On the heels of an unusual if not unprecedented court victory for a jilted bride, another Hall County woman has filed a suit for breach of contract against her former fiance.
Wendy Louise Webb filed the lawsuit against Bradley Collins on Friday morning in Hall County Superior Court. She claims he asked her to marry him on Christmas Day 2006 but never followed through on his promise.
On July 18, Collins applied for a criminal trespass warrant against Webb, an indication that he didn’t want to marryher anymore, according to the suit.
Webb claims she used "numerous dollars" to remodel her fiance’s Gillsville home while they were living together.
The suit seeks unspecified damages for "mental anguish, humiliation and injury to her health and psyche."
Webb’s attorney, Gainesville lawyer William "Sonny" Sykes, claims that the suit was not influenced by a similar breach of contract action that resulted in a large jury award in Hall County Superior Court on Wednesday.
"We’ve been working on this for some time," Sykes said. "The verdict in that case didn’t have anything to do with the timing of this lawsuit."
Webb’s suit was filed two days after RoseMary Shell was awarded $150,000 by a jury. Shell said she quit her $81,000-a-year job in Pensacola, Fla., to move back to Gainesville after Wayne Gibbs proposed to her in October 2006. Gibbs broke off the engagement in March 2007 and Shell filed suit the following June. A six-man, six-woman jury found in Shell’s favor.
Sykes said he was uncertain whether that courtroom victory would help his client’s case.
"I don’t know that it would," he said. Sykes said he hopes the case can be settled before it gets to a jury.
Collins was served with the suit Friday but does not yet have a lawyer, Sykes said. Efforts to reach Collins for comment were unsuccessful.
Both Sykes and Sartain have maintained that breach of promise to marry suits are not uncommon, but the most recent case has sparked intense media interest, attracting national television news coverage for Shell and her lawyer.