$20,000 stolen from MIL
So the drama continues even after MIL has passedz back story is on previous posts. My husband has been looking into things all week and has been able to determine that MILs partner took up to $20,000 from her personal account. She should have had more than $6000 in her checking out. We’ve hit some roadblocks as the credit union is not cooperative (that’s understandable). My husband called some friends at the DAs office and we can get her bank records if we file a notice of small estate with the probate court. I actually suspect he was helping himself to her money for awhile now. We can’t figure out where else her money would have gone. She has had no debt for several years. No medical bills. There were a few utilities but they totaled less than $500 and her brother was paying her rent. After taxes, she was bringing in around $48, 000 a year between her pensions and social security. She got paid the 15th of every month. She was down to $2000 when she got paid in May. Somebody was taking her money and the only person who had access to her accounts was her partner. My husband's siblings are supposed to come over today so he can tell them everything and see how they want to proceed however my SIL wanted to invite MILs partner over too! Not be part of the discussion but for our Father’s Day get together. So he’ll be coming at 6pm supposedly. I am not happy at all. Neither is my husband but he is the one who told her yes when he could have said no. They are supposed to talk about everything before he gets here. I am so anxious and on edge. I am just angry that my husband has been put in this situation. His sister is probably going to want to forgive and forget. But this doesn’t fall on her shoulders. My husband is the executor of the estate and he is the one who discovered the crime. We can handle the missing money, it’s not like it came out of our pockets and nobody wanted or expected money when MIL died. The problem for me is that this situation could cause a rift between all of us and my MIL, the backbone of the family, isn’t here to keep us together & talk some sense into everyone and that’s a hard pill to swallow.
So On June 9th when we went to pick up the deed to MILs House, her partner was talking about life insurance again, he didn’t know this but we already knew there was none. But he was talking about multiple policies they had on each other and how she always wanted him to have half of everything because they did everything 50/50 (the bank records say otherwise). He claimed they had cashed in the life insurance policies and put the money into the mortgage (bank records show otherwise) and he claimed there was other policies out there that her kids needed to claim. Then he got into her retirement and how she always wanted him to have half of that too and that he kept telling her no, leave it for her kids. And that’s a load of BS. I don’t doubt for one minute that he tried to get her to take the full monthly payment instead of the lower payment. At the time she retired, she was not sick and had no reason to think she would die even within 5 years! When you put in for retirement, PERs tells you what your total contribution was and how long it will be until your contribution is used up. Hers would be used up in a few years. Her partner convinced her to work until 2016 (she wanted to retire in 2015) because she would get $100 a month from social security. She did not need the extra $100 month and she ended up owing federal taxes in 2017 and 2018! She worked an extra year to bring home an additional $1200 a year and ended up getting hit with $2400 in taxes. and her social security WAS taxable because her income was over the limit. Anyway, I believe he probably wanted her to take the larger pension payment.
And looking back, I think his comments about how she always wanted him to have half of everything, was just prep work. Trying to convince us she wanted him to have half, because he had taken $20k from her right after she died and he told my husband he took “half” the accounts. He didn’t, there was $12k left in her personal accounts. $6k in each account. He was trying to convince us and have a believable story in the event we found out about the $20k taken the day she died!
So on tuesday my husband picked up the check which covers the remainder of the stolen money. When it rains it pours, that’s for darn sure. When he went out to his car that morning to go to MILs house, he discovered someone had broken in and stolen his work uniform, sunglasses, 2 sweatshirts and his prized golf clubs! Our camera footage caught it but since it happened at midnight-2 guys on bikes, 1 rode past the car and 1 stopped at the car and broke it-their faces weren’t identifiable. I was just sick that night, my husband plays golf once a week, it’s his stress relief, his personal time. The good news is, and maybe this is MIL looking out for him, but he went to the pawn shop yesterday morning & asked them to call him anyone came in to pawn titleist golf clubs and a Scotty Cameron putter. He got the call a couple hours later that someone was there with a Scotty Cameron putter! He raced down there and there was the thief caught red handed! He eventually broke down and admitted the rest of the stuff was at his house & the police recovered it all. He was cited for possession of stolen property since there is no proof he actually committed the burglary since like I said, you can’t make out any faces in our camera footage.
I think MIL came to me in a dream last night too. It was a difficult week, emotionally. The kids & I took her some flowers on Tuesday but didn’t stay at the cemetery long. When I went to bed last night I had an overwhelming feeling of sadness. I ended up having a dream, I don’t know who’s house we were in because I didn’t recognize it or maybe I just don’t remember now but I think we were in a kitchen. My SIL was there and said something not very nice, I forget what she said but I remember agreeing with her but thinking it was terrible to say such a thing since MIL has passed. And then she was there in the kitchen with us and I don’t remember much but at one point she told me to cover over & give her a hug so I walked over and she picked me up off my feet and gave me a big hug! Which is funny because I am about 6” taller then she was, she was around 4’9” think. She weighed more than me until March of this year too. But she was pretty heavy-set in my dream. She had lost a lot of weight in 2017 and the final 3 months of her life she hardly ate so she was skin and bones at the end. But in my dream, she was nice & round. Maybe this is crazy but I think her appearance was her way of telling me she’s OK now & she’s not suffering anymore. She’s happy. I actually woke up feeling at peace and not sad anymore.
i called the medi-cal fraud line and reported him for IHSS fraud a second time. And reported the tax evasion to the IRS—he is once again working under the table as a courier delivering medication!
we may have to seek legal action against him if he doesn’t get the house treated for terminates and the damage they’ve already caused repaired. The trust agreement states that this one of the conditions of living there. He had told us right after MIL died that he was going to do and when my husband went to pick up the $20k cashiers check the 3rd week of June, he told my husband the pest control company was coming out the following day. He apparently scheduled all the work and was supposed to stay at my SILs house while the house was tented but either that was all another Big lie OR he cancelled the service. He hasn’t had the work done and he sold my SIL and my MILs brother who also lives at the house that he isn’t going to do it because he can’t afford it. I don’t know why that would be. He lives rent free. His income between IHSS, social security and a small pension are $2,000 a month. He is also working under the table for the courier service too. He’s been pocketing it all for 8 months now and used my MILs money to pay his expenses from nov-2017 until she died June 1st! My husband called him yesterday and gave him until August 30th to get it taken care of. So we will see what happens with that. If he doesn’t do it, we have to pay a lawyer and try have him removed from the home.
Pepsee, I don’t know why he thought he could get away with this! My husband even asked him if thought he would We wouldn’t find out and that he “reads people for a living. It’s what he does” and that he could see that something was going on back on June 9th. We aren’t using corruption to get him or anything, but we did get to cut in line. Normally a patrol officer would take the report and it would be forwarded to the investigations unit and the person in charge would eventually assign a detective and the process would be pretty slow. My husband received permission to go straight to a detective to file the report & get the ball rolling. So I guess you could say it’s special treatment! I wish things were moving faster but we are lucky we didn’t have to go through the normal process.
Anyway my husband has to contact him this week because on the form he filled out for the PERs death benefit, he incorrectly stated that she had no will and that he was her domestic partner! It will be interesting what is said when that happens because they last spoke a week ago Friday when my husband told him to come up with a solution by 3pm or he filed a police report. I will be sure to update when something happens!
Tomorrow my husband will file a police report. The plan was to file Friday afternoon after we wrote down a timeline of events & conversations with MIL and her partner but it got delayed until Monday because the case is going straight to a detective and the investigations unit was working something big on Friday (armed robbery with shots fired). We will have to try to establish that the $14,000 was taken without her consent, I don’t have much hope for that but it doesn’t matter because the $20,000 theft happened after she died and multiple crimes were committed. Transferring the money is grand theft and could also qualify for internet crimes charges. Withdrawing the money later that day is burglary. There could possibly be elder financial abuse charges as well.
I listed to the recorded conversation from 6/19 when my husband went to talk to MILs partner. MILs partner had said on June 9th that he had taken some money because MIL wanted him to be reimbursed for the Honda. So when my husband asked him why he took the money, he said it was his half of the accounts, that he was supposed to get half of her personal accounts. He claims, and this is not true, the bank statements prove it, that he had money in the accounts too. They stopped sharing their finances in March/april 2016 and from then on, he paid all the bills out of her personal account and he alone used the joint account. Eating out and groceries came out of her account. Almost every month through October 2017 he transferred $500-$1200 to her account, obviously to contribute to their expenses. Some months he didn’t transfer anywhere near what the expenses were, some months it looks like he transferred more. From
November until the day she died, he did not transfer any money to her account yet he still paid most of the bills from her account & used it to buy groceries. Anyway. He was never supposed to get half her accounts. She told my husband very clearly on several occasions in March that her accounts were to be split 3 ways amongst the kids. This is also spelled out in the trust. He had previously told me, several times, that when he sold his truck for $20,000 he put the money into her Honda. We know by looking at the bank records that this is not true. On June 9th when he said he took some money, he said again it that was because she wanted him to be reimbursed for the Honda and she didn’t want him to be worried about his IRS tax bill. He never said when he took it and I didn’t hear him say he took it, he basically said she gave him money for the Honda. So up until June 9th, his story was that the money was for the Honda. On June 9th it was because he got half her accounts.
This guy.....I just want to punch him. Knock him out. He said she told him around the 20th to take the money. I don’t believe it. She was hardly able to talk. She couldn’t remove her face mask long enough otherwise her oxygen levels would drop. A week later is when she was actively dying and hospice was strongly recommending morphine.
My husband asked him “why would you do it at 8:07 in the morning while we were all here crying over her cold dead body, and you go to the back room and transfer the money” and this guy....this piece of work has the audacity to say, as if this makes it any better, that “you guys weren’t here. Nobody was here. I took it an hour after she died”. Then later in the conversation my husband said something about him taking it 3 hours after she died and this guy has the nerve to correct him and say “I took it an hour after she died”. Then....he offers to pay $15,000 back and after my husband says no, he’ll pay back the entire amount, this guy has the nerve to say “ok. I’ll have a cashiers check here tomorrow. And i’m Even going to pay the $5 to have it made out in your name. And then I never want to hear of this again”. My husband tells him “I don’t care if it costs a $100.”. So Are you kidding me? He never wants to hear if this again? Sorry buddy but we can’t just forget what you did. He also said “I Was going to wait until Father’s Day to take it and I didn’t. I took it right after she passed away and I’m going to tell you why. It’s because I’m not the type of personal that’s slow and deliberate. I just took it because I knew I had to pay for her funeral and I did not have the money to pay for her funeral”. No, he was supposed to prepay for her funeral using HER money and he didn’t. This is why he failed to pay off her credit card. Had he paid the mortuary and the cemetery/credit card , her personal checking would have had around $9,000 left when she died. It’s clear to me that he planned to take $20k all a long. He knew he couldn’t drain her checking and savings account by paying for the funeral and taking money for himself. It would have been an immediate red flag. The $6000 in her checking account was a red flag for my husband, I thought something was off about it too but I assumed it was because of her funeral expenses. I did not know my MIL had told everyone it was paid for. And what I want to know is, if he brings in $2500 a month or so he claims ($1800 a month between SS, a tiny pension and the fraudulent IHSS is deposited into the joint account every month but he says he gets 4 pensions and $2500 a month but there’s no way. He worked 2 jobs in his life, one is where the small pension comes from and the other one he cashed out when he lost that job). We know for a fact thanks to bank statements that he didn’t pay any household expenses between November and June and he was withdrawing cash every time he got paid, so what did he do with that money? And no one told him to pay for the funeral. My MIL planned to pay for it herself all along and she was under the impression everything was paid for back in March! She told my SIL and my husband it was paid for. Her partner told SIL it was paid for. He told me the mortuary wasn’t paid for. Anyway basically during the conversation in Tuesday night he tried to fast talk and in my opinion play with my husband head. One of the first things he said was “you don’t like me. You never did. Your FIL told me. You hate me”. What the in heck? My dad and my husband have never spoken about this guy. My husband and my dad hardly speak. We see my dad twice a year. So I don’t know where he gets off saying something like that and why he brought my dad into it. He also said he loves this family more than he loves the money and that money isn’t important to him. Oh really? Then why was money all he could think about as soon as she died? He wasn’t thinking about the family. About her kids who he had to call and give the bad news too. About her grandchildren who loved her dearly. He wasn’t thinking about it. He had a premeditated plan to take $20k and he did it. And now he is going to face the music.
Anyway, all I know is, tomorrow we begin the process of holding him criminally liable.
Your husband and his siblings need to resolve how to handle the fact that MIL's partner has "life estate" (that's the term our lawyer used) of a house owned by your husband' family and they can't sell it as long as MIL's partner lives in the house. And he is going to continue to bother your husband and siblings about things around the house that need to be fixed. So "forgetting the $14 K, will NOT make MIL's partner "go away.
I find it interesting that the trust states that "MIL's partner can’t bring a non-blood relative (into the house) and he can’t rent it out." So that means that he CANNOT have a ROOMMATE or a NEW PARTNER live with him in the house?!? Something to think about in case a new person suddenly shows up at your MIL's house.
Also, the fact the MIL's partner is seeing a lawyer might be related to the fact that your husband forewarned MIL's partner that he is going to be arrested if he doesn't comply with your request. So MIL's partner may already be building his defense against the possibility that he is arrested. Just a thought.
As much as you want to "forget the whole thing", this just might be the one time that the situation cannot be forgotten because too much dishonest activity by MIL's partner has occurred. And until your husband's family resolves the conflict with MIL's partner, he will continue to be a problem as long as he lives in a house owned by your husband's family.
There is nothing in the trust that says he can be evicted. It just says he can’t bring a non-blood relative and he can’t rent it out and that he is responsible for maintaining the condition of the home and paying the taxes and insurance. So again if the majority wants to evict, they have to hire a lawyer so again it all comes down to the money. Do we want to fight him on the principle of it and spend all the money on legal fees and potentially lose it all and lose the case as well as sever family relationships ? Or do we want to accept that he stole the money and just put it behind us and try to move on. I’ll be honest. If I was one of her kids, I would say let’s move on and forget the $14k. Have him charged with the $20k theft even though he paid it back. Because we can prove he took it after she died. We can’t prove she didn’t tell him to take the $14k. I’d say Let’s keep a close on eye on him and document everything & let’s forget the $14k and try to get passed this bump in the road. I would also hold the fraudulent IHSS over his head, i’d Tell him he needs to resign immediately or we turn him in. FWIW, I turned him in for the 2nd time yesterday but I know they aren’t going to investigate him. My husband and his siblings will be the ones to discuss any actions and how far they want to take this and they will decide what to do.
I don’t believe for one minute that he is upset and grieving my MIL. If he is so upset why did he log into her bank account 2 hours after she died and take $20,000 and then withdraw the cash just minutes after the mortuary took her away? Why did her get rid of 90% of her stuff within 2 days of her dying? He also had a water softener installed within days of her death, and made arrangements to have the house tented. (And that is costing $2700 not $270 like I said earlier that was a typo.) She’s been gone 3 weeks now and he already went out and got a job. And he wasn’t too upset to submit another month of false hours to IHSS either! It’s funny, her ex husband came out in May to visit and she allowed him to come over and see her. after he left, he was bothered by the fact that all her partner did was talk about her death and he said it seemed like he was counting down the days until she died. Now I don’t know about that because the longer she lived, the longer he lived the good life. Looking at her bank statements, he started withdrawing all his monthly income around November, October is the last time he transferred money to her and November is when the Dr said she was end stage and wouldn’t make it to next Christmas. Seems to me that’s when he went into panic mode and started planning & hoarding his money.
We think he didn’t pay off the $4000 credit card because he wanted the money. We ran her credit and there is a card with that amount owed. The plot was purchased on 3/3. 10 days later he took $14,000. She paid her tax bill that month too. If he had paid off that card in april, like he was supposed to (using her money of course), it would have drained her personal checking account because of his $14,000 transfer in March. And when she died, and he took the $20k he probably planned to take all along, she would have had just $2,000 in her personal account and he had to have know that would be a red flag. At the end of the day, he was never given or entitled to $34,000 and a 2014 Dodge Charger. She gave him the car and my husband and the lawyer were present when that was decided. It was around 3/14 when the rough draft of the trust was sent over by the lawyer for MIL to review and the day we reviewed it, they had a disagreement about paying for the funeral, about which account the money would come from. I don’t know how she expected or wanted it paid, but he saw a statement for an account she had with my SIL and when she told my husband it was to be split 3 ways, her partner got agitated and said “I thought we said the money for the funeral was going to come from that account” and she got visibly agitated as well and said “no. I never said that. You said that”. He started to argue but quickly shut his mouth. But the bottom line is, the $4000 charge was in early March and in May he told us he paid everything off and cut up the cards and he told my husband the same thing on June 9th. He didn’t just forget about this outstanding bill. He purposely didn’t pay it because he planned all along to steal $20,000. If he paid paid the card off in April when he was supposed to, she would have had $15,300 left. If he paid it in May, she would have had around $18,000 left. But by not paying it, the day she died she had $26,400 and he was able to take $20,000 and he probably assumed that $6400 left in the account was enough that no one would question anything.
So he called my husband earlier this morning and said he gave MIL $14000 in January 2017 and sure enough there is a $14,000 deposit into her account. But that still doesn’t mean he had the right to take the money back if she never told him to. My husband is working today so I don’t know where we are at now. Looking over her account, it looks like she paid all the Bills and credit card bills, all he paid for was gas and small incidentals. He transferred money to her but only through October 2017, and she was paying a bill of his and the money he transferred didn’t always cover that bill. Sometimes it covered a little more than that bill but it’s clear as day, things were not 50/50 like he claims. She was paying for everything.
Also I forgot to mention, MILs partner made a comment to my husband yesterday when he picked up the cashiers check, that he has an appointment with a lawyer! My husband didn’t ask about it so we can only assume what it’s about. My BILs wife and I think he’s going to see about challenging the trust so he can get more money.
I also think that it is a good idea to have an impartial accountant review your MIL's and MIL's partner's finances. There could easily be more going on than what you see.
It took my Dad 2 years after his Mother's death before he uncovered all of the banks that his Mother (my Grandmother) had had accounts at. By the time he was done, he discovered that my two cousins had "sweet talked" Grandma out of thousands of dollars.
My concern is the life tenancy. You all need to have a good attorney look at the document that grants this and see if it's able to be challenged - in other words, an attorney who is not with the firm that drew up the document. There may be a clause in there about if there is *proven financial abuse or criminal action*, the life tenancy is terminated. That would really push me to get a criminal action moving forward so you don't have to deal with this man forever. He will destroy the house.
My best friend growing up loved her daddy very much. However, when she turned 21, she found that not only did daddy spend her whole 10M inheritance but that led to the police finding out he had embezzled from his company as well. He spent time in jail. She was disabled, thus granddad left everything to her to pay for her lifetime of care. Since then, she's been on medicaid and disability, and amazingly, continues to talk to her daddy even though she hates what he did to her. Your sister can work through her issues too.