One Dollar

On 3 September 1996 the Fayette County Court of Common Pleas in Ohio overruled Stanley Meyer's last motion and ruled against him; the final judgment entry was journalised three weeks later. The finding was "gross and egregious fraud". The punitive damages were one dollar. Almost every account written since carries the first half of that sentence and none of the second, and almost every one of them descends from a single newspaper article — Tony Edwards, "End of Road for Car That Ran on Water", The Sunday Times, 1 December 1996 — which is still the only contemporary source the encyclopedias cite for the case. This film reads the other account, the WFC Public Notice to Inform, against the court's own docket in CVH19930292, which the archive has now read end to end and indexed here entry by entry.

About the voice. Where you hear Stan Meyer in this film, you are hearing a synthetic voice built by a machine from thirty seconds of his voice on the Deer Creek conference tape of 1985. It reads three passages, each his own words — two from the Public Notice, which is copyright 1996 by Stanley A. Meyer, and one from the dealership tape. The narrator is a stock voice and nobody in particular. Treat both as a reading, not a recording.

What the docket confirms

Meyer's document is one side of a case, written by the losing party, and it says so on its face. The court's record is not. Laid against each other, the clerk's docket carries every date Meyer gave for the last months of the case, and the money to the cent:

• The complaint, 21 September 1993, served on him by certified mail two days later.
• The jury and the venue. On 27 January 1994 he filed a demand for a change of venue and for trial by jury. He got neither.
• The trial dates, from the stenographers' fee certificates: 1 and 2 February 1996, and again in the week of 14 May.
• His own counsel leaving. Roger L. Hurley — of Hanes, Schipfer & Hurley — and James S. Detling moved for leave to withdraw on 29 July 1996; the entry allowing it is dated 9 August. From 23 July the filings are his own, and the plaintiffs' 20 August memorandum calls them pro se.
• The motion overruled before it was answered. By written order of 9 August the court set a time limit for responding. The plaintiffs' memorandum in opposition arrived 20 August. Entry (motion overruled), Min 115/704–706 is dated 3 September. Defendant request for new trial/dismissal, with Dr Russell E. Fowler's affidavit and exhibits A36 and A37, is dated 4 September. This was the part of Meyer's account that looked impossible to check.
• The judgment, Min 116/166–168, journalised 24 September 1996.
• The garnishment, 4 October 1996, issued to seven banks at once — Huntington National, Fifth Third, Key Bank, Heartland, State Savings, National City and Bank One — each packet holding, in the clerk's words, a "CK. FOR $1.00". Meyer was served the same day the banks were, though the notice gives a debtor five days to ask for a hearing. Six returned it unexecuted. National City executed it twice: $35,337.42 on 18 October and $5,178.30 on 21 October. That is $40,515.72, which is the figure Meyer published two months later, to the cent.
• It was paid. $4,201.66 was refunded, Meyer paid the balance himself on 9 December 1996, and on 6 March 1997 the court filed a Final Entry of Disbursement & Entry of Judgment Satisfaction. Total owed $41,754.29; paid to date $41,754.29; balance $0.00.

What the docket does not carry. It lists the entries; it does not print them. The wording of the judgment, and the dollar attached to it, are on a physical page: Minute Book 116, pages 166 to 168, in Washington Court House. "Gross and egregious fraud" is corroborated independently by the Columbus Dispatch; the dollar is in Meyer's document and nowhere else the archive can reach.

What rests on his word alone. The gunpoint seizure of August 1992, Linda Russell's affidavit, the offshore account, and the IRS and SEC interest. No police report, no charge, no file.

The connection nobody draws

Of the men on the other side of the Fayette County courtroom, four had money in a competing water fuel. Forrest Harper and Richard Willis, the two plaintiffs, were members of the investment group Rick Schneider raised $1.54 million from for A-55 — Rudolf Gunnerman's naphtha-and-water emulsion out of Reno, Nevada, which put a Reno city bus into service in October 1993 and had the engine stripped by Caterpillar. Ron Dockweiler, one of the three expert witnesses, was a member too; Schneider himself was the second expert witness and the man who raised the money. That is not proof of anything, and honest people invest in one thing while believing another is a swindle. It is a fact about the case that goes to interest, and in thirty years it has never been printed.

The powder

At the deposition to test of 18 October 1995, in the office of the plaintiffs' attorney Robert Judkins, the plaintiffs' expert Michael Leverich measured the two cells and — as the Notice records — confirmed that they operated exactly as the WFC documentation said they should. He then added an unknown white powder and took the measurements again, over Meyer's objection. Judkins later conceded in a plaintiff's motion that it was a salt compound; no certificate of analysis was ever produced. The fight that produced that afternoon is all in the docket: the plaintiffs' request to inspect and test on 21 April 1995, Meyer's motion for a protective order on 18 May, their motion to compel on 30 May, Detling's affidavit in opposition on 7 June, Meyer's supplemental affidavit on 23 June, and a stipulation and protective order entered 27 October.

Why that is decisive rather than procedural: the cell is a capacitor with water for a dielectric, and the whole design exists to hold voltage across the water while keeping current out of it (see episode 14). Dissolved salt is the most effective ordinary means of raising water's conductivity. The chart in this film is Exhibit A of Meyer's own test report: sodium concentrations measured for him by R&D Laboratory of Columbus in seven waters — tap water 10 ppm, rain off the Kroger roof in Washington Court House 15, a drilled well in the same town 20, the Ohio River 40, ocean salt water 25,000. One gram of table salt in a litre is 393 ppm of sodium (Na is 39.34 % of NaCl by mass); a level teaspoon, about 6 g, is 2,360 ppm.

What the plaintiffs' own expert said under oath

Item 20 of the Notice records Michael Leverich testifying during the 8–10 May 1996 hearing that "the electronic circuit interfacing suggests that it is not an electrolysis process." That is the plaintiffs' witness. The Sunday Times reported the opposite six months later, and it is the Sunday Times sentence the encyclopedias carry.

What one dollar means

Punitive damages are the sum added on top of the loss purely to punish the defendant. One dollar is the smallest sum an American court can name, and a nominal award like that is what a judge gives where the law entitles a plaintiff to something and there is nothing worth punishing. The money Meyer paid was restitution of the two dealership deposits plus the plaintiffs' attorney fees. Both suits were civil — the clerk's own cause of action is "Other Civil" — no criminal charge was ever brought, no prosecutor was ever involved, and there is therefore no conviction and no fine, whatever the retellings say.

18 June 2014

The docket runs on past the judgment. On 18 June 2014 the court filed a notice of destruction of exhibits and depositions: the depositions of Meyer, Willis and Harper, exhibits 1 through 11 and A6 through A37, and the video tapes lodged with the court in November 1993 — including, so far as the archive can tell, whatever was filmed in Judkins's office on 18 October 1995. The copy posted to Stanley A. Meyer came back on 27 June: not deliverable as addressed, unable to forward. He had been dead sixteen years.

Still missing

Minute Book 116, pages 166 to 168, Fayette County Court of Common Pleas, Washington Court House, Ohio: the final judgment entry itself, in which the wording and the dollar are written down. The docket says it exists. Nobody has read it since 1997. If you can get to that building, the archive would like to hear from you.

Meyer's twin brother's account of the same case — "a contract disagreement, not a technology disagreement" — is checked against the record in The Stephen Meyer Interviews, Checked.