WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR FAMILY?
My sister and I were notified of the abuse of our parents less than a week before our dad died. We struggled to save dad's life, but his body was too weakened to recover from the effects of the abuse which he had endured. Because we notified the police of the abuse of our parents, we were told by the investigating officer that if dad died, an autopsy would be performed after his death. The family had no choice in the matter of the autopsy. Upon being notified of dad's death, the police and county coroner arrived at our parent's home. Dad's medicine and any additional material that was deemed evidence was packaged and taken, a preliminary exam of dad was done by the coroner and dad's body was removed from his home and sent to the state laboratory in Lubbock, Texas.
Because of the volume of autopsies performed by the state lab, tissue and blood samples were taken but were not examined in detail for almost six months. After a few days dad's body was released to the funeral home. The District Attorney notified us after all the autopsy studies were done and a Grand Jury was convened that three counts of Felony Elder Abuse would be brought against the abuser. While there was enough witness testimony and circumstantial evidence concerning the abuse to satisfy the requirements for filing several charges of Felony Elder Abuse, not enough evidence was uncovered by the autopsy of our dad to charge the abuser with an even more serious crime, such as criminally negligent homicide or murder.
In the intervening months between the death of our father and the filing of charges against the perpetrator, my family struggled to understand just what had happened. Was the abuse unintentional, an error of judgement by the caregiver? Was it the result of caregiver burn-out? Or was there an even more sinister answer to our questions? My sister and I talked at length about our separate memories of the almost eleven months that the abuser worked in our parents home. We refrained from interviewing the caregivers who had worked during the same time as the abuser, leaving that task to the police investigators. Should a trial be forthcoming, we did not want to "contaminate" the testimony of any of the witnesses to these crimes, thereby making a conviction less probable.
WORKING WITH THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY
Once the District Attorney decided to press forward with a case against the abuser, we were required to complete victim's statements and provide the District Attorney with all of dad's medical records, not only from the hospital, but from each one of the doctors who attended him and the visiting nursing service which supplied weekly in-home care. Each family member, not just our parents, was entitled to submit a "victim's statement". I wrote statements for myself and each of my parents and helped my sisters format their own statements. In addition, my sister's husband and son wrote statements about their loss. Both individuals had close relationships with our parents and had been devastated by these crimes. We wanted each victim's statement to be well written and well presented. We wanted the District Attorney, the judge who presided over the trial and the jury which would be impaneled to hear the case, to know what kind of people our parents were and how important our parents were to us.
After studying the medical records for dad which had been supplied by the visiting nursing service, we discovered that many records were missing. My sister spent hours on the phone speaking with the director of the visiting nursing service trying to obtain all of the records. After weeks of promises, the service finally supplied all of the records, some of which pointed to their own complicity in dad's death. Even though the nursing service had suspected that our parents were being abused, the police were not notified as was required by law, and our family continued to be told that dad's care was more than adequate.
The nursing service's initial contact with our family had provided us with a written and verbal guarantee that "they were our first line of defense" in the care of our parents. To say that the guarantee was worthless does not begin to describe what devastation their failure to conform to the basic requirements of the law had caused. Our father had lost his life. Our mother had been abused and sickened. Those who were in a position to save him did nothing but fill out their forms and file them away.
We provided the District Attorney with an audio CD of an interview with our dad which had been done in the year preceding his surgery. The audio CD provided the most cogent case for a man who was highly educated, well spoken and though in his mid-eighties, had full control of his faculties. We believed that it was important to demonstrate to the District Attorney and later to the court, that both our parents were fully engaged in their lives, that they were contributing members of their community and were still active in their church. Neither one of our parents had been close to death when the abuser was hired.
REACHING A CONCLUSION
By combining my sister and my memories with a timeline of dad's illness, dad's medical records and the evidence which the police uncovered, we came to a startling conclusion. We believe that the abuser had as her goal, from almost the beginning of her employment with our family, the death of both of our parents. There was not sufficient physical evidence to support all of our conclusions. However, adequate physical evidence and an abundance of eyewitness testimony was available for the District Attorney to prove her case against the abuser, thus forcing the defendant to accept a plea agreement of three counts of Felony Elder Abuse.
During this process of combining our various memories, I came across a wonderfully written book entitled "The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us" by Martha Stout, first published in the USA by Broadway in February 2005. Dr. Stout is a practicing psychologist and a clinical instructor in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. By carefully reading and studying Dr. Stout's theories and the theories of other researchers in the field, I came to realize that the woman who had abused our parents is likely a sociopath. Identifying the perpetrator as a sociopath does not assuage my family's grief, but it does help to answer the questions "why?", and as you will see "how?".
"PRIMER FOR A SOCIOPATH"
I wrote an essay entitled "Primer for a Sociopath" which details step by step how a person might manipulate a family and secretly cause the death of an elderly patient. The material for the essay comes directly from my family's experience with the abuser. By combining all of my family's memories of the time the abuser worked for our family, I was able to piece together the actions of the abuser which ultimately led to the death of our father. The family's memories reflected in the essay present a chilling tale of deception, manipulation and murder.
After listening to the testimony of the witnesses and the police who investigated the crimes, and lastly, writing and reflecting on the essay, my sister and I were able to put to rest the question of how this perpetrator caused the death of our father and the injury to our mother. We will never understand why the abuser would choose to hurt two defenseless, kind and generous people who looked to her for help. According to Dr. Stout and other researchers into sociopathy, hurting other people, whether financially, emotionally and/or physically, is a game to sociopaths, a game they often win.
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