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During the couple’s 2011 dissolution, a court awarded Bunney the full $174,000 the marital community had invested in improvements to the ranch, based on the expectation that Evans would receive the property from his father. On November 2, 2026, the Washington Court of Appeals, Division One, refused. It upheld two divorce judgments totalling $166,698.50 against Evans, along with a 2021 order extending them, concluding that his challenge came too late and that the loss of the inheritance was not an extraordinary circumstance justifying relief, as per Justia U.S. Read more details about it here: The dissolution court entered its decree on September 15, 2011. The decree included two monetary judgments against Evans, one for $162,190.50 and another for $4,508, bringing the principal total to $166,698.50. The decree treated the ranch as Evans’s property only if he inherited it from his father, subject to Bunney’s $174,000 lien. On May 31, 2012, the TEDRA court found that Evans had financially abused his father. The Washington Court of Appeals later affirmed that decision in 2015. Two of his children, Cory and Jesse Evans, later transferred their combined 50 percent interest in the ranch to Hidden River Ranch LLC, a company Evans solely owned, in exchange for his agreement to leave each child 50 percent of any ranch interest he held. After losing the TEDRA appeal, Evans moved in May 2017 to vacate the two 2011 divorce judgments and redistribute the couple’s property.
Because the anticipated inheritance never arrived, fourteen years after the divorce judgments were entered, Evans asked a court to undo them. Because it found Evans would retain more than $800,000 in ranch property, it awarded Bunney the entire $174,000 community investment. As a result, Evans received nothing from his father’s estate, and the ranch passed to Evans’s four adult children.
It also said the court retained jurisdiction to reconsider the financial distribution if Evans did not succeed under his father’s will but received property through intestate succession or another route. Calvin Evans Jr. expected to inherit his father’s Washington ranch, a property that had also become central to his divorce from Deborah Evans, now Deborah Bunney. But a separate probate dispute later found that Evans had financially abused his father, leaving him with nothing from the estate and sending the ranch to Evans’s four adult children. Law. Evans’s three siblings filed a petition under Washington’s Trust and Estate Disputed Resolution Act, known as TEDRA While the divorce was still pending. They sought to invalidate the will on grounds including lack of testamentary capacity and undue influence, and asked the court to declare Evans an abuser under the applicable statute, which would prevent him from inheriting his father’s property. The property did not disappear from Evans’s financial life entirely. That arrangement meant that, although Evans did not inherit the land directly, his company acquired half of it through his children. The dissolution court denied the motion without prejudice, saying it needed more information about the outcome of Bunney’s separate unjust-enrichment lawsuit against the estate and those who ultimately inherited the ranch.
