Elder Abuse: One Woman's Story, a National Epidemic

Rosalind “Joy” Walker died without her daughter or grandchildren by her side. The Alzheimer’s patient had been a victim of elder fraud, in which the woman’s attorney, Janet Colton, next-door neighbor Joanne Turner and Betty Miller, a supermarket clerk, had conspired to obtain power of attorney and guardianship of the elderly woman, estranging her from her daughter, Glynnis Walker.

After learning about fraud against the older, more vulnerable segment of the population and the legal system, through her own personal experience, Walker wrote “Stealing Joy: A True Story of Elder Abuse and Fraud” to illuminate the risk and ruin of what she said has become a national epidemic.

“These seemingly everyday people were the ones who targeted my family. During their association with my mother, they abused her – psychologically, emotionally and financially, isolated her from her family, defrauded her, changed her will, stole her identity and mine,” Walker said. “In the end, they arranged for her death.”

In the beginning, Walker said she thought she was doing everything right. She had obtained a power of attorney for her mother, after her father’s death in 2006. Walker had set up direct debits for most of her mother’s bills, and, since her mother was not used to writing checks, had advised that she keep a small amount of cash in the house, for incidentals.

At that time, Walker retained Colton to draw up a will and POA for Rosalind Walker.

“On Oct. 19, 2006, we attended a meeting at Ms. Colton’s office. My mother signed a straightforward will, passing all her property to me, or if I was deceased, to [my daughter] Arabella,” Walker explained. “She also signed a POA, appointing me to act for her. It was an Enduring Power of Attorney, which meant that even if she became mentally incapacitated, the document was still in force and I could still act for her. This, as it turned out, was significant.”

Her mother entered the hospital and was declared cognitively impaired in 2010, after which Colton, Turner and Miller began working to turn Rosalind Walker against her daughter. Since Glynnis Walker lived in Chicago, Ill. and her mother lived on Victoria Island in British Columbia, about 15 hours away, the trio worked to obtain guardianship and POA for the elderly woman, which they were ultimately successful in doing.

“My mother executed three wills in her lifetime,” Walker wrote. “One in October 2006, before she got Alzheimer’s, and two in September 2010, after she had been declared cognitively impaired – a multitude of times. The first of these wills was executed in Judy Colton’s office, following all legal requirements. The other two were written in Joanne Turner’s house, the first in Turner’s own handwriting. The first of the September wills was written on ... blue flowered kitchen notepaper. The September 15th will was typed. My mother never learned how to type.”

But the fraud didn’t stop there. Walker received a letter on Sept. 28 that her mother’s bank account had been closed, as per her instructions. “I had been POA on mum’s accounts since 2007, which was why the letter came to me,” she explained. “But, I did not, would not have closed that bank account, because I knew that that is the account where her British pension went. Once it was closed, the Pension Service had nowhere to send the money to and so they stopped sending it, as I found out many months later. Colton would not have known this little detail.” That led Walker to believe that Colton had been responsible for closing the account and eventually bankrupting the elder, by writing checks to Miller.

“By the end of January, 2011, I knew for sure what the women were up to, thanks to my phone calls. I also knew that they had to be stopped,” Walker wrote. “I wrote a long letter to the Victoria police department, detailing everything that had happened, instead of just calling. Somehow, it landed on the desk of Detective Rick Anthony, one of the two detectives who handle the overwhelming number of cases of elder fraud in Victoria.”

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Elder Fraud:  One Woman's Story, a National Epidemic