Bob,

Since you raised the subject of "Protective Custody - or Abduction?", I thought I'd give you more of my viewpoint. As always, the caveat is that there's three sides to every story -- the two different tellers and then the actual truth!

The odd thing is that I went through this all, and saw things first hand, and I still cannot tell you really what happened as it makes no sense to me at all. My wife, Kathy, just writes it off to Liz's Alzheimer's.

I appreciate that's what's left of her is just a house and some money, and so that's what we have to talk about these days, but at the time it didn't occur to me that it was a money issue, although now, in hindsight, maybe I was naive about that. So let me try to recount events somewhat chronologically, told from my viewpoint (remember the caveat about 3 sides ... and with the passage of time, I may get things a bit out of order), and you can make of it what you will ...

The best place to start is with Liz's moving to Minnesota. As you remember, she had sold her place in Hoboken and decided to move in with her college friend Lou Trader in Minnesota. I visited her after she had moved in, helped her get her computer set up, and it seemed like she was pretty happy there. I was a bit sad that she had moved out of New Jersey, since it meant she wouldn't see Maia that often, but I could understand -- Hoboken is like living in New York City, which is a place for either the fresh from college, ready for the excitement youth or the very, very rich who can afford the high costs of enough luxury to cushion the hardships of living in such a densely urban place. At that point in time, none of us knew Liz had Alzheimer's. She did complain about memory and how she wasn't as sharp as she used to be, but I just figured it was age, and living with Lou seemed a lot better than owning and managing a rental building in New Jersey, that's for sure. I expected to have many years of visiting Minneapolis ahead of me.

After a while, though, my mother started to tell us that Lou wanted her out, that things weren't working out. Liz became hasty, almost panicked in her desire to move. We told her we'd love to have her in Florida, which was true, but she wanted to move so quickly that we were worried. We called up Lou to ask her what was going on. Lou didn't really know either -- she hadn't asked Liz to leave, but knew Liz was unhappy. We just figured there was some miscommunication, and encouraged Liz to stay put. She had recently just uprooted herself, and moving is a big thing when you get to be that age. Still, Liz was determined to move, so ...

In hindsight, there was never any problem with Lou; Lou was always a wonderful and gracious person. Why my mother thought she had to move immediately, why things were so horrible, I'll never know. But that's just one of many things I'll never know.

I would encourage you call up Lou, if you know her at all, and ask her about that time. What happened to Lou was like a dress rehearsal of what happened me.

We hooked her up with our Realtor down here. Very nice guy, very honest, retired school teacher. We figured she'd find a low-maintenance condo nearby -- something small and easy for her to maintain. Instead, she bought a house down the street -- an old house with uneven floors and lots of problems. I guess she wanted to be very close to us, but the house wasn't appropriate for her. Too big and too needy. But she didn't ask our advice, and so she bought a fixer-upper.

Shortly after she moved down here, we had to go back to New Jersey for Maia's grade school graduation ... here we all are.

Liz, Maia, Charles in June 2005

Because we also had to go to a graduation in Ohio right before Maia's, we drove up while my mother flew up just for Maia's. Inbetween Ohio and New Jersey, our car's transmission died in upstate New York. That was a joy. We lost a day dealing with repairs and, because it would take a while before they had a transmission (the car was under warranty, which meant it was free, but also meant we had to wait for the dealer to find one), we rented a car, drove the rest of the way, and then flew home afterward. In a week or so, they had the car fixed, so we flew back up to drive down. Unfortunately, I didn't have any more time off from work, and so we had to fly up on a Friday, grab the car on Saturday morning, and drive back. And it turns out that Saturday was my mother's birthday. We told her in advance what was going on and told her we'd take her out for a late birthday dinner when we got back.

When we called her on Saturday, from the road, to wish her happy birthday, she seemed quite angry with us. I didn't understand it at the time, but in hindsight the fact that Kerry has arrived for a visit is a real clue. I believe he had gotten her all worked up and convinced her we were ignoring her. The conversation with her was basically the following: Her: "You forgot my birthday" Me: "No, that's why we're calling you now." Her: "But you're not here", Me: "I explained why I had to go get the car this weekend, and we agreed we'd do dinner during the week". It was a very strange call.

We could tell something wasn't going well for her mentally. And not just the strange call: she was forgetful and not able to make decisions well -- I should say, she'd make a decision and then be upset by that decision later on. She seemed very unhappy with things, but I think she was very unhappy with her condition. I started going with her to her doctor's appointments when she moved down, because she was unable to articulate what the doctors said about her and what they were doing for her. And that's when I discovered she had Alzheimer's. Listening to her doctor, he said it was early stage, she should be able to live on her own for many years, and proscribed her Arizept (or however it's spelled) to try to slow the progression down.

She and I talked a bit about what she wanted to do, but she seemed to be in a kind of denial about it. It seemed that she wanted to live on her own for as long as possible, which made sense to me. My grandmother (on my father's side) lived well into her 80s on her own (with visiting attendants to take care of cleaning, etc.). My wife's grandmother lived in her own house past 100.

Liz also had made a pretty big circle of friends around here as well -- she was going out to lunch with friends regularly, attended a local church, and had a lot of people here who cared about her. I still get a lot of grief from people for "letting" her go, especially from her friend, Sally Hardy. Feel free to give her a call at (386) 738-3589 if you wish to hear her perspective on events.

Life went on, and we saw Liz all the time. In addition to her friends, my sister Kathleen came out for a visit near Christmas of 2005:

Kathleen visits

But after a while, Liz's memory became a problem. She wouldn't remember the last time we'd seen her, and complain that we weren't spending enough time with her ... even if we'd just seen her a few days beforehand. Other times we'd make arrangements to see her and then she'd forget -- either not be ready to go out or just be off doing something else.

She'd also become a bit socially awkward. Kathy's parents live here nearby us, and we would often plan group outings for the five of us -- we thought Liz would enjoy the company. But she started to become withdrawn in those settings and eventually told us she didn't want to go out with Kathy's folks. Which was rough, because it meant we had to divide our time between them. If we wanted to go to the beach with Liz, we couldn't take Kathy's folks; and if we wanted to go to an art festival with Kathy's folks, Liz wouldn't come. Very awkward at times!

But where things really started to become problematic was money. Liz was starting to have trouble managing her checkbook.

We know several accountants in town who are really all-around, trustworthy people who deal with the elderly, and we encouraged her to meet with them and find one who could manage her affairs. I can pay the water bill, but I'm not the guy for doing end-of-life financial planning and I didn't want to be responsible for her finances. At one point Liz added me to her checking account, but, as Kerry can testify, I never did anything with that access. And before too long, I was back off the account again... The funny thing is that she had somebody from LA who had been helping her with her finances for years (from the time she lived in LA), and that person didn't seem like she had done anything wrong. I also suggested that although it might be awkward to have someone in LA pay bills for someone in Florida, since she trusted Delia (I think that's the right name) she should stick with her.

But trust was not really something Liz was capable of, it seemed. She told me that Delia wasn't really getting a good return on her investments, and that Liz felt she could do much better somewhere else.

I finally spoke to Delia about it, and, well, Delia was actually doing the right thing.

If you're old, and have Alzheimer's, and may need to spend a lot of money on things that will give you an extra margin of comfort and independence -- things to keep you out of a nursing home before it's time. And Delia told Liz that you don't want to invest in something risky -- you have no real ability to recover from investment losses or no ability to get your money out of it when you need it and safety was number one.

When I went over Delia's investments, they were all the sorts of things that are appropriate. And so I told Liz, to her unhappiness. She seemed disappointed I wasn't going to make big money for her.

Again, in hindsight, I can well imagine that Kerry was promising her riches if she invested with him.

In August of 2006 there was a fire in the building my wife's antique store was in, and forced the business to close.

The term "fire-sale" means a lot more to me now that we had to dispose of sooty, foul smelling antiques at pennies on the dollar. It was a pretty big hit. Liz gave us around $40K to help us re-open in a new location. That is not a trivial amount of money, for sure, and it was greatly appreciated; it is very expensive to open and equip a new store from scratch. So far, that's all the money we've seen from her apart from small amounts as Christmas gifts etc. I'm not sure what stories Kerry has told, but that's it. We didn't ask her for anything, she volunteered it, and we accepted. Liz was strangely generous that way.

If you're looking for where rest of the money went, that I can't tell you. I know that she had a variety of "contractors" work on her house -- these were folks who were unlicensed and took advantage of her. Things were done poorly, from the hot water heater being hooked up backwards to shoddy work on the house. I'd ask her to let me help with the projects, but they just seemed to get started on their own. She'd say the guy across the street was helping her by finding people to work on projects for her. I'm sure he had quite a scam going, but my mother insisted he was doing her great favors. This is the guy she gave her car to when she moved. It was kind of like having a toddler with a checkbook.

At one point, she thought she should move into a retirement community, which we were starting to think was a good idea too, given the problems she was having. I took her around to many of the ones nearby here, but she didn't like them and decided the whole thing was a bad idea. I tried to convince her to look at a few more (there's a lot of them around Florida of all sorts, and we didn't have a large enough sample size), but to no avail.

Somewhere around all this she told us that Kerry was going to invest her money for her because he could make so much better returns for her. She told me Kerry was really good at buying fixer-upper houses, fixing them up, and then selling them for a lot of money. I told her that it was a bad idea; real estate is a very dangerous thing to invest in.

I wish I could tell you I was a genius and saw the market collapse that we're in now, but that's not true. Real estate is just always dangerous. Michelle and I owned an apartment in New York when the stock market died in 1987; it took almost 15 years before the prices came back to where they were when we bought it. That was probably a bad example, but it's really easy to get stuck for a few years during a recession where your investment is tied up. And when you're old, and have Alzheimer's, you really don't want your money tied up like that against your will...

Still, she was determined -- somehow she got a bug that she was getting ripped off by low returns, when really it was just that interest rates were very low for a long time.

I convinced her to go to her lawyer to get a contract drawn up between her and Kerry. I still remember that meeting: the lawyer turned to me and said, in front of Liz, "And you're going to let her make this kind of risky investment?". I had to say I had no choice and the best I could talk her into doing was getting a contract. As it turns out, I was wrong. I could not even get her to get a contract. Kerry talked her out of it.

Also around then -- again, the precise sequence of events is hard for me to remember -- my mother talked about moving in with Kerry. She seemed convinced we didn't care for her, even though we saw her all the time. It's just that she didn't remember seeing us, and to her mind it was like we never saw her. We convinced her that we did love her, that moving didn't make sense, and that her life here in Florida was not so bad: she had lots of friends, belonged to a church, saw us all the time. By Christmas of 2006, things were going downhill. If you look at this picture from Christmas of that year.

Christmas 2006
... you an see she's still hanging out with us (that's Kathy's parents in the picture too), but she's not the happiest we'd seen her.

Around that time it was also clear that she was going to need to move into an assisted living facility very soon. She wasn't just forgetting about last week, she'd leave stuff out on her counter to spoil. We'd see her driving in the neighborhood and she'd just blow through stop signs like they were invisible.

Kathy and I would have pretty heated debates about what to do, but Liz didn't really welcome us telling her it was time to think about moving out of the house. At one point, I went to see our lawyer to see what could be done, and he told us that in Florida to have someone declared mentally incompetent -- unless they've done something really harmful to themselves (like, say, burning their own house down by mistake) is very hard; it would cost a small fortune and we'd probably lose. So the only thing to do was to convince her of the right thing to do.

Somewhere along in there, Kerry came for a visit (or maybe many visits -- he'd come by and visit her without telling us), and they invited us out to lunch. At that lunch, Kerry and Liz told us that Liz was going to move to Oregon, that Liz was going to live with Kerry and his family, and, even better, Liz was going to be happily busy babysitting Kerry's kids. It would be just one big happy, wonderful family.

And that's when the glass of water got thrown that you heard about (see, somethings he said are true :-) ). Because we knew, as Kerry certainly did, that Liz was not really capable of taking care of herself, let alone any kids. It was a lie, a lie to convince Liz to move. Liz needed to be in a good home, for sure not the one she was in, but one that could care for her 24/7.

At first, I thought that Kerry just didn't understand how the Alzheimer's was working on Liz's brain. The same way we didn't understand things when Liz had a strange need to move out of Lou's house. I spent lots of time trying to make Kerry understand, but he never did. Or he did, and he really didn't have her best interests at heart. I tend to think the latter -- but that's that three sides of the story problem for you again. Her friends in town certainly thought she was making a bad decision and tried to talk her out of going. I got calls and in one case summoned to one of their homes. I explained the same thing over and over again: I had tried to convince her not to leave, but unless she did something really harmful to herself there was no legal way for me to stop her.

Liz became increasingly withdrawn. Kathy's daughter, Sarah, got married in June of 2007, and we tried to talk Liz into going with us. Liz had known Sarah since 1999, and Maia was going too so it would have been a neat family event. Liz stalled on the subject while we tried to convince her to go, and finally just told us, basically, that she really didn't know Sarah, and that Sarah was nothing to her. The most we could convince her to do was sent a gift, but she still snubbed Sarah big time. We knew it was the Alzheimer's, but it still hurt.

It's very hard when you see somebody who you can still talk to and have intelligent conversations with nevertheless act so strange. There's no "power-gauge" that tells you what percent of their mind is left. Sometimes it seems like they're all there, and some times they just seem really odd.

In any case, we see-sawed back and forth with her between the go/no-go thing for quite some time. Imagine being in my shoes, having a conversation where you are challenged on whether you love someone when they don't remember last week. At times, she started even calling me Patrick, my father's name. I don't know if she was confused about my name or who I was... We'd show her pictures, remind her of things we did, and gradually win her confidence back. And then a week or two later, it was back to "you never see me and don't care for me." There was no winning that argument.

I gradually realized that every time I would make an argument, Kerry would make the counter argument. Every time I would convince her that staying here with her friends and family, Kerry would convince her a better life living with him, Gloria, and the kids awaited her in Oregon. Eventually she decided that she'd rather live with Kerry, in his house, than in her own home or in an assisted living facility here in Florida. I knew we couldn't have her live with us, not for long, and I knew Kerry was insincere about her living with him for long too, but she believed him more than me. That still hurts.

Then one day in November, Liz was supposed to show up for dinner with us and Maia and she didn't. We went to her house, it was dark. She has left town without saying goodbye.

We were glad to see Liz last summer (Kerry, not so much!), but didn't realize it would be the last time.

The reason Kathy and I have such animosity towards Kerry is not only did he squander Liz's money and lure her away under false pretenses, but he had the smug arrogance to tell me it was my fault as I wasn't spending enough time on her.

I knew that one day that kind of ego would catch up with him. But I didn't really any of you to catch on to him, but I guess a brother can only BS another brother so much.

I have some copies of previous wills Liz made which I'll try to scan and send to you this weekend. Even if they aren't legally valid, it's interesting to see how her thoughts changed over time. I would encourage you to call Lou and Sally if you want to get a fuller perspective. I think Sally may have a lot to say about Kerry...

So that's it. I apologize for not writing sooner, but I have been working 70-hour weeks lately. Given the economy, I can't complain, but it's very hard to do much when I'm on the road so much.

Best,

Charles McGuinness