The Case for Specialized Elder Abuse Prosecutors

About a month after meeting her, Leon- ard told O'[Neill]'s father that he wanted to marry her. O'Neill's father responded that, rather than buying his daughter a ring, [Leonard Swenson] should pay off her truck loan. Leonard agreed, cashing out a CD in which he had invested some of the proceeds from his wife's insurance settle- ment to pay off the $23,000 loan. Thus began a pattern of Leonard giving O'Neill money. Fed by his hope for the future and by her promise to repay him some of the money, Leonard wrote checks to pay off O'Neill's many debts, gave her cash, and bought her a computer and anything else she wanted. Leonard told us, "She said someday we might get married, that age don't make a difference." When Leonard moved into O'Neill's basement, he virtually disappeared from his children's lives. One day not long after he left, [Beverly] was reviewing her father's bank statements when she noticed a number of uncharacteristically large withdrawals. She called her father, but he didn't answer his phone. She and her brother, Tony, then went to their father's bank to see if there was anything they could do to protect his assets. As they drove into the parking lot, they saw their father's truck parked there, Leonard in the passenger seat, smoking a cigarette, and O'Neill in the driver's seat. As Tony and Beverly sat there unnoticed, they heard O'Neill loudly instruct their father to cash out the remainder of his bank accounts. In a panic, Beverly called 911. Shortly after this, O'Neill announced to Leonard that they were moving his accounts to a bank where his money would "do better." By this time, O'Neill had taken over Leonard's bill-paying, promising him she would take care of his finances. She made herself a joint account holder on his new accounts. Once this was accomplished, she began to system- atically drain Leonard of his remaining assets. Whenever a check was deposited into Leonard's account, she conducted an online transfer of the money to her own account. Not knowing how to use a computer, Leonard was not aware of these transfers or of the steady decline of his account balances. Because O'Neill arranged to have the bank statements sent to a post office box, Leonard never saw them. After our interview of Leonard, Detec- tive [Montemayor] and I remained in close contact and collaborated on the plan for his investigation, which involved obtain- ing a capacity evaluation of Leonard by a geriatric psychiatrist, executing search warrants for Leonard