Adding insult to injury

It sounds like a nightmare straight out of Kafka: Your car gets stolen in broad daylight. Two years later you learn that the car had been recovered just days later, but then sold four times, and someone else has claim to legal ownership of the vehicle.

Now, you're not allowed to so much as touch the car as it sits in a tow yard, racking up daily fees, for which you and the car's other claimant are being sued by the local government as a way to determine the car's ownership.

This is the scenario that JoEllen and Dave Johnson have found themselves in.

"We don't know what do. It's just ridiculous," Dave Johnson said.

"We dated in that car -- it was our wedding limousine; we had that car for 20 years," Johnson said. "It had new paint, a new motor."

On June 15, 2005, Dave Johnson was mowing the lawn at their house on 102nd Terrace when a neighbor came over and told him he'd seen the Johnsons' 1984 Monte Carlo speeding down the road with a black car that had been previously cruising through the neighborhood right behind it.

Johnson immediately called 911 and soon an Edwardsville police officer arrived.

Dave Johnson said the officer, Detective Redinger, had told the couple that he had checked a couple of popular stolen-car dumps on the way over, even though, Johnson said, the car was probably still on the road and likely on Interstate 70.

Redinger took a report and then, the Johnsons said, they didn't hear anything for 18 months.

Then one night last November, Dave Johnson decided on a whim to get a Carfax vehicle history report.

The reports list the purchase and title history of a vehicle.

"I hesitated because of the $25 (cost of the Carfax report)," Johnson said.

He entered the car's VIN number and discovered it had been recovered two days after it was stolen, then bought and sold four times after that, including two title changes. Johnson called the Edwardsville Police Department that night and a report was made.

A few days later Dave Johnson received a call from the Edwardsville Police Department telling him the car had been recovered by the Kansas City, Kan. Police Department.

The car was being driven at the time by the son of its last buyer, Carlton Strother, who was then in federal custody on several charges of identity theft and fraud.

JoEllen Johnson said the Edwardsville police had said a federal judge had given them permission to impound the vehicle on the grounds that it was stolen.

So the car was taken to Tiger Tow.

But when the Johnsons went to go pick up the car at Tiger Tow after receiving a call from the Edwardsville Police department the day before, they were told they couldn't touch the car because its ownership was in dispute.

The car looked different that it had the last time they'd seen it, with a different paint job and huge wheels. It was apparently drivable though, JoEllen Johnson said.

The car had been taken to Alandon Towing in Bonner Springs when it was recovered the first time in Kansas City, Kan., in June 2005.

JoEllen Johnson said Edwardsville police officers had told her the car had been stripped to its frame when it was found on the side of a road.

An employee at Alandon who would not give her name said that while she couldn't recall the Johnsons' car, as far as the legal requirements of notifying the vehicle's owner go, "we did everything we're supposed to."

Kansas state law requires sellers of vehicles to notify the last known owner by certified mail and to have notice of the vehicle's auction published twice before selling it.

The Johnsons said they never received any word that their car had been recovered, but Dave Johnson said the problem might have been that the vehicle's registration listed the Johnsons' old address.

Mary Solem, public information officer for the Kansas City, Kan. Police Department, said there was no record of the VIN number for the Johnsons' car being reported as stolen, which she said means the number was not reported, or there was a typographical error in the reporting of the number.

The Johnsons' frustration at the situation is palpable.

"It's a stolen car. So how can he legally own it?" asks JoEllen Johnson.

The Johnsons' circumstances echo the situations faced by characters in Franz Kafka's novels, who found themselves in absurd situations, often as the result of bureaucracies and their surreally nonsensical policies.

The Johnsons estimate the car's value at $7,500, and say they had only liability insurance for it.

It's not just about the monetary value of the vehicle, she said.

"We had some attachment to it," JoEllen Johnson said. "I had owned it over 20 years ... We had no intention of ever selling it. We've been all around the country in it. Him and I drove it down to Miami, drove up the east coast to New York, then back to Kansas City. I've been a lot of places in that car.

"It was driven daily up until we had the kids, and even then it wasn't until 1997 that we bought a third vehicle," Johnson said.

Early this January the city of Edwardsville filed suit against Dave Johnson and against Carlton Strother in an effort to determine the legal owner of the car, so that it can be released, and also for compensation of towing fees and more than two months of storage at Tiger Tow. No court date has been set.

Roseann Ketchmark, media officer for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the western district of Missouri, said there was no forfeiture count in the indictment against Strother, so the result of his criminal trial probably won't have any effect on his claim to the car.

An employee at Tiger Tow declined to say how much the bill for the Monte Carlo was, or how much the daily storage fee is.