Greetings Crimefighters

Have I ever told you that I cultivate pet peeves? I’m sure I must have mentioned this before; my sense of annoyance at such things as conspiracy theorists and left lane vigilantes. At the top of my list of pet peeves are liars and thieves, which in my experience are typically two sides to the same creep. Nothing pleases me more than to catch a thief (or a liar) in the act of practicing their sordid little business and personally to lay them low for it. Here is an account of when I busted a particularly insidious thief.

I have a really good friend I’ll call Bear. He is an honest hardworking sort who’s society I have enjoyed through many libations and many adventures. Nearly twenty years ago, when his mother was still alive, I received a call from Bear one night asking me for my help. His Mom had been chronically sick for some time, and she had come to rely on a nurse to help her with her day to day needs such as running errands, fetching her prescriptions and other odds and ends. Among the things Nurse was helping Mom with was keeping her banking records in order, but the arrival of Mom’s most recent banking statement disclosed that not everything was in order. Bear stated that the balance on the statement did not reconcile with the balance in her ledger, and since he knew I was a banker by profession (and that I had attended two years of law school; impressive to someone who barely finished high school), he asked if I would visit Mom and help her straighten out her books. Naturally I was eager to agree.

When I arrived at Mom’s apartment, the first thing I did was to examine her bank statement. This was back in the days when banks still returned cancelled checks with the statements, and I began by comparing each check against the list of checks on the statement. It did not take long for me to spot a red flag. One of the cancelled checks in the returned batch had a serial number that was out of sequence with the others. Furthermore, the check was made payable to cash for an even dollar amount (a hundred dollars). I quickly compared this check against others in the batch and found that the signature on the questionable check did not really resemble the signatures on the other checks. Alarm bells began ringing in my head.

Next I examined the ledger for Mom’s account, and became even more alarmed. Mom confirmed that all of the entries in the two ledger books she had were mostly done by Nurse, who regularly made a habit of collecting her mail, and reconciling her ledger with her bank statements. One of the first improprieties I noticed was that the ending balance on the older ledger did not match the beginning balance on the newer one. The difference in balances was several hundred dollars. I began to expand my research by looking at the bank statements for the previous six months (the period of time that Nurse had been working for Mom). In every single statement, I found examples of check numbers that were written out of sequence. Upon searching through the returned checks in each monthly batch, I found that the checks that had been written out of sequence were all missing.

Next I turned to Mom’s box of blank checks. All of the checks that had been written out of sequence had been removed from the end of the respective book. Upon flipping through the blank check books, I was able to identify almost a half dozen checks that remained unaccounted for either in the blank checkbooks or bank statements.

By this time it was absolutely clear in my mind that Nurse had been defrauding Mom on a fairly routine basis. She was stealing blank checks from the back of blank books, writing them payable to cash for an even dollar amount for anything from fifty to a hundred dollars, forging Mom’s signature, and then covering her tracks by collecting the bank statements from the mail before Mom could, and removing the forged checks from the returned batch of checks. The final step of her cover-up was to make entries into the ledger that conveniently left out the stolen and forged checks.

This made my blood boil. I was determined to burn Nurse for her duplicity.

Now that I had caught Nurse dead to rights in her theft, I recognized my next task as determining just how much Nurse had ripped off from Mom. This was easy enough; just identifying all the checks that were written out of sequence and missing from the bank statements, and adding them up. Mom was stunned to find that the woman she trusted to help her with her finances had stolen almost $900 dollars from her over a six month period of time. Since Mom was on a fixed income of disability payments, this blow was a disaster. I felt a calm sense of controlled anger as I sat explaining these facts to this frail old lady as tears began to drip down her cheeks. Now I didn’t only want to see Nurse in jail; I wanted to get Mom’s money back.

All of the complex little details I had uncovered seemed to mystify Bear and Mom, and I knew that if there was to be any chance of recovering the loss, they would need to have a clear statement of the case. I took a yellow legal pad and began to draft notes in bulleted format; A, B, C, and D. “Here”, I said, “take your banks statements, your batches of checks, the blank check books, and your ledgers to police headquarters tomorrow. Ask to speak to a detective. When you interview with the detective, present these things I have outlined in this order. The detective will understand and know what to do”. I closed by making the sad observation that Nurse almost surely spent Mom’s stolen funds by now, and recovery of the property wasn’t very likely. I left Mom’s apartment late that night, with Mom appearing puzzled and sad, and Bear in a state of cold fury. Secretly I hoped that he wouldn’t go find Nurse and harm her, but as I left I wasn’t so sure he would control this impulse that I knew he was feeling.

The next evening, I received a call from Bear. He thanked me profusely for my help with a glad tone to his voice. The interview with the detective had gone very well. Bear reviewed the evidence and my notes exactly as I had instructed while the detective listened patiently. After Bear was done, the detective only asked a single question; “Do you have Nurse’s telephone number?” Mom gave him the number and Detective gave nurse a call. He politely introduced himself, explained that Mom and Bear were in his office and disclosed the reason why they were there. Detective informed Nurse that she was to have the full amount of the missing funds, in cash, in his office within one hour if Nurse were to harbor any hope of spending that night in her own bed rather than in jail.

An hour later, Mom and Bear left the Detective’s office with $900 in cash.