A HEART AND A KIDNEY

• Share

A Harvard-schooled entrepreneur of impressive means was not the sort of beau Dorothy Zauhar thought herself fated to find. The daughter of impoverished heavy-drinking parents, Zauhar, 59, recalls sleeping nights in a car in a junkyard. She was removed (along with her four brothers and sisters) from her parents' custody when she was five. Zauhar spent the next five years in a Duluth, Minn., orphanage until a loving foster family was found for her. At 20 she married a TV repairman. They were divorced in 1982 after the couple had had three children.

Then, at an age when even the world's most fortunate women find new love elusive, Zauhar met a man who seemed to be life's recompense for all her hardships. In the spring of 1994, Zauhar was introduced to Richard McNutt, a Duluth millionaire and founder of the local Inter City Oil Co. Says Zauhar's old friend Lillian Stocke, who had been the matchmaker: "They were both very vivacious and seemed to have the same types of interests."

Zauhar, who was supplementing her nursing income with a job as a real estate agent at the time, loved her new suitor despite the fact that he had been married three times and had a reputation as a womanizer. "I heard there were problems with his other wives," she reflects, "but he told me I was special. He radiates an air of niceness. When my mom met him, she said he looked like Robert Redford." She adds, "He's a man with a temper who has punched holes in walls and swept the top of an attorney's desk clean with one swipe of his arm. My friends thought it was an unhealthy situation, but I thought I was going to live happily ever after."

Alas, that was not to be. Not only did the couple split, but their parting has also culminated in a bizarre lawsuit filed against McNutt earlier this month by Zauhar and her brother John Dahl. The two are demanding more than $150,000 from the businessman, claiming that he accepted a lifesaving kidney from Dahl in exchange for a promise he did not keep: to love and care for Dorothy Zauhar always.

A few months into the couple's courtship, McNutt, who suffered from a congenital kidney disorder, had begun dialysis treatment and learned that he would eventually need a kidney transplant. Zauhar was eager to donate one of her kidneys, but doctors determined she was not a medical match. By December 1994, after McNutt had presented Zauhar with a 3 1/2-carat, $21,500 engagement ring, Dahl stepped forward as a willing and suitable donor with a gentleman's understanding, Dahl says, that McNutt would buy him a life-insurance policy, give him money to compensate for the pay he'd lose while recovering from surgery and--most important and perhaps most unrealistically of all--promise that he would never disappoint Dahl's sister. "I made it abundantly clear," says Dahl, "that the donation was for Dorothy's happiness."