Foreclosure Auction

A man making his first visit to a home he bought in a foreclosure auction found the former owner's mummified body sitting on the living room couch, Spanish police said. Coroners estimate that the woman's remains had been in the home since 2001, when she stopped making payments on the residence in the coastal town of Roses in the Catalonia region. The woman, in her mid-50s, was estranged from her children in Madrid, and no one had reported her missing. Officials did not give her name.

A U.S. district judge in Boston Monday refused to block the planned foreclosure auction of Sullivan Stadium, the Foxboro, Mass., home of the financially troubled New England Patriots. The decision by Judge Joseph Tauro on the auction scheduled for today removed another hurdle in the legal effort launched by Connecticut Bank and Trust Co., which holds a $9 million second mortgage on the 61,000-seat stadium. The Patriots reportedly are $82 million in debt.

Two weeks before his Radisson Hotel is scheduled to be sold at a foreclosure auction, developer Carroll Davis has hired a former state savings and loan commissioner to help him negotiate with federal regulators a refinancing of $27.5 million in defaulted construction loans. "I'm just here to assist and consult (in Davis' dealings) with regulators," San Diego financial consultant Lawrence J. Taggart said Tuesday. Taggart stepped down as state savings and loan commissioner in January.

Participants cut a chain rather than a ribbon Saturday to open a museum at the motel where civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was slain. "Let the chains fall with a tremendous, thunderous, crashing to the ground to set our minds and hearts free," said state Judge D'Army Bailey, a leader of a 10-year effort to build the museum.

Rep. Laura Richardson (D-Long Beach) says the foreclosure auction of her Sacramento house was improper and contrary to a written agreement she had with her lender. In a long interview Friday with the Associated Press, she struck back against reports that she had defaulted on her mortgage. Her house was sold at auction earlier this month. Richardson said the sale never should have happened and that she had renegotiated her loan to pay it off.

Update: The 1940 Bel-Air estate owned until recently by actor Nicolas Cage is back on the market at $12.75 million, the Multiple Listing Service shows. Cage lost the trophy home at a foreclosure auction earlier this month on the county courthouse steps in Pomona when it failed to generate any bids and ownership reverted to Citibank. The foreclosing lender was one of six holding a total of $18 million in loans on the English Tudor. It had been marketed as high as $35 million.

The estate of former New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies outfielder Lenny Dykstra has returned to the Multiple Listing Service, this time priced at $14.9 million. Dykstra, who filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the summer, had purchased the 6.5-acre compound in Thousand Oaks from hockey great Wayne Gretzky in 2007 for $18.5 million. The property was in default when Dykstra filed for bankruptcy, which derailed a potential foreclosure auction. The mansion came on the market in September 2008 at $24.9 million and after two price reductions was increased to $25 million a year later.