The Reward
By: Amos Gooall, Jr.
May you never have to experience the legal and banking problems, not to the mention the gut-wrench, associated with posting a reward to help find a missing friend, family member or colleague. But if you do, here are the lessons I'm learning from the search for our local District Attorney, Ray Gricar, who, at age 59, vanished April 15, 2005, from near his office in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. his last credited sighting was in Lewisburg, sixty miles away. Ray told his girlfriend he was going for a drive.
Ray is a friend. I represent his family. They, a number of other friends and I could find no explanation for his departure and determined to establish a reward of $10,000 for his return. In doing so, I discovered that there is very little literature available on the subject of rewards but much to be done to offer a reward.
There have been other, more famous rewards. Often they're for criminals, from the recent "up to 25 million dollars", offered by the American government for information leading to the capture of terrorist mastermind Usama Binladen to $25,000, offered by the St. Louis Midland Railroad for the 19th century outlaw, Jesse James.
Private citizens have also offered rewards, such as the $50,000 reward posted by Randall Hurst in 1974 for the return of his daughter, Patricia, kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army.
In our case, the purpose for the reward was to get people combing through the woods near Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where Ray's car was found, and through the nearby Susquehanna River, looking for clues and to have them vigilantly looking among the publich trying to spot someone looking like him. Police authorities reported that the reward served its purpose in that there were more canoes and kayaks onthe Susquehanna River in that location during the month following the announcement of the reward, than any other late spring in memory. Although Ray's County-issued laptop computer has been found in the river, as was its hard drive which has been removed, no trace of him has been discovered.
Legally, this has been a fascinating effort to create what my contract's professor, Joseph D. Calamari, at Fordham University School of Law, described as "a unilateral contract". Since then, in 35 years of practicing law, I have never heard a lawyer or judge use that term again until now.
In most peoples' view, a contract is seen as an obligation binding both sides, involvong an offer which has been accepted. This creates a bilateral contract. Upon acceptance, both sides are obligated to each other. A unilateral contract is one in which only one side is bound: The obligation to pay follows actual performance, such as "If you will rake my leave, I will pay you $25." Once the performance takes place, the other side is legally obligated to pay the money. Typically, there is some control, since the offeror and offeree are usually communicating with each other directly. A reward, on the other hand, is an offer to the public in general, and once made, would be very difficult to change or cancel.
When someone disappears, their affairs go into a sort of legal inerregnum. If the peson were known to be deceased, the Corut would have the power to appoint an executor or administrator to handle final affairs. Unfortunately, the Court has not power to appoint a fiduciary to carry out the estate plans of a person who is not necessarily deceased.
Like most States, Pennsylvania law has an office known as a Trustee Durante Absentia, which allows a fiduciary to be appointed to manage the person's affairs during his or her absence, in order to preserve the status quo. Such a trustee's duties are more limited than the executor or administrator, but we asked the Court to appoint Ray's adult daughter as his Trustee. His family has been directly involved in the search process, and information on his disappearance and police efforts can still be found on the family's website, www.raygricar.com.
In addition to assisting the police with access to Ray's personal records, through releases signed by his Trustee, the family sought to enlist the general public in the search by offering to pay for information leading to his return (or, less optimistically, leading to the recovery of his remains). To this day, although police carry him as a missing person, much of his career was spent in several States, prosecuting dangerous criminals from drug dealers and domestic abusers to figures in organized crime.
Offering a reward is a delicate proposition. The elemtns of a unilateral contract are an offer that is made which can be accepted by conduct. A contract is the conincidence of offer and aceptance. Once the offer is accepted, there is a binding obligation on the offeror to carry out the terms of the contract, in this case to pay the reward.
A classic reward offers to the public at large to pay a certain sum of money for information leading to the apprehension and conviction of the person or persons responsible for a particular crime. "Where a reward is offered for information leading to the areest and conviction of a criminal, that person is entitled to it who gives the information which is the effective or proximate means of securing the desired arrest and conviction." Nasser v. County of Lackawanna, 28 PA.D.&.C. 3d 46, 50 (Lack. Co. Com.Pl. 1980). In our case, we were interested in obtaining information about Ray, whether a crime had occurred or not.
A reward makes an offer to the general public which can be accepted by conduct. Thus, it is important that the reward be precisly defined and limited, so that the offeror does not become obligated to pay the reward to many people for an indefinite period, or for information that is not really helpful to law enforcement. On the other hand, the reward could not be defined in such a circumscribed fashion that it did not encourage members of the general public to join in the search.
If you are not careful, you could be contractually obligated to pay someone a reward when they have done very little to earn it. Moreover, in Pennsylvania at elast, a reward can be payable to someone who did not even know if its at the time of the conduct. It is conceivable that you could also be obligated to pay the reward after all reason for its existence has passed. The worst of all possible worlds would be to use imprecise language in the reward that might alter the general rule and allow multiple claimants, each seeking the full reward. Finally, sine there is not other party to deal with, the reward needs to contain its own procedure for being terminated, when it has served its purpose, since the Nasser court held that the expiration of the statute of limitations period would not be sufficient to cut off claims for the reward. We also struggled to find a way that persons contributing to the reward fund might have a chance to claim a tax deduction if their efforts actually produced the information sought.
All of these provisions need to be dealth with in the reward offer.
In our case, a number of folks were concerned about Ray's return. Moreover, he had, during a long prosecutorial career prior to this disappearance, been fearless in his commitment to protect victims of domestic violence, and in supporting activities to find and prosecute domestic violence perpetrators and protect domestic violence victims. This commitment had previosuly been recognized by the local Women's Resource Center, which agreed to sponsor the reward. What we did was to set up a fund, owned by the Women's Resource Center at a local bank, subject to an agreement that provided that donors contributed to the Women's Resource Center in offering the reward. The checks were drawn to the order of the Women's Resource Center and deposited intot he reward account, held in the custody of a cooperative local bank, Nittany Bank. The family created a Reward Committee, consisting of representatives of law enforcement, the Women's Resource Center and the Gricar Family actually to make the offer and to supervise this fund, so as to be in a position to rule upon applications for the reward. Donations and pledges for donations quickly exceeded $10,000.
Once the money was in place, a reward offer was prepared and signed, and a notice was published. We took no action, however, until satisfied that there were funds to back the offer, since we were concerned that the reward itself was promise ultimately by the Reward Committee to pay the rewrad whether there were funds on deposit or not.
We set the limit at making a claim for the reward at one year, since the activity we hoped to encourage should have been completed by that time. That year has come and gone without another credible clue, despite massive publicity on local, national and even international levels.
The best reward for me would have been to contribute to Ray's successful return. A distant second would have been to hlep his family and the community achieve closure. Although the reward did not produce either result, it was gratifying to be a lawyer and be able to use a specialty in turst and estate practice to find a way to help in this time of need.
**The endnotes have been taken out of this article