A homeless man falls in love with a rich woman many years his senior and starts living with her. Is it a true love story or something else?
Carolyn Holland, 80, was a wealthy widow. She was living in a resort in the beautiful and quiet town of Kioux, California, when she met David Foote, 23 years younger than her.
They came to them to repair their household items and help with other tasks. Within a few weeks they became a couple and declared their love.
Carolyn said she never imagined she could love a stranger so much or have a romantic and sexual relationship.
‘His caring attitude has given me something special. I love her personality. And I don’t like it at all (when he leaves).’
“I will take care of them as much as possible,” David told me. Everyone knows Carolyn is mine and I don’t joke about it. I don’t stay out long at night because I have to visit someone at home. I will be with them till the end.
Carolyn’s daughters, however, saw something else.
They believed that David was cheating their mother for money and that this would break their heart, make them sad.
I know David and Carolyn’s story because I live on their street. Life in the Kyoks moves slowly and people sit together and talk to each other.
There is an embankment that extends almost a thousand feet into the sea and when the light is fading in the evening you can see the shadows of the waves against the setting sun.
It’s a perfect setting for a love story and I wanted to believe what David was saying, but like Carolyn’s family, I was suspicious of the whole situation.
Was Carolyn becoming a victim of financial abuse, taking advantage of her age and emotions to extort money from her? One in five women over the age of 60 suffer from this fear.
Carolyn’s niece told me: ‘The age difference was bothering me, it was alarming for me. Why would someone his age pretend he loves them (Carolyn)? Except because he needs a place to live.
I was in a unique position to see the layers of this story unfold. Every character in this story wanted to discuss this topic. Carolyn’s daughters were keen to discuss their concerns, while David and Carolyn believed they were being misrepresented and wanted to tell their story.
I first met David very warmly. A neighbor suggested his name to me for home renovation work while getting information about David from a local church where he attended regular worship. David was loved by all his colleagues who worked with him. He played harmonica and guitar. He had a good sense of humor and was open about his past.
The more I learned about this story, the more I began to understand why Carolyn’s family was upset about the situation.
When David came to the Kioux, he was homeless and living in difficult conditions. When they first came to Carolyn’s house, they were spending the night next to Pushte.
He confirmed that he was addicted to crystal meth and because of this addiction he also sold drugs. Because of his meth habit, he lived in whispers and was suspicious of everyone around him.
In this situation, he was once jailed for the crime of making a pipe bomb.
According to police, they may have wanted to target a Wal-Mart department store. David still thinks Wal-Mart wants to microchip everyone.
David claimed to have given up drugs, but I noticed that he drank a lot and smoked weed.
Carolyn’s daughters, Susan and Sally, were horrified by their mother’s change in personality after meeting David.
‘It’s like a fairy tale world, it’s very strange,’ said Sally. As soon as he (David) came she (Carolyn) would become like a young man. She would start laughing strangely.
Not for a moment did their daughters believe that what they were witnessing was true love. They saw a lonely old woman who needed a companion, and a cunning stranger who wanted to use her.
The question of inheritance was also coming in this story. Carolyn and her late husband owned several million dollar properties.
He asked me this is our family wealth, my parents worked hard for this money. Shouldn’t we have a problem with it being given to a failed person?’
Carolyn’s daughters believe she was losing her mental capacity before she met David. He tried to declare his mother mentally incompetent so that she would manage her affairs herself.
“They think I have Alzheimer’s,” Carolyn told me. Yes, I don’t remember many things, but I am very stressed. I can make my own decisions.
Carolyn’s relationship with David was distancing her from her daughters. But they believed that they had the right to have a partner of their choice. Carolyn said her children didn’t take care of them the way they needed after their father died.
“Before David, he never came to see me, never really,” he said.
His daughters do not agree. Susan lived five hours away from them. She says she wished she could spend more time with him, but she and Sally were both raising their children and working with him.
“We tried our best to make them a part of everything,” she says, adding that her mother did not want to join her in these activities.
Sally lived closer to her mother than Susan. Before David arrived, she helped her mother with her bank accounts and tax returns. But when the relationship soured, Carolyn took back control of these matters.
Shortly thereafter, Carolyn signed a loan agreement with David that allowed David to purchase a $40,000 van. I asked them what would happen if David disappeared with the van, causing them to have to pay back the loan. He said it doesn’t matter to him and he doesn’t care what his daughters think about it.
“Yeah, they think they’re saving me from David, but David’s the best thing I’ve ever had.”
What was David’s reality? One day I saw him visit Carolyn after a long day of work, David made food for Carolyn and reminded her to take her medicine. These are the moments that made me believe he truly loved Carolyn.
But I also observed them outside the house in the town. He used to proudly tell his friends that very soon he would never have to work.
I decided to research David’s past. I had a dark history of domestic violence and neglect with my daughter.
Her relationship with a colleague ended when David suspected her of having an affair with someone else, after which he tortured her. Their daughter from her first marriage came very close to dying because of David’s carelessness. They later sold the same girl to a couple and then they legally adopted the girl.
When I talked to David about this past, he said it is all in the past, he goes to church now and he has promised God that he will live a better life. He had nothing when he came to this town, and to him his relationship with Carolyn was a sign from God that this was to happen.
David said, “Behold, I am blessed.” I can’t leave them, because I had to be here with them.
But their story was soon to reach a bitter climax.
In a nearby town, Carolyn had a plot with two houses. Despite the fact that Carolyn’s grandson was renting one of the houses with his family, David agreed to sell the houses to Carolyn.
Carolyn’s daughters were shocked at this. She believed that David was taking advantage of her mother’s fragile state of mind. He showed me a CCTV footage of his mother looking shocked as David paid a visit to a property dealer.
Carolyn promised David that she would give him some of the $600,000 from the sale of the property for their future.
The property quickly sold and the check in Carolyn’s name was with the agent to pick up. But at that moment she got Corona and was admitted to the hospital.
Carolyn had followed David’s advice and refused to get the vaccine. David convinced them that the vaccine was part of a government conspiracy.
By the time they were sent back home, Carolyn’s mental and physical condition had deteriorated to such an extent that her daughters became her legal guardians, giving them control over their mother’s financial affairs.
Carolyn died soon after. Susan says, ‘Corona did not kill him. But it did not help as his health was already deteriorating.
The daughters did not allow David to visit Carolyn during her last days and did not even call David when she died. Carolyn was not cremated because her daughters were angry with the local church, which they felt had given them little support.
Susan and Sally still feel that their mother was taken advantage of and no one, including doctors and the police, helped her.
“Everyone’s hands were tied, they couldn’t see what we were seeing,” she says.
Millions of people in the UK suffer from dementia. One-third of them go undiagnosed. This disease makes a person very weak. After hearing Susan and Sally’s concerns about their mother, I spoke to a specialist in aging and its diseases (geriatrics) and what their daughters told me.
Asked about this and financial abuse. Financial abuse of older people is a growing problem in the US and UK.
According to Weill Cornell Medicine’s Dr. Mark Lakes and his colleague Dr. Jason Karlovish of the Penn Memory Center, financial capacity can be one of the first things to decline when the brain is damaged by disease or age. .
They want to identify what they call ‘age-associated financial vulnerability’, a pattern of risky behaviors that are inconsistent with past choices and decisions.
“Making financial decisions is very difficult for the mind,” says Dr Karlovish. Even a small defect in them can cause you to make financial mistakes that you otherwise would have made in your daily life.” Cheated.
Hourglass, a UK charity, runs a helpline for elderly people who have been abused. Veronica Gray, the organisation’s policy director, says that in 2022 her organization received more than £19 million in fraud or coercion from older people, which is 50 per cent more than was stolen in the period from 2017 to 2019. Is.
In 70 percent of cases, a son or daughter is involved. Others involve acquaintances, caregivers, new romantic partners and even grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren. Most of the cases are not reported to the police and victims have to bear the brunt of this financial fraud.
Veronica Gray calls it a hidden crime. “A lot of people lose a lot of money, they lose the property they’ve been living in for years and they end up in huge debt.”
For families like Caroline’s, the issue of mental capacity and decision-making is somewhat more complex. And it’s not an unusual story either, Jerry Atretion says he hears stories like this all the time.
David is homeless again but still has the van that Carolyn helped him buy. He has parked it at the same place where he used to spend nights after coming here.
David now makes a living selling jewelry and art made from recycled materials.
The last time I saw him, he was in a semi-conscious state, flicking the lighter on and off and telling himself over and over that he loved Carolyn.
‘When he would come to Balati, I would miss Carolyn, I loved Carolyn. I was trying my little mission to make them proud to be me.