Trial paints late Harlan Douglass, titan of Spokane building and development, in shades of rage and ice

As part of a deposition with a lawyer, Harley Douglass described growing up around a father whose focus mostly centered on building a real estate empire in and around Spokane.

Douglass said Wednesday navigating around his father, Harlan Douglass, who died in 2023 at age 86, was like walking across a frozen lake: You never knew when you were on thin ice.

The family, which is engaged in a legal war over how much each sibling will receive from the $1 billion estate of Harlan and Maxine Douglass, described a home life punctuated by the patriarch’s fits of rage, years of estrangement and little if any explanation for any of it.

Asked whether he inquired from his father why, in about 2006, Harlan began communicating and working with Harley again after a five-year estrangement, Harley replied with an emphatic, “Hell, no. I was glad to be back.

“I didn’t want to peel off a scab that would make him upset again,” Harley said.

While the family now manages, and has since grown, the Douglass property empire of subdivisions, apartment complexes and storage units that all generate millions in revenue every month, their multiple legal disputes now nurture several legal careers.

A good portion of the spectators in the weeks-long trial currently underway over Harlan’s inheritance are attorneys representing competing factions.

Harley filed the current suit seeking to compel Superior Court Judge Jacquelyn High-Edward to enforce Harlan’s 2018 will that would have split his half of the estate (Maxine’s will contained the other half) equally among his three children.

But Lanzce Douglass and Stacey Douglass Boies instead want Judge High-Edward to enforce the will signed on May 2, 2019, giving Lanzce 65%, Stacey 35% and Harley $1,000.

After taking out 38% for estate taxes, Lanzce estimated that his payout from the 10% of Maxine’s estate would be $27 million; Harley’s 50% equated to about $122 million and Stacey’s 40% would bring her about $108 million.

If Harlan’s 2019 will remains in effect, Lanzce would get about $245 million; Stacey would get about $125 million and Harley would get about $620.

Lanzce noted that Harlan and Maxine gifted Harley four properties that he estimated would be worth about $400 million at the end of a 20-year lease agreement.

Those sums help explain what’s at stake as part of a legal battle that appears to come naturally to a family that often knew discord growing up.

As children, Harley said the family would get along for a while around Thanksgiving. But that would quickly change. “We didn’t have nice Christmases because the parents were fighting.”

The anger always remained emotional, never physical, he said.

By February, the family would get along well enough to try a vacation. “Then a discussion about a bill would come up and they would fight again,” Harley said of his parents.

During many disputes, Harlan would storm out of the house and later return. But he would silently stew.

“The four of us would be watching TV,” Harley said, referring to Maxine and his two siblings. “Dad would show up and it would be cold. You have no idea what that’s like. I made sure to never subject my kids to that kind of behavior.”

Lanzce later took the stand and said he agreed with Harley their upbringing was punctuated by Harlan’s outbursts.

Harlan was once overheard saying that he could only love one son at a time.

“From high school on, that was the dynamic that prevailed in our family,” Lanzce said.

Bursting the balloon

Harlan’s love language, if he had such a thing, was construction.

“Growing up, we didn’t have a lot of hobbies,” Lanzce said. “The big thing we did was work.”

One witness described Harlan spiraling into a rage after finding out that his contractors on a multimillion-dollar project had wasted a few board feet of framing lumber.

“It happened to me several times,” Lanzce said.

He relayed the story of developing an apartment complex in 1999 or 2000. He brought his father out to show off the 240-unit project, which was bigger than anything Harlan had at the time.

“I was proud of myself for getting financing from the bank and building it,” Lanzce said.

But the visit took an odd turn.

“I was looking up at the buildings, excited to tell the story of how I did it, and he was looking down, shaking his head,” Lanzce said.

Harlan saw nails in the dirt left behind by the crews who built the walls.

“He said, ‘You must have a lot of money. Look at all these nails on the ground,’ ” Lanzce said. “I told him that the framers paid for their own nails. He replied, ‘Who paid the framers?’

“I was all excited to show him the project. He basically just popped my balloon.”

Lanzce became choked up with emotion while describing that day on the witness stand.

“It wasn’t the positive experience that I had hoped for.”

Family breakup

While the siblings now mostly communicate through attorneys, they once worked as a team in the same office, at 815 E. Rosewood Ave., a nondescript, rectangular building where Harlan founded Douglass Properties Inc. decades ago.

Lanzce said he remembers exactly the situation by which Harlan froze out Harley for about five years.

At the time, Lanzce, Stacey and Harley were working together on the Hunters Ridge subdivision in Mead. Harley had hired his wife’s brother, who was a contractor in the Seattle area, to put in the foundations and utilities at the site.

After Easter brunch, the family was touring in a vehicle looking at projects when Harlan asked the brother-in-law, Rob Bonnett, how much it cost to install a sewer pipe.

“Rob said a lot of variables go into that. Dad just wanted a solid number, like $20 a square foot. Dad knew all that,” Lanzce said about the variables, “but he felt slighted.”

At the time in the early 2000s, Lanzce and Harley had offices on the second floor, above Harlan’s ground-floor office in the Rosewood building.

“Harlan came up to my office and said, ‘I don’t want any of those Bonnetts on any of my jobs,’ ” Harlan also informed Harley.

But Harley carried on as before.

“When Harlan found out … he went down and proceeded to fire Rob (Bonnett) from the job. Harley called me up. He was embarrassed about the whole thing,” Lanzce said.

After Harley used an expletive to describe an action Harlan should take, Harlan booted Harley out of the office, which began a five-year period of nearly zero communication.

Harlan then entered Lanzce’s office. “He said, ‘I just kicked your brother out of the office. It’s only fair that I kick you out, too.’ I never asked him why.

“We had our entire family in the same building,” Lanzce continued. “Now we were scattered.”

After kicking Lanzce out, the sibling started Lanzce Douglass Properties, which put him in competition with his father.

Lanzce said if Harlan learned that his son was developing a piece of property on Desmet Road, for example, Harlan would buy the adjoining property and build a larger apartment complex.

Lanzce wouldn’t show Harlan his local properties “because there was a fear of retribution” and to avoid “triggering his competitive instincts,” he said. “I tried to shield that from his temper as much as possible.”

The relations with Lanzce began to falter in 2007 at a rehearsal dinner for him and his wife where Harlan “made some snide comments about me” and Lanzce’s wife.

Not long after, Lanzce and Harlan were partnering on a project where they purchased some Kaiser Aluminum land that had been sold as part of a bankruptcy auction.

Something went wrong with the financing, and Harlan told Lanzce he needed to come up with $4 million or he would be taking over the project.

“I came up with the $4 million. It was upsetting to him,” Lanzce said. “He was pissed off that I could come up with the money to pay him off.”

The big thaw

After his father largely avoided Lanzce from about 2008 to 2016, things that year started to change.

Jeri Via, who moved in with Harlan at about the same time Maxine died from Alzheimer’s disease, reached out to Lanzce in 2016 and invited him to visit Harlan’s winter home in Palm Springs.

After a dinner in which Harlan almost didn’t speak, Lanzce said his father called him the next morning and invited him to breakfast.

“He was in a good mood,” he said.

The positive experience made Lanzce comfortable enough to visit again with his wife and young daughter, who was about 8 at the time.

“We enjoyed a nice weekend,” Lanzce said as he fought back tears. “He was a totally different Harlan.”

Attorney Jason Burnett walked Lanzce through a series of photographs that document Harlan joining large groups of family members, including Stacey and her husband, for the holidays in 2018, including trips to Lanzce’s cabin on Priest Lake.

When he was handed one of the photos, Lanzce gave an involuntary smile as he looked at an image of his father and daughter, who was about 10 at the time.

It was her birthday. “We were playing a game we call ‘Who could get the money,’ ” Lanzce said. The girl had opened her birthday card and a $100 bill fell out.

The image shows a smiling Harlan, who had grabbed the cash before his 10-year-old granddaughter could reach it.

“He beat the (10-year-old) girl” for the money “and he was pretty happy about it,” Lanzce said. “He was involved with the whole family … living life.”

While the photos clearly show Harlan enjoying a family setting, it’s exactly the same time that he stopped communicating with Harley.

Within months, Harlan, who had been diagnosed with early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, signed a will that doubled Lanzce’s take, kept Stacey’s inheritance about the same but mostly excluded Harley.