Elder Abuse Is an Old Story

Abuse of the elderly is nothing new, but law enforcement’s fight to protect our aging population—and punish the abusers—has new champions. In San Diego, Deputy District Attorney Paul Greenwood is leading the charge.

FOR VICTORIA GILBERT, the seventh question on the caretaker agency’s background form was easy: Have you ever been convicted of a felony? Fresh from three years in a Nevada slammer for felony embezzlement, Gilbert said “No.”

The San Diego caretaker agency hired her on the spot. She went to National City and took care of an 86-year-old man who had suffered two strokes. Within seven days, she had persuaded him she needed to move in with him to provide 24-hour care. Within another week, her boyfriend, whom she had described as her husband (he wasn’t) and as a deputy U.S. marshal (he wasn’t), moved in also.

The pair not only took the elderly man for a financial ride, using a credit card they stole from him, they neglected his health. They literally ate caviar and drank expensive wines while he was fed hamburger.

Eventually, his bank uncovered the credit card scam and alerted relatives, who were shocked. Victoria Gilbert went to trial, was convicted and sentenced to five years. She’s out now. And prosecutor Paul Greenwood, who recently saw her, wonders if she’s caring for the elderly again. It’s one of the cases that haunts Greenwood, the deputy district attorney in charge of San Diego’s elder abuse unit, who’s nationally recognized as an expert in the field.

Greenwood, a transplanted Briton, tells many such tales. Here’s a scam typical of the sort he says keeps cropping up:

An elderly Alpine widow hears a knock on her door. The fellow at the door says, “We put the roof on your house several years ago, and we think it may be leaking. I need to go make some repairs.”

She says no, but he goes up on the roof anyway. When he comes down, he says, “I know you told me to go away, but I can’t afford the risk of you suing me if there is a leak. I’ve done the work, so it’s only going to cost you $100. Get your checkbook and write out $100.”

She doesn’t want to, but she feels intimidated, so she gets her checkbook. The interloper can tell she has poor eyesight, and says, “I’ll write in the $100 for you. You just sign it.”

Reluctantly, she agrees. And he writes the words “one hundred dollars” far to the right, leaving an inch gap on the left side. She signs her name. Later, he writes the word “Ninety” in front of the “one hundred dollars,” then cashes the check for $9,100 at her bank and disappears. He’s still out there somewhere.

“Cases like that infuriate me,” says Greenwood. “I just want to get my hands on these guys.”

His anger at crooks who fleece the elderly has roots in his upbringing in England by parents he reveres as superb role models. “My dad was a bomber pilot in World War II,” says Greenwood. “He was shot down over the Adriatic on his sixth mission, but rescued. After 48 or 72 hours to dry out, he was back in the air. He completed 68 more missions.

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For ten tips on avoiding financial elder abuse, click here

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“My mother taught high school English for 38 years. My mother—think of Margaret Thatcher and take two steps to the right. Margaret Thatcher was known as the Iron Lady. My mother was the Steel Lady. She wrote to [former Prime Minister] Tony Blair every other week, trying to set the government right.”

Greenwood’s love affair with San Diego started in 1973. Just out of law school at Leeds in Yorkshire, the 21-year-old was touring America on a three-week airline coupon that let him fly anywhere. “I’d go up to the ticket counter and ask, ‘Could you tell me what flight is leaving in half an hour that is serving hot food?’ The clerk would ask, ‘Where are you going?’ And I’d say, ‘Where the food is.’

“I had no money in my pocket; just this coupon. So I flew around America, randomly, based on where the food was. I found myself flying into San Diego on a Friday night, thinking what a beautiful city it was. And I knew a chap who invited me to stay for the weekend.

“On a Sunday morning, we went to a Baptist church in University City, and the only empty seat was next to a gorgeous young lady.” Pause. “So I married her.” Pause. “Five years later.”

After a long-distance courtship, they were married in San Diego, but went back to England where Greenwood was a barrister, then a solicitor. He sometimes spent four days a week as a criminal defense lawyer, then the fifth day prosecuting other suspects and sending them off to jail.

The Greenwoods returned to San Diego in 1991, and after two years with a law firm, he joined the D.A.’s office. “I was passionate at the interview,” he says, waving his arms wildly. “I banged on the table. I said, ‘I’m drying up here as a lawyer. I’ve got to get back into criminal law.’ ”

Three years later, he was told he was to head a new elder abuse unit. No one was sure what elder abuse was. “Many of my colleagues made fun of me, saying I’d spend all my time drinking hot tea with elderly women in nursing homes.

“I said to myself, ‘I’ll do it for two years.’ But here I am 11 years later, not wanting to move.

“Elder abuse is definitely one of the fastest-growing crimes in the country, if not the fastest. There’s going to be an explosion of these cases, and that’s why I spend some of my time going to other jurisdictions, warning that unless they get their act together—unless they train investigators, police officers and prosecutors to handle these cases—they’re not going to be able to deal with the influx in the next three to five years.”

In 1996 in the county, 17 such felony cases were prosecuted. Between 2004 and 2006, the number was 135. National figures are harder to come by, partly because each state has its own rules on reporting and partly because the problem remains largely hidden. One expert estimates that only one in 20 crimes against elders—those 65 or older—is reported. Another authority says one in five elderly Americans will suffer financial exploitation serious enough to lose at least a third of their assets.

California, with the most elders in the nation at nearly 4 million, is prime territory for scam artists. And that population figure is predicted to nearly double by 2030.

Over the next decade, the fastest-growing job in the healthcare field will be home health aides, Greenwood says, and there is no law requiring criminal background checks on caretakers. “There’s a chance the caretaker you’ll hire is a convicted felon,” he says. The good news is that he and others are pushing for a state law requiring such background checks.

At an international Family Justice Center Conference here in April, Greenwood told some 300 attendees the growth of the country’s aging population could be overwhelming. He listed 10 myths about prosecuting elder abuse cases. One is that the elderly don’t make good witnesses (they often are better than younger people). He also pointed out that even though restitution is made, a theft can still be handled as a crime; that a home-repair scam is a criminal case, not a civil case; and that more deaths of the elderly need to be investigated. San Diego County, for example, has an effective elder-death review team. Many cities do not.

An animated speaker who loves talking to groups, Greenwood says 65 percent of crimes against elders here can be classified as financial abuse. And he believes 60 percent of those could be eliminated with early intervention by banks, clergy and others.

His office and the D.A.’s pioneering Family Justice Center are using color posters and training law officers and seniors to recognize the red flags of elder abuse. Under a one-stop-shop concept, victims can be taken to the Family Justice Center in the Hall of Justice on Broadway in downtown San Diego, where they can tell their stories.

In July, Greenwood testified before the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging, where he was called a pioneer in the elder-abuse field.

SEVEN OF EIGHT first-degree elder-abuse murder trials Greenwood prosecuted have ended in convictions. In a ninth case, the most recent, he asked only for a second-degree murder conviction, and got it.

It was a case with a twist. The victim was a 98-year-old Santee man who, Greenwood told the El Cajon jury, was stabbed, punched and kicked by his 47-year-old caretaker, who then tied him up with a vacuum-cleaner cord and tried to set him and his mobile home on fire to hide the crime. She also had forged two of his checks for a total of more than $11,000.

The victim, Jack Parks, died a month later in a Chula Vista nursing home, but what complicated the case was that he had fallen out of his wheelchair at the nursing home. The defense contended that the fall caused Parks’ death. The jury disagreed—and also convicted the caregiver of all seven other charges in the case. She was sentenced to 17 years in prison.

Greenwood’s knowledge of both U.S. and British court systems helped him land two notable gigs on England’s BBC. One was the Woodward case, involving the British nanny in Massachusetts convicted in a baby-shaking death. The other was the O.J. Simpson trial.

“What was funny about the O.J. Simpson case,” Greenwood says, “was that, to English people, O.J. is the well-known actor who appeared in The Naked Gun. He’s not known as a sports figure, because not many people follow American football.”

In his talks to groups, Greenwood often tells of Ruth Wine, a widow in her mid-90s with severe dementia, living in Encinitas in a skilled nursing home. A limousine driver, Donald Wade, managed to take Wine out alone and get her to sign a certificate-of-deposit surrender form for $94,000. He took her to her bank and was able to persuade the bank personnel that she wanted to cash in this CD, even though there was a $1,000 penalty for early withdrawal. Wade got the sum in a cashier’s check, made out to a good friend (purportedly Wine’s lawyer). The two culprits spent the whole $93,000 over the next four weeks.

Wade eventually got five years, and Greenwood got to do what he loves best: cross-examine the two culprits, who both testified.

“But what frustrated me about the case was that the bank didn’t ask Ruth whether this was what she wanted to do. They simply allowed this guy to take the money.” Fortunately, a new law requires bank employees to watch for signs of elder fraud and report it to authorities.

Greenwood also tells the story of an abusive son. “I think of him living at home, lazy, unemployed, addicted to drugs, with a smattering of mental illness. He spends his days either watching his television, which his mother paid for, or cranking up his hi-fi in his bedroom, to the point where it annoys the neighbors. The neighbors don’t confront him because they’re afraid of him, so they confront the mother. The mother is now totally embarrassed.

“So she walks into his bedroom and touches his hi-fi and turns it down. It’s the worst thing she could have done. Because he gets very angry with her, and later that evening, when she’s asleep, he walks into her room with his welder’s torch lit and sticks the torch up to her scalp, so her hair is on fire.

“Cases like that are so vivid they never leave you.”

The mother survived. The son went to prison for several years.

“In many of these cases, the mother is afraid to testify against her son. She tries emotion on me: ‘Mr. Greenwood, don’t put my son in jail. Don’t take him away. He’s my only friend. He’s my blood, after all, and if you take him away from me, then I’ve got nothing else to live for.’

“Of course, her son has been urging her on with a phone call from jail.”

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