Is a Seller Required to Disclose a Home's Bloody Past?

Yahoo! News picks up on a case bubbling up through the Pennsylvania courts:

A Pennsylvania woman has appealed to the state Supreme Court in her suit against a home seller and real estate agent who failed to disclose that a murder-suicide had taken place in the home she purchased.

When Janet Milliken, 59, moved from California after her husband died, she had hoped to start a new life with her two teenage children in Pennsylvania near her family. She bought a home in Thornton, Pa., for $610,000 in June 2007. She learned a few weeks after she moved in from a next-door neighbor that a murder-suicide had occurred the year before in her home.

She sued the seller and the real estate agent for fraud and misrepresentation, saying they made a "deliberate choice not to disclose the home's recent past," according to a court document. The trial judge granted summary judgment in favor of the defendants, saying state law does not require agents to disclose such events.

Steve Clowney