Columnist Ken McCall: There’s nothing rewarding about these cases

Ken McCall

Friday, Dec. 20, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

THE NEXT TIME someone offers a huge reward for information leading to something or other, some cynics have a few words of advice:

Forget about it.

Based on two cases this summer, the cynics have a point.

First Bob Stupak offers a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction in the disappearance of Francine Meegan, then withdraws the offer after her parents are arrested, convicted and sent to prison.

Next, Larry Koentopp, distraught over the disappearance of his wife, offers "up to $25,000 reward for information leading to the return of Espie" Koentopp, but doesn't pay when hikers find her body in Red Rock Canyon.

The cases are raising all kinds of questions, in conversation, on talk radio and in court. The three hikers are now suing Koentopp for, basically, breach of contract.

Are Stupak and Koentopp just a pair of reward welchers?

Or are the hikers and a main witness in the Meegan case a bunch of blood-sucking leeches?

How can you "withdraw" a reward anyway? Once you make the offer, don't you have to pay up or be branded a welcher?

Just try to "withdraw" a bet after you lose in a casino and see what happens. Guaranteed: More than insults will fly.

The Koentopp case will keep the cauldron bubbling for months, assuming the former owner of the Las Vegas Stars baseball club doesn't settle with his tormenters.

That's the way Koentopp's thinking of them these days.

"All they're doing is renewing all the wounds for the family," Koentopp says.

When his wife went missing in August, and three days of searching by Metro officers and volunteers turned up only her car, Koentopp says "everybody thought there was foul play."

So, after consulting briefly with Metro, Koentopp and friends began plastering the western end of the valley and Pahrump with posters offering the reward.

The idea, he says, was to entice possible kidnappers to let her go.

"The intent certainly wasn't somebody just finding her body.

"When your wife's missing, you're upset and you're sick and you're trying to get these things out," Koentopp says of the posters. "You don't sit there playing with words and trying to think about liability."

But, says Mark LoBello, attorney for the hikers who found the body five weeks later, liability is what Koentopp got.

"This is solely an issue of contract," Lobello says. "I'm not unsympathetic to Mr. Koentopp's loss, but that isn't the issue here.

"Mr. Koentopp is obligated to pay under contract law."

The posters, LoBello argues, offered an open-ended contract with the public, a contract that his clients accepted when they called with information about the location of Espie's body.

The poster read "for information leading to the return of Espie."

"It didn't say dead or alive," LoBello says. "It didn't say in good condition. It didn't say anything."

The attorney says if the poster had been worded differently -- if it had required Espie's "safe" return -- there wouldn't be a lawsuit.

"One word would have made all the difference in the world."

But the word wasn't there, and when Lobello's clients -- John and Tammy Visoky and Michael Buer -- found the body and called in, they fulfilled the contract.

"What he got was the return of his wife," LoBello says. "She got a decent burial. Otherwise her bones might still be sitting out there in that canyon."

As for the "up to" before the reward amount, LoBello argues there was nothing that defined payment of a "lesser sum."

Part of Koentopp's reluctance to pay, he says, comes from the "attitude" of the three hikers.

They were calling Metro trying to collect the money "before she was even buried," he says.

"Before you know it, they were after us with both barrels."

LoBello calls that claim "unsubstantiated," but he also says Koentopp wouldn't return phone calls.

"When you have a contract with somebody and they don't pay," he says, "that is reason for a few phone calls."

In any event, Koentopp didn't appreciate their attitude and offered the trio $1,500 -- 6 percent of the posted reward. They responded with the lawsuit.

The Stupak-Meegan case is a different story altogether, but raises some of the same questions.

Stupak wasn't personally connected to the case, but he certainly got a lot of good publicity with his flamboyant and well-publicized $100,000 reward offer.

Police say no one came forward to claim the reward until well after the trial was over. Those who offered information, police say, never asked for money upfront in exchange for information.

Which raises a thorny question: Do you have to be motivated by greed to qualify for a reward?

Police say Visalia, Calif., resident Gerardo Vasquez, who alerted Metro to possible foul play in the Meegan case, wasn't "qualified" to get the reward.

In addition, Detective Michael Karstedt, director of Metro's Secret Witness program, said he suggested Stupak withdraw the reward.

It's true, no one witness provided a smoking gun, but several witnesses had the parts to build a successful case.

Since Stupak so magnanimously and publicly offered this huge reward, shouldn't he pay something to all the witnesses who helped send James Meegan to prison for life for killing his daughter?

It's true, the trio suing Koentopp have apparently showed an appalling lack of sensitivity.

But as one courthouse observer put it: "Because somebody's a jerk, you don't pay them? If that was true, nobody would get paid down here."

And even though Koentopp was understandably distressed when he put out the posters, doesn't he owe those who found the body something more than 6 percent of his original offer?

One thing is sure, if the case goes to trial, it'll get ugly.

"I don't know what to do," Koentopp says. "I wish I knew. The last thing I want to do is drag this thing out."

My unsolicited advice: Pull out the checkbook and pay the jerks.