The bizarre, fight-filled saga of the Plantation home that became a massive Christmas display

Lisa J. Huriash, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
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Selma Mikula says she put behind her the nightmare of having her identity stolen long ago, an unresolved ordeal she says cost her so much.

Then came the unexpected call this year.

Suddenly talking to her were Broward home-fraud investigators, who wanted to know more about the circumstances back in 2004 when they say Mikula fell victim to identity theft. Someone had used Mikula’s name at the time to get a mortgage for a Plantation home. No charges came from the matter.

Nearly two decades later, investigators were examining anew the log of questionable transactions linked to the residence. “Has it impacted me? Yes,” Mikula told the South Florida Sun Sentinel, recalling her legal fight. “I used my life savings to hire attorneys and investigators to figure out what was going on. It took me 20 years to recover. I recovered somewhat financially, mentally.”

The Plantation home, at 11201 NW 14th St., has attracted national attention in the past, as a couple turned it into an over-the-top Christmas display and the city unsuccessfully tried to declare it a public nuisance. And last month, the Broward Property Appraiser’s Crimes Against Property Unit drew headlines when investigators concluded that that couple, Mark and Kathy Hyatt, had wrongfully “squatted” in the house for years.

But the complicated history of the residence, built in the mid-1990s, predates the Hyatts. The issue over homeownership has been at the center of an investigation launched late last year by the appraiser’s office, given that a string of people have dueled over the property.

Broward County Property Appraiser Marty Kiar said the home and its many issues stand out in South Florida. “I have never seen a case like this in my entire life,” Kiar said. The elements: a long-contested home turns out to have “so much history,” and to find out the Hyatts never legally owned it “is just shocking.”

He called Mikula’s story “heartbreaking” and “something nobody should have to go through. I hope she can have a little bit more peace in her life knowing her story is finally being heard.”

Mikula took solace in recently hearing from the property appraiser’s investigators, who had set out to unravel the complex legal matters and determined she indeed was a victim in 2004, as she has always maintained. It remains to be seen what’ll come next, if anything, in the matter.

“It just keeps going on and on,” Mikula said.

The 1990s-early 2000s

The home, in the upscale neighborhood of Plantation Acres, was previously owned by former NFL player Brett Perriman, investigators said. Broward County records show Perriman and his wife bought the home for $600,000 on July 31, 1998.

Perriman, who played for four teams including six seasons with the Detroit Lions in 1991-96 and one season for the Miami Dolphins in 1997-1998, would face issues paying the mortgage, investigators said.

In 1998, he took out a $400,000 mortgage, but failed to pay it, investigators said.

Facing foreclosure, Perriman took out a second mortgage for $585,000 in April 2002 to pay the first, according to investigators. That second loan went into foreclosure in December 2002. The Perriman family lived in the house from 2002 to 2004, while the foreclosure lawsuit was pending, according to investigators.

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Property Appraiser Kiar enlisted the help of Ryan Shrouder, a real estate attorney, to help examine “complex title” documents and other legal matters.

A memo from Shrouder last month detailed the use of documents deemed fraudulent that included Mikula’s name, even though it doesn’t state who may have been responsible for what the appraiser’s office calls a case of identity theft.

In his memo, he said Mikula’s name was used to get a mortgage in March 2004 to purchase the property. A warranty deed that proves ownership then was issued, giving Mikula the house, records show, and then a loan was taken out in her name to pay off Perriman’s loan. Months after the alleged sale, a quit-claim deed, which allows the transfer of property, handed the home from Mikula back to Perriman in June 2004, records show.

Except Mikula said she never signed the paperwork and said her signature was a forgery on both the 2004 mortgage and the deed back to Perriman, the records show. And the notary on the deal told investigators he never signed off on it, either, according to records.

“Shortly after the mortgages were taken in Selma Mikula’s name, it was discovered that Selma Mikula was a victim of identity theft,” Shrouder wrote in the memo.

“Selma never knew or associated with Brett Perriman or the property,” according to Shrouder’s memo.

Investigators, while examining the quit-claim deed, said Perriman signed his own name as the official witness, which isn’t allowed; Mikula’s signature wasn’t on the grantor line; and there was no notary signature. “My notary seal was neither stolen nor misplaced but I cannot explain how my seal got on the documents,” the notary told investigators, according to records.

Perriman, who moved to Georgia, had a stroke in 2016, The Detroit Free Press reported. He was then on life support for three weeks, his son, Brett Perriman Jr., told the Sun Sentinel.

Brett Perriman Jr. said he fondly remembers growing up in the Plantation house but that his father now has dementia and would be unable to recall any mortgage details.

Still, “knowing my father, he wouldn’t be involved in something like this,” he said.

Realizing something was amiss

Mikula first learned she was the owner of the Plantation home in 2004, she told the Sun Sentinel.

“I was not familiar with identity theft and fraud at the time,” she said. “I figured it was just a big mistake.”

Mikula filed a police report in 2004. She hired a lawyer to pursue a lawsuit but her lawyer wound up getting disbarred on unrelated matters. She reported the case to the Florida Department of Financial Regulation, which spent about two years on her case. She said she felt nothing ever came of her efforts.

Robert Crespo, now a retired criminal fraud investigator for the state Department of Financial Regulation, started investigating Mikula’s identity theft in 2004.

“Selma Mikula, she has always been a victim,” Crespo told the Sun Sentinel. “Her information has been misappropriated and misused for that property.”

He said he spent “two to three years easily” on this case.

“That was a big case. We interviewed a lot of people, subpoenaed bank records, interviews, the title company, the mortgage company.” He said he tried to interview Brett Perriman, “but he declined.”

Despite Crespo’s investigation, charges never were filed.

Records obtained by the Sun Sentinel from the state Department of Financial Regulation, his former agency, show the case was closed in 2008 as a civil dispute.

Mikula had put up a legal fight. Broward County court records show she filed a lawsuit in 2006 against Perriman and seven other defendants, saying her identity was stolen and used “fraudulently to cause her damages, both financial and emotional.” She wrote in her lawsuit that the fallout denied her the chance to purchase her own home “due to the poor credit rating of plaintiff caused by the conduct of the defendants.”

Broward court records show one defense lawyer listed, a lawyer who represented the mortgage company, which disputed the allegations and said it wasn’t liable for any resulting damages. It asked for the case to be dismissed. In 2011, Mikula’s lawsuit was dismissed, court records show.

When the legal ordeal concluded, Mikula said it cost her a bankruptcy, a foreclosure and “the end of my marriage.”

A change in occupants

When Perriman left the house in 2004 and moved to Georgia, it was scooped up by a private investor.

In July 2005, the investor bought $50,000 of the original foreclosed mortgage — the balance Perriman didn’t pay — and then changed the locks, set up an alarm, and started working on the house with plans to flip it, said Vivian Gallinal, the lead investigator on the Plantation house case in the Property Appraiser’s office.

Gallinal would look into transactions involving the home, used for years by Mark and Kathy Hyatt, who divorced around 2018. Mark Hyatt died in 2020.

This year, Kathy Hyatt told investigators in a sworn deposition that Mark Hyatt found the house about 2004 while driving around and reached Perriman, who agreed to sell the Hyatts the house for $900,000.

Mark Hyatt, who then worked as a mortgage officer, correctly discovered Perriman no longer had a valid deed, Broward investigators said.

Kathy Hyatt told investigators that her ex-husband took matters into his own hands, creating a fake deed at the kitchen table with “cut and paste.”

Then the pair tossed all the investor’s belongings, such as his tools, onto the swale, according to Kathy Hyatt’s statement to investigators. She said in a sworn deposition that Mark Hyatt called a locksmith and “we break in.”

Mark and Kathy Hyatt then “squatted” in the house, without buying it or taking out a mortgage for 15 years, the Broward Property Appraiser’s Office determined, based in part on Kathy Hyatt’s sworn deposition.

The Hyatts moved into the house in 2005 “through a series of schemes, forgeries and frauds,” according to the Nov. 13 letter written by Shrouder, the attorney enlisted by the appraiser’s office to review the matter.

The private investor pursued his case in court but did not win. That’s because Hyatt’s deed, dated later, trumped the investor’s earlier quit-claim deed, investigators said.

While living there, the Hyatts turned the home into a holiday destination. For many years, the house rose to national fame, with its whimsical display of lights, stuffed animals, a snow-blowing machine, and on occasion, a reindeer.

A battle over the home

Court records document some of the issues the Hyatts faced as they separated. Mark Hyatt accused Kathy Hyatt of calling FPL to get the electricity shut off at the house three times. At the time, Mark Hyatt was living there with their two children.

Court records in 2019 show Kathy Hyatt was ordered to “provide exclusive use and possession of the marital home” to her ex-husband, but Mark Hyatt was ordered not to sell it, pending all appeals.

In an April 2019 court filing, “the former wife is ordered to execute any and all documents necessary to effectuate the sale” of the Plantation house, according to a decision by Judge Gina Hawkins.

And in August that year, Mark Hyatt asked again for permission to sell the house to pay for retroactive alimony, child support and attorney’s fees that Kathy Hyatt owed him. The following month, Kathy Hyatt was evicted from the home, according to court records.

Mark Hyatt died in February 2020. Court records show Kathy Hyatt in March 2020 asked a judge for permission to move back into the home.

But the judge denied the request.

In October 2020, Mark Hyatt’s sister, Jane Zimmerman, filed court records alleging Kathy Hyatt refused to provide documents needed to sell the house, and “continues to obstruct the sale of the property by damaging same and attempting to move back in.” Zimmerman alleged in the court filing that Hyatt “broke into the property with bolt cutters and now claiming that she owned the property.” She accused Hyatt of “attempting to squat.” The judge ordered Hyatt from coming within 500 feet of the property line.

Court battles and appeals continued and Kathy Hyatt was ordered by a judge to hand over the deed to the house to the estate.

Property records show she did, on April 27, 2022, but then took one more step that very same day.

Broward County Clerk of Courts records show she filed an official document stating the house had been obtained by fraud all along, essentially alleging the deed she had been ordered to hand over wasn’t valid.

Then an investigation began when property appraiser investigators were contacted by Plantation Councilwoman Denise Horland. She was passing along a tip from a resident of “allegations of fraud.” Horland told the Sun Sentinel that a resident had told her in 2018 that he uncovered details of Mikula’s allegations of identity theft and there were questions about the house’s history. But she didn’t feel there was anything to do. Horland said Kathy Hyatt phoned her in October 2022, asking questions about how to remove code enforcement fines, and then she shared that her family had “squatted,” tossed the owner’s belongings outside, “and created a fake title” and “never owned the house and she wanted it back.”

“That’s when I knew I needed to contact Marty (Kiar),” Horland said. “Now that there’s a fraud unit, let them take a look at it.”

At the same time, Kathy Hyatt herself contacted investigators, saying she wanted to report that the 2005 deed conveying title from Perriman to the Hyatts “was fraudulent, resulting in the Hyatts unlawful ownership of the subject property,” according to Shrouder’s memo.

The legal battle for the house continues: On Dec. 12, Kathy Hyatt filed court records to prevent her from having to pay her ex-husband’s estate for money owed for alimony and attorney’s fees. In that filing, she said the ability for her to pay her outstanding debt hinged on the sale of the Plantation house. But, she wrote, she never had ownership because there was fraud, and pointed to the property appraiser’s investigation that showed her and her husband had been squatters.

Property investigations

The issues surrounding the Plantation house “was one of the reasons” why the state created a Mortgage Fraud Task Force in 2007, said Crespo, the retired investigator.

The Attorney General’s Office created the agency-wide Mortgage Fraud Task Force that year to “combat the pervasive mortgage fraud problem,” according to its website.

Property and mortgage fraud schemes were “happening throughout South Florida,” he said. Investigators assigned to the task force also investigated deed fraud. “Local police don’t handle these things,” said Crespo, who is also an accountant.

But that task force fizzled out; the last meeting occurred in November 2010, according to a spokeswoman for the Attorney General’s Office.

These days, the Broward Property Appraiser’s Office has a team of investigators rooting out property misdeeds.

While the Broward County Property Appraiser’s Office has long investigated homestead fraud, Kiar assembled a new team of detectives in 2022 to snuff out deed fraud. In this latest case, Kiar said his team dubbed the Plantation home’s investigation the “Nightmare Before Christmas.”

Lisa J. Huriash can be reached at lhuriash@sunsentinel.com. Follow on X, formerly Twitter, @LisaHuriash