Smyrna Building Loan Ass'n v. Worden

10 Del. 508

• Court: Superior Court of Delaware
• Decided: July 5, 1878
• Status: Published

Opinion

The Court:

At the preceding sale of the premises by the sheriff returned at the last term of the court, Worden himself became the purchaser of them, but he failed to comply, and on the eve of the second sale he made the lease of them in question to his mother for one year, the whole rent then being paid to him in advance by her, the object of which must have been, like his former conduct by which he rendered nugatory the first sheriff’s sale, anything but just or fair toward his creditors; but to make it still more reprehensible, unjust, and fraudulent in its character and design, to evade and defeat the ends of justice in the due course of the administration of it by law, and the final process of this court, it was done at that late moment for the purpose apparently of preventing the plaintiff or any other person learning of its existence until after the day of the second sale, for it is in proof that the plaintiff, who then became the purchaser of the premises, had no notice or knowledge whatever of the lease on the day of the sale. And as it is mill property, combined with a bucket factory, of which the mother, the lessee, has no possession which it would subject her to any personal inconvenience to be removed from, we make the rule absolute.