In the end he still had his dignity, his family and friends. The promises of the two women, who left with his money, melted like snowflakes against the windowpanes of his house. They said they would always love and cherish him and take care of him now that he was ill. Their love ran out the same time as the money did.
It wasn’t the money missing from his bank account that he regretted the most. It was the picture of his mother, the only one he had, his wedding band and his wife’s ring.
When the cost was finally tallied up, not only the 50-year-old wedding bands could be counted among the loot they carried off with them. All of his bedridden wife’s jewelry, a luxury model car and a fur coat was what it cost him.
The first thing they did was to dismiss the nurse who was there looking after him.
Thank God his doctor immediately got him off the diet one of the women had placed him on during one of his visits to hospital for a blood transfusion. With his blood platelets down, a diet was deadly.
It was at the nursing home, where the 76-year-old has visited his wife for the last year, that he first met the mother-and-daughter tag team.
Everyone knows Harry at the home. Charming, intelligent, full of life, and yes, loquacious too, no one would have guessed the terminal illness from which he suffers.
Dapper and slim, Harry looks much younger than his 76 years. An accomplished dancer, he was ripe for the pickings, standing out from the other elderly folk who frequent the busy nursing home. Harry was soon ‘dating’ one of the two predators.
Over a period of only a few months, tens of thousands of dollars were taken from his several bank accounts.
The accountant who had looked after his books and investments for years was intuitive and stopped the leak of money from going any further. The woman, who had described herself as his loving girlfriend, ‘almost like a wife’made her first mistake. It turns out that she did all the talking when she took Harry to visit the accountant. The money the girlfriend was trying to have transferred over to the bank account to which she already had access never made it there because according to the accountant, Harry had never himself requested it.
When mother and daughter, who stayed at the house for several weeks, began wearing his wife’s jewelry, Harry never complained. To drive him to the doctor’s and to the hospital for blood transfusions, the daughter had bought herself a luxury model car.
The fur coat came next.
But in the end it was the boldness and the sheer greed of the pair that woke Harry up. When about $11,000 American cash was removed from the house, Harry gave himself a reality check.
When he made his first request to have the money returned, Harry says the mother of the duo struck him with her hand.
Harry’s son and daughter-in-law were tipped off in London, Ontario.
The wife had to find a baby-sitter for the couple’s two younger children. They have a daughter with a raw and recent tragedy that would break any parent’s heart. Still, they drove from London to Toronto in the middle of the night to come and protect their father.
Within two days of their arrival, doctors confirmed what the two women had known for some time, Harry has terminal cancer.
When Harry returned home on the day of the diagnosis, he immediately went into his bedroom and shut the door.
‘It’s almost as if he’s given up,’said his daughter-in-law.
It all happened at a time when the sound of Christmas carols and wishes of goodwill are everywhere.
Drifting towards an imminent death when you have nothing to believe in anymore seems a tragedy too much to bear. When everyone was looking to find a way to give Harry something to believe in again, he seemed to rally, if not physically at least emotionally.
The two women have never been heard from again. But the Christmas tree they talked him into buying is still there as if to mock him. Strangers keep calling the house looking for the two women.
Police, who have an Elder Abuse team, say the vulnerability of the lonely elderly makes them easy prey for unprincipled predators.
Toronto is a big city.
If you have an elderly person in your life, a father, mother, grandparents, aunts or uncles don’t let a busy lifestyle let you leave them alone. The predators, who are out there, won’t.
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