ST. LOUIS —ÌýThe city raided the big house on Virginia Avenue, in Tower Grove East, on a bright spring morning.
After years of complaints about derelict cars, unruly pets, trash and pests, the city had reached its limit. Police and other city workers impounded a car, seized more than 40 animals, and condemned the building.
The house was one of at least 20 owned by the Daugherty family, notorious for renting to poor city residents and keeping the homes in awful shape.
But in 2004, police weren't after Dara Daugherty, the south side landlord who city lawyers recently accused of running a slum housingÌýempire.
They were after her mother.Ìý
The city lawsuit filed against Daugherty last month was the latest twist in a saga stretching across five decades. Before the city was chasing Dara Daugherty and her rental business, they were chasing Jean Daugherty and hers.Ìý
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Both women riled neighbors who said the Daughertys preyed on the poor and let the properties become nuisances. They both defied efforts to rein in their business. It wasn't until recently, when public interest lawyers teamed up with neighborhoods on special lawsuits targeting the Daughertys, and new city leaders sharpened their enforcement strategies, that a change became possible.Ìý
“I was so surprised to see the city do something about this,†said John Baldus, a longtime neighbor who knew both women. “This has been going on for 40 years.â€
Dara Daugherty declined comment.ÌýHer attorney, Elkin Kistner, said she needed to focus on a pending criminal case against her.
Daugherty is accused of burglarizing a south city home last year.Ìý
'Very strange people'
Baldus got his introduction to the Daughertys in 1989. He and his then-girlfriend, who is now his wife, had moved into a house in Tower Grove East that backed up to the Daugherty family home, so they shared the alley with them.
Neighbors told them to watch themselves around the Daughertys, and Baldus quickly found out why. “They were very strange people,†he said.
Some of the oddities were small and short-lived, like the dog poop drain. When Baldus noticed the Daughertys were flushing the waste from a backyard pen through a pipe that flowed into the alley, he called the police, who made them fill it with cement.
Others were more persistent, like the cars. For years, the Daughertys would line the nearby streets with 10 or more junkers at a time. Baldus noticed Charles Daugherty, the family patriarch, seemed to spend a lot of time laboring over the broken machines.
The Daughertys also rented out two other homes on the block, which over time drew their own complaints for rat infestations, building code violations and piles of debris. Baldus and others noticed that tenants were either down on their luck, doing odd jobs for the family, or both.
One man would move the fleet of cars on street sweeping days. He had to carry a car battery from vehicle to vehicle to make them start, a neighbor said.Ìý
Jean Daugherty called a different tenant “Chicken Lips,†a neighbor said.
“Jean would come out of her house†Baldus said,Ìý“and yell, ‘Chicken Lips, go get the truck!’â€
Then a man with thin lips would come out of a house on Louisiana, get a truck and drive off with Daugherty.ÌýOften, Baldus said, those trips ended with the truck full of beat-up furniture, as if they'd just moved someone out.
“It was like watchingÌý‘Sanford and Son,’â€ÌýBaldus said.Ìý
Daugherty’s rental business was growing in those days. Land records show the Daughertys controlled at least seven properties in 1989, mostly clustered in their home neighborhood. By 2003, they controlled more than 20 across the south side, stretching into Benton Park, Dutchtown and Dogtown, and drawing concerns from neighbors and authorities alarmed at the state of some of their properties and their tenants.
Former Alderman Ken Ortmann, who represented the old 9th Ward, regularly discussed Daugherty properties with city staff charged with handling nuisances.Ìý
“I felt sorry for the people they were putting in there,†Ortmann said. “I could never understand why anyone would go into a property that's so bad.â€
The city condemned at least three of the houses from 2002-2004. One was slated for demolition. But the city, then, wasn't targeting the whole business.ÌýIt hadn't yet come up with the strategies the city is using now to deal with slumlords, saidÌýformer Alderman Craig Schmid, whose ward also included Daugherty properties. The city also didn't want to create new headaches.
“You need someone ready to take over the property and redevelop it,†Schmid said. “Otherwise, it’s just another vacant property that’s going to continue to bring you problems.â€
But by 2004, the big family house on Virginia was deteriorating. There was a hole in the roof. And in the previous four years, complaints had spiked, sounding the alarm on rat infestations, building code violations, derelict cars and general filth.
One morning that spring, neighbor Ralph Zuke was standing in his kitchen when he heard a woman screaming.
When he reached his back porch, he saw two female police officers leading Jean Daugherty down the alley in handcuffs. The place was being condemned.Ìý
Inside, city workers encountered a disgusting mess. In a lawsuit filed later, city lawyers cited infestations of rats and roaches, and large amounts of trash and waste — human and animal.
When things calmed down on that spring day, Zuke asked a police officer what it was like. “He said he got 10 or 15 feet in and his asthma kicked in,†he said.
In the months that followed the raid, Zuke marveled as the house was slowly cleaned out, and its contents were loaded into a series of 30-yard dumpsters.
“One day it was nothing but sewing machines,†he said. “One day it was nothing but bike frames.â€
Jean Daugherty sued months later, seeking the return of 43 pets — 12 dogs and 31 exotic birds. The city resisted, citing the unsanitary conditions. Eventually, a judge allowed the pets to be adopted by a list of family members and friends at other addresses.
Zuke never saw Jean Daugherty again. She died the following year.
But not before filing paperwork seeking to pass on a collection of at least 20 properties to her five children, including Dara.
'The house was almost lost'
Some of the houses were sold. A couple others were lost to foreclosure.
But from 2009 to 2012, Dara Daugherty reloaded, buying seven homes on the city’s southeast side out of foreclosure, the first tranche of 16 she would buy over the years.Ìý
She also introduced something new into the business: She used limited liability companies to buy and hold the properties, reducing her financial risk and making it harder to know who owned her property. She wasn't on a buying spree — AAA Sunshine Investments was. She would ultimately organize at least three more LLCs, including two that each owned a single property. Investigators had to see who was collecting the rent to say who was in charge.
City lawyers would later say tenants reported signing over their government benefit checks to Dara Daugherty, ensuring rent got paid.Ìý
The usual trouble followed. Neighbors filed reports of dangerous dogs, roach infestations, bed bugs and water leaks. One property, on Pennsylvania Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood, inspired 13 complaints — about hazardous waste, about garbage on the property, about building code violations, derelict vehicles and general nuisances — in a single year.Ìý
And, city attorneys said, Daugherty regularly had renters living in houses that were condemned. Her LLCs even sued to evict tenants from at least two properties that had been condemned, city and court records show.
Sometimes complaints turned into building inspections, and then summonses to housing court, where Daugherty faced fines, city records show. But city lawyers later said Daugherty often responded by skipping court. Officers would arrest her on the resulting warrants, but she would get out of jail in a few hours, reset her court date, and start the cycle all over again.Ìý
Neighbors felt like nothing could stop Daugherty. Back on Virginia Avenue in Tower Grove East, Cal Thomas, a longtime resident and block captain, said that when the city boarded up a place next to the old family home, Daugherty would just take down the boards. And when neighbors reported people going in through the front door, tenants just started coming in through the back, Thomas said.
But in the fall of 2020, a nonprofit public-interest law firm,ÌýLegal Services of Eastern Missouri, opened a new front on the Daughertys.
Attorney Peter Hoffman had recently arrivedÌýfrom Kansas City, where he'd had success using state nuisance laws to force property owners to take better care of vacant buildings or sell them to someone who would.
His new initiative here was asked to help with a house in south ºüÀêÊÓƵ' Marine Villa neighborhood that had been in Daugherty hands since 1983. By the time Legal Services arrived, the place was vacant, and the big concerns were squatters and slow-motion structural collapse — the back wall had fallen out.
Neighbors had called the city and gotten it written up a bunch of times, said Stephen Jehle, the neighborhood association president, but nothing was happening.Ìý
Legal Services' lawsuit changed that. Citing state nuisance laws, the firm asked a judge to order a Daugherty-organized company to fix up the house within 30 days. It said that if the company didn't respond, the judge shouldÌýappoint a third-party receiver to do repairs,Ìýsend the company the bill — and take over ownership.
A lawyer for Daugherty's company and ex-partner,ÌýKeith Mack, signed an agreement in April 2022 to make repairs, or give the neighborhood association the right to take the property.
Instead, Daugherty's company transferred the property to a company connected to her brother.
When the neighborhood association learned, it asked a judge to force a sale, and got it.
“That house was almost lost,†Hoffman said. “Now it's being renovated.â€
'We did our best'
Legal Services filed similar suits against five other properties they tied to Daugherty, on behalf of groups in the Carondelet and Benton Park neighborhoods.Ìý
Then the city stepped in.Ìý
Mayor Tishaura O. Jones came into office in 2021 knowing that the city had fallen short on nuisance properties in the past. She made a priority of doing better, said spokesperson Nick Dunne: She hired new staff and formed a new legal unit to take on big cases like teasing apart the Daugherty empire.
On Jan. 16, in a 57-page petition, lawyers from the unit put on record what neighbors had been saying for years.Ìý
Daugherty and her associates, the petition said, "operate outside the boundsÌýofÌýtheÌýCity’sÌýhealth and safetyÌýpermittingÌýprocess and engageÌýinÌýa predatory businessÌýmodel that exploits vulnerableÌýandÌýindigentÌýpersons.â€
It said she recruited tenants, many of whom were struggling with mental illness and drug addiction, from homeless shelters and food banks. It said she charged them hundreds of dollars per month to live in garages, basements and other small spaces inÌýuninhabitable properties without occupancy permits. It said there had been five overdose deaths, several violent assaults, and numerous fights at those properties.
It described Daugherty herself, too, as a scofflaw who brushed off arrest warrants and court dates, and bragged to city officials about making $40,000 per month by neglecting her properties.
Then city lawyers asked a judge to declare dozens of properties owned by Daugherty and associates as public nuisances. They asked the court to force Daugherty to close them down, fix them up, and pay the city back for all the trouble.Ìý
"The public’s interest in maintaining safe and peaceful residential neighborhoods outweighs any inconvenience or economic loss to Defendants," the lawyers wrote.Ìý
Daugherty has yet to respond in court, or even to be served with the lawsuit, court records say.
But now, 20 years after the city raided the big house on Virginia, the problems are once again stacking up against Dara Daugherty. The city wants to shut her down. Neighborhood associations and legal aid lawyers want to take her properties. At least three tenants who lived in spaces without occupancy permits are suing her for fraud and demanding thousands of dollars in damages. Another tenant, James Cole, just won a $1.8 million judgment against one of Daugherty's companies after being stabbed by another tenant in a house on South Jefferson Avenue.Ìý
Even her personal home, in Brentwood, has been condemned by that city for operating as a boarding house, failing to have working smoke detectors, and trash piles large enough to be deemed a fire hazard.Ìý
Still, her old neighbors on Virginia aren't sure change is really coming.
Deloris Bentley, who once lived across the street from the family home, said she expectsÌýto see people living in the rotting house next to it again. "They'll be back," she said.Ìý
Thomas, the longtime block captain, recalled years of calling the city with no result.
“We did our best,†he said.Ìý“Something finally happened. You just hope she doesn't wrangle out of it. She seems to be good at that.â€