CLAYTON • It didn't take long for Ryan and Amanda Findlay to decide that their new apartment on Enchanted Parkway in Manchester wasn't so magical.

They say that starting with their move into Park Meadows Apartment Homes on Aug. 1, 2007, there was a constant odor — at best like burnt peanut butter and at worst like a dead animal.

It was a "most disgusting, makes-you-want-to-puke smell," Amanda Findlay testified in court in Clayton Friday in the trial of the couple's lawsuit against South Hampton Apartments, which owns the complex.

The apartment complex is part of Thiemann Real Estate, a firm founded by veteran real estate investor David Thiemann of Ladue that owns apartment complexes in Missouri, Illinois and Indiana.

The Findlays claim it took a neighbor to tell them what the apartment company allegedly covered up: that after the prior tenant of Unit 101 died of natural causes, it took days to discover him and several weeks to clean up the mess.

This week's graphically disgusting testimony was accented by Exhibit 17, a sealed jar of 4-day-old beef that the plaintiffs suggested Judge Thomas Prebil sniff to appreciate their frustration. Prebil declined but ruled that Amanda Findlay could describe her own whiff.

People often die quietly in their homes. Missouri has no state regulation governing cleaning and, unlike some states, does not require that the next homeowner or tenant be told.

The Findlays' suit goes beyond disclosure, however. They claim fraud, alleging that managers told lies about how the unit became available, and misrepresented the source of the smell.

The company is fighting the suit, saying it did nothing wrong. The bench trial on the claim for $25,000 in actual damages and up to $500,000 in punitive damages resumes Monday.

The couple said they logged nearly 60 complaint calls to the leasing office over 7½ months, until the neighbor revealed what had happened. They moved out that day.

"Our view is it's a willful tort," said their attorney, Steven Spoeneman. He said the apartment managers "certainly had knowledge this would be objectionable to these folks, and they always made up excuses — that the guy was a smoker, or it was a bad food smell."

Jon Sanner, the lawyer representing the owner, showed through questions in court how the maintenance and leasing staff tried to resolve the smell, cleaning air ducts and spraying after a brief infestation of bugs.

Sanner suggested that none of the staff the Findlays dealt with directly knew that the prior tenant had died. And he implied that Amanda Findlay was exaggerating the smell.

The attorney noted that the Findlays could not say for certain what cleanup measures were taken, or when. He suggested the remediation occurred much earlier than they suggested.

Jennifer Spangler, who had lived in the apartments, testified Friday that a woman from the leasing office asked her not to tell the Findlays about the death. She told the judge she kept the secret until moving out, to avoid trouble with management.

Spangler said that for two weeks after the death, a worsening odor floated into her own unit. The mother of two young children, she said she resorted to setting out bowls of bleach and using scented candles and air fresheners.

In the second week, she said, the apartment staff let her into Unit 101 to open the windows.

Leasing agents aren't legally bound to disclose such circumstances, but if asked, cannot lie, Mike Traviglini, a past president of the St. Louis Association of Realtors, told a reporter in an interview this week. Traviglini, the South County branch manager for Coldwell Banker Gundaker, said his office always errs on the side of transparency.

"We'd rather disclose it because we don't want someone to find out later on from a neighbor," he explained. "They bring over a cake and say, 'Welcome to the neighborhood! Do you know what happened in your house?' At that point, someone might want to make a bigger issue out of it."