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to extinguish the debt for either Hamseh or Desert Spice.
According to Murphy, he and Hunt modified their sales contracts
for Hamseh and Desert Spice to use the cash-in-hand from the
insurance settlement to pay much of the unpaid interest on those
horses. The debt was finally extinguished--and the notes marked
“paid in full”--only years later, when Murphy agreed to turn over
to Hunt one foal each from Hamseh and Desert Spice. In addition
to his testimony, Murphy produced a written agreement with Hunt
ratifying the continuing existence of his obligation to pay the
outstanding principal for On the Piste.
In judging the credibility of this story, we wondered what
was in it for Hunt--if Murphy is to be believed, by the time he
bought On the Piste in mid-1997, he was still in debt to Hunt on
the other two horses for hundreds of thousands of dollars. If
Murphy was truly delinquent in his payments to Hunt, why would
Hunt continue to “whip and dip” by selling On the Piste to him?
Why is there no rock-solid contemporaneous documentation
regarding the many extensions, modifications, etc. of the note
payments that were to have occurred?
It would also have been easy, one might think, for one party
or the other to have introduced Murphy’s check registers and bank
statements for 1994-97 to see the extent to which the debts on
Hamseh and Desert Spice had been paid. But neither party did,
despite Murphy’s having turned all these records over to the IRS
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