joseph Goodman when he took the stand yesterday. “It was hard to see people living in that condition.”

Testified neighbor Patricia Vaught, “It’s hard for me to believe someone was comfortable renting and taking money from people living in those conditions.”

In her testimony, Brittany Marquardt described the Virginia Avenue house right next door to her as being in “a state of disrepair." Tenants there collected metal for scrapping and stored a lot of that metal in the backyard. At one point, a tenant threw a concrete birdbath into the street and sex toys into a neighboring yard.

Marquardt described the house’s basement having seven inches of standing water in it, creating the odor of “a musty cave” that, as temperatures have warmed, has morphed into an odor “more moldy and menacing.” (At one point, according to Goodman’s testimony, Daugherty’s father-in-law lived in that basement.)

Also taking the stand was Valenda Spurlin, one of Daugherty’s former tenants who lived at a different property but who indicated that in the past three months Daugherty tried to get her to move into the Virginia Avenue house.

Spurlin gave her testimony by raising either a green or red hand to indicate yes or no to questions put to her. She had her voice box removed five years ago due to cancer and cannot speak.

Spurlin indicated that Daugherty had aided her and her fiancé in applying for state rental reimbursement and that Daugherty even drove them to the proper place to do so. Daughtery promised that the couple would get more than $2,000, but that money never came to Spurlin or her fiancé. The checks from the state were mailed to Daugherty’s address in Brentwood.

Asked about this by Mullenix, Daugherty said they had to be mailed to her house because Spurlin was homeless at the time — this, despite the checks being for rental assistance.

At one point, Mullenix showed Spurlin what appeared to be a mugshot for Patrick Timmerman — the man Daugherty sold the Virginia Avenue house to, whom Daugherty claimed she had never previously met. Mullenix asked Spurlin if she'd ever seen this man before. Spurlin indicated she had, though she did not know his name.

Officers Louis Naes and Erin Hein, both with the department’s Problem Properties Division, testified as well. Naes said he was familiar with numerous properties belonging to Daugherty, saying they are “all in disarray.” Hein called the conditions of Daugherty’s property on Virginia “deplorable.”

Neighbors of the Virginia Avenue property said on the stand that there had been some superficial improvements as of late, primarily that some of the debris that once cluttered the backyard had been removed. However, all seemed to agree there was much work left to be done.

For instance, Goodman noted that a wooden pallet was now being used as a makeshift fence on the property. The foul odor still lingers and is only getting worse as the weather warms.

At one point, Kistner showed Marquardt a recent photo of the property, which he hoped would demonstrate it had recently gotten some much-needed TLC.

She replied, “The smell is not coming through in your photo.”
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