Buder v. Walsh

314 S.W.2d 739, 1958 Mo. LEXIS 702
CourtSupreme Court of Missouri
DecidedJune 9, 1958
DocketNo. 45906
StatusPublished
Cited by4 cases

This text of 314 S.W.2d 739 (Buder v. Walsh) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Supreme Court of Missouri primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Buder v. Walsh, 314 S.W.2d 739, 1958 Mo. LEXIS 702 (Mo. 1958).

Opinion

COIL, Commissioner.

This is an appeal from a judgment in an equity suit wherein one cotrustee sought equitable contribution from the other to allegedly equalize their payments in satisfaction of a joint and several surcharge judgment rendered against them, and wherein defendant cotrustee cross-claimed for full indemnity from plaintiff cotrustee for money defendant had paid in partial satisfaction of such surcharge judgment. The cotrustees involved were G. A. Buder and G. A. Franz. The instant suit was instituted by G. A. Buder against Orval C. Sutter, administrator c. t. a. d. b. n. of the Missouri ancillary estate of G. A. Franz, who died in July 1939. During its pendency G. A. Buder died and his executor, G. A. Buder, Jr., was substituted as plaintiff, and later Edward A. Walsh was substituted as defendant as successor administrator of the G. A. Franz estate.

E. D. Franz died testate in 1898. He left the residue of his estate to his widow, Sophie, for life with remainder in equal parts to their ten children. In 1909 Sophie executed a trust agreement whereby she conveyed to G. A. Buder and G. A. Franz (her son), as trustees, all of her property, including the property which she owned outright and her interest in the property which she held as life tenant under her husband’s will. From the inception of the trust there was almost constant strife and differences among the trustees and some of the remainder interests. As early as 1910 there was litigation in the St. Louis Circuit Court styled E. W. Franz v. G. A. Buder, No. 57836-A, for construction of the trust agreement. Litigation in the federal courts began early and continued at least until late 1951. There were two cases in the Supreme Court of Missouri. While reference will hereinafter be made to certain of those cases, a fuller history of the litigation than here set forth will be found in the cases cited in the footnote.1

[741]*741In so far as necessary to our disposition of the instant issues, suffice to say that Sophie Franz, the life tenant, died in 1930, but that matters concerning the administration of the trust which terminated upon her death and matters affecting the remainder interests under the will of E. D. Franz were unsettled for years thereafter. Thus, in 1942 the federal district court directed the surviving trustee, G. A. Buder (as noted, G. A. Franz, the cotrustee, died in 1939), to employ a designated accounting firm which prepared and filed an audit and final accounting in the E. D. Franz estate from June 1931 to the date of filing the report. Certain remaindermen (who, by then, were nine, one child of E. D. and Sophie Franz having died unmarried and without issue) filed exceptions to the report. The district court sustained four such exceptions and entered a judgment which, inter alia, surcharged the cotrustees (the judgment was entered against G. A. Buder and Arthur U. Simmons, administrator c. t. a. of the G. A. Franz estate) with the four items which then totaled (including interest) $366,511.24. Those items were:

(1) Attorneys’ fees theretofore allowed Buder & Buder as attorneys for the trustees and certain remaindermen, $115,000.

(2) Interest on trust funds which had been commingled with the funds of Buder & Buder, $7,305.76.

(3) The value of 600 rights to acquire shares of stock of the Burroughs Adding Machine Company which rights had been retained by the trustees in January 1920 as commissions, $45,000.

(4) “Advancements” to remaindermen: principal, $100,795.46; interest thereon from April 15, 1930, $98,410.02; total, $199,205.48.

The surviving trustee, G. A. Buder, and Simmons, as administrator of the G. A. Franz estate, appealed from that judgment in so far as it had surcharged the trustees in the four respects above noted. The opinion of the United States Court of Appeals is reported in the case of Buder v. Fiske, 8 Cir., 174 F.2d 260. The district court’s judgment as to the surcharged items (the only matters of appeal) was affirmed.

The above items labeled “attorneys’ fees” and interest on commingled funds are self-explanatory. The $45,000 item described as rights to purchase certain shares of Burroughs stock arose when the trustees retained five per cent of a total number of rights which had accrued in 1920. The trustees took the position that the “rights” were income on which they were entitled to commissions. The court decided that the rights were corpus and that the trustees had no right to retain five per cent of them.

The item labeled “advancements” requires a fuller explanation. Subsequent to the death of E. D. Franz and prior to the execution of the trust agreement, Sophie caused payments to be made to her ten children totaling $87,500 and, within two months after the execution of the trust agreement, further payments to those children (remaindermen under their father’s will) of $50,000, making a total amount paid to them of $137,500. As the 1924 litigation (Buder v. Franz, 27 F.2d 101) disclosed, G. A. Buder and perhaps his cotrustee, G. A. Franz, had entered on a course of conduct designed to satisfy or destroy the remainder estates by causing the remaindermen to execute various and sundry agreements and receipts indicating that the mentioned payments, as well as others received from or through Sophie Franz, were advancements against the respective remainder shares due them from their father’s estate. That course of action involved the concept or belief that stock dividends were income and not corpus and therefore went to the life tenant. (That was important in the E. D. Franz estate inasmuch as 210 shares of stock [742]*742of the American Arithmometer Company, owned by E. D. Franz at the time of his death, became, through stock dividends, 282,500 shares of stock in the Burroughs Adding Machine Company worth, in 1929, $25,000,000.) The 1924 litigation determined that stock dividends were corpus and that the various receipts, agreements, etc., relied upon by the trustees as having destroyed the remainders of the Franz children had not had that effect and that the children had vested remainders under the will of E. D. Franz.

The cotrustees, in January 1927, credited themselves as trustees with $100,795.46. That sum was part of the proceeds received from the sale of certain Burroughs preferred stock. The theory of the trustees in entering the credit was, as we understand, that that amount had been, in effect, loaned by Sophie Franz to the estate of her husband and on behalf of that estate she had caused the aforementioned payments to the remaindermen to be made as advances against their remainder interests and that the E. D. Franz estate was obligated to repay Sophie Franz the $100,000. The district court found, and the appellate court affirmed (Buder v. Fiske, supra), that $100,795.46 of the total $137,500 had come from the separate funds of Sophie Franz, that she intended to and did give the various amounts to her children as outright gifts without expectation or intent of reimbursement, that there was no implied obligation on the E. D. Franz estate to repay that sum to Sophie, and that, consequently, the trustees had wrongfully taken that credit.

Sophie died April 14, 1930, and her estate was administered in the St. Louis City Probate Court. Thus, the $100,000 item credited to the trustees went into the Sophie Franz estate rather than directly to the E. D. Franz remaindermen.

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Related

Buder v. Buder
372 S.W.2d 885 (Supreme Court of Missouri, 1963)
In Re Franz'Estate
372 S.W.2d 885 (Supreme Court of Missouri, 1963)
Security-Mutual Bank & Trust Co. v. Buder
341 S.W.2d 782 (Supreme Court of Missouri, 1960)

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Bluebook (online)
314 S.W.2d 739, 1958 Mo. LEXIS 702, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/buder-v-walsh-mo-1958.