I found $182,000 hidden in a bathroom wall — but it only ended in grief when the owner didn’t give me what I owed

A CONTRACTOR has found nearly $200,000 in Depression-era cash hidden in a bathroom wall, but it has only caused grief.

Bob Kitts reportedly couldn’t agree with the home’s owner, Amanda Reece, on how to split the $182,000 cash he found hidden in the walls of her 83-year-old home near Lake Erie.

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Since Reece testified that she is considering bankruptcy and that a bank recently foreclosed on one of her properties, the money hasn’t done her much good either, NBC News reported.

Kitts did a remodeling project for his high school classmate who hired him.

Tearing down the walls in the home’s bathroom, he discovered two green metal lockers hanging from a wire.

In the lockers were white envelopes with the return address of the “P. Dunne News Agency”.

“I ripped off a corner,” Kitts said during testimony in a lawsuit filed by the estate.

“I saw a 50 and got a little dizzy,” he added.

When he called Reece about the money he found stuck in the wall of their house, they counted the cash and even posed for photos, both smiling like lottery winners.

Debating how to split the treasure ensued, Reece offered Kittz 10 percent, but he wanted 40 percent – from then on when things went bad.

Patrick Dunne is the troubled businessman who hid the money during a time of bank failure and unemployment.

Representatives from Dunne’s estate got involved just a month after news of the case broke on the news channels, suing for the right to the money.

“If these two people sat down and settled their differences and divided the money, the heirs would not have known about it,” said Gid Marcinkevicius, an attorney representing the Dunne estate.

“Because they weren’t able to sit down and split it up properly, they both lost.”

Dunne has 21 descendants, each of whom is to receive only a fraction of the find, as by the time Dunne’s estate came forward there was not much money left to claim.

Reece testified in a statement that she spent about $14,000 on a trip to Hawaii and even sold some of the rare late 1920s bills.

She said around $60,000 was stolen from a shoebox in her closet, but said she never reported the theft to authorities.