TOPEKA, Kansas (AP) – Can there be no trust between a kidnapper and his hostages?
A man who held a Kansas couple hostage in their home while fleeing from authorities is suing them, claiming they broke an oral contract made when he promised them money in exchange
for hiding him from police. The couple has asked a judge to dismiss the suit.
Jesse Dimmick of suburban Denver is serving an 11-year sentence after bursting into Jared and Lindsay Rowley's Topeka-area home in September 2009. He was wanted for questioning in the beating death of a Colorado man and a chase had begun in Geary County.
The Topeka Capital-Journal reported that Dimmick filed a breach of contract suit in Shawnee County District Court, in response to a suit the Rowleys filed in September, seeking $75,000 from him for intruding in their home and causing emotional stress.
Dimmick contends he told the couple he was being chased by someone, most likely the police, who wanted to kill him.
"I, the defendant, asked the Rowleys to hide me because I feared for my life. I offered the Rowleys an unspecified amount of money which they agreed upon, therefore forging a legally binding oral contract," Dimmick said in his hand-written court documents. He wants $235,000, in part to pay for the hospital bills that resulted from him being shot by police when they arrested him.
Neighbors have said the couple fed Dimmick snacks and watched movies with him until he fell asleep and they were able to escape their home unharmed.
Dimmick was convicted in May 2010 of four felonies, including two counts of kidnapping. He was sentenced to 10 years and 11 months on those charges. He was later sent to a jail in Brighton, Colo., where he is being held on eight charges, including murder, in connection of with the killing of Michael Curtis in September 2009. A preliminary hearing originally scheduled for Dec. 6 has been rescheduled for April 12. No plea has been entered in the case.
Robert E. Keeshan, an attorney for the Rowleys, filed a motion denying there was a contract, but said if there was it would not have been binding anyway.
"In order for parties to form a binding contract, there must be a meeting of the minds on all essential terms, including and most specifically, an agreement on the price," he wrote.
Keeshan said the contract also would have been invalid because the couple agreed to let Dimmick in the home only because they knew he had a knife and suspected he might have a gun.
Man ordered to pay wife
PARIS (AFP) – A court in France has ordered a man to pay 10,000 euros ($13,300) in damages to his long-frustrated ex-wife after he failed in his marriage "duties" by withholding lovemaking from her for years.
In the May ruling, published on Tuesday in the Gazette du Palais judicial review, an appeals court in the southern city of Aix-en-Provence upheld an earlier decision to award the damages for "absence of sexual relations."
The couple, who are both 51, married in 1986 and have two children. They divorced in January 2009 in the city of Nice.
In its ruling, the court said the man's wife deserved the damages due to the suffering she endured because of her marriage.
"The wife's expectations were legitimate in the sense that intimate relations between married people are an expression of their mutual affection and part of the duties that proceed from marriage," the court said.
It dismissed the husband's argument that health problems and long working hours had simply reduced the opportunities for the couple to make love.
The court ruled that he had not proved "any health problems that would make him completely incapable of having intimate relations with his wife."
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