Woman swindles elderly man for $2.2 million
Norman Butler of Washington worked all his life as an optometrist and managed his money carefully. When he and his wife, Mary, retired, they were financially comfortable. Mary died in 2004, and the next year, Norman met a widow online.
Except Shea Saenger wasn’t a widow. She was married con artist, who was also a convicted murderer. As Butler developed Alzheimer’s disease, she swindled him for $2.2 million.
Doug Butler, a Lovefraud reader and Norman Butler’s son, sent a link to his story.
Read Murder, fraud, $2.2 million somewhere, on ArkTimes.com.
I was very impressed with the NRA. A lawyer called from there called to ask a few questions and said he woukd get back to me. He was back to me with this amazing list (at least to me) of what they would do. He said, legally it’s not quite like someone stole you father’s credit card and used it to buy a membership but equitably it’s very damn close.
OxD, to you and me, the amount of money is HUGE potatoes. That’s why the DA won’t even return my calls, here. What’s 250-300K? Well, it was all that I had, and I’ll never see a dime of it back.
Dndacct…..a moral victory is better than NO victory. Good for you – good work!
“Sorry that a million bucks is “small potatoes” to the DA’s office, it wouldn’t be small potatoes to me. ”
A few months ago as part of my work I sat on a panel discussion about fraud. One of the speakers was an assistant US Attorner and was a retired US Attorney.
I posed the question – how much does it take to get the US Attorneys Office interested? At first the answer was we’ll prosecute anything but as they talked about for a few minutes it became a large number. The retired US Attorney said plainly that if one of his staff had come to with a case involving less that a couple million dollars he response would have been ‘what the hell are you doing?’ With the budget they have they only spend on cases with large (to them, not me) dollar amounts.
Its different if you steal from a government on a non-profit. Almost any amount there will be enough to get a prosecution from either local or federal authorities as Shannon Wiggins found out. $51,000 stolen from Quapaw Quarter United Methodist was enough to her a conviction for theft and forgery. The same crime with a different victim (an individual or a business) will almost never be prosecuted.
@Truthspeak – I have had this discussion with a few people. My attitude is that the dollar amount does not matter. When someone steals EVERYTHING from you it does not matter if its ten dollars or 10 million. The impact is the same, you have lost everything.
Doug, I agree….it doesn’t matter how much or how little is stolen, the thief is still a thief, but I do see the DA’s office’s reasoning about who they can or will prosecute.
My egg donor put her boss and nine of his co-workers in the federal pen for them defrauding farmers (they worked for a farm loan co-op that was federally insured. She was the one who discovered the fraud (she was also an officer of the company) it rocked the little town of 3,000 as her boss and the co workers were all big shots in the town. I don’t remember what the amount was…but it was the federal connection that got them.
I can understand the Feds approach. They only take on really big cases. I have lots of problems with the local prosecutors though. The same people who will prosecute for stealing from the Red Cross will not prosecute for stealing from the hardware store. But they are death on the kid who tried to shoplift a video game or had a 1/2 ounce of marijuana. I always believed that there was something about right and wrong and enforcing the law but its more about doing what’s easy and only doing the hard stuff if there’s no way to wiggle out of it.
My experience with local law enforcement is that they are professional, polite, sympathetic and completely useless. That is not the fault of the line officers, it rests entirely on an elected prosecutor not doing his job.
The results of the Lumpkin bankruptcy auction are in. The auction netted just over $780,000 which is not as good as I was hoping. I had hoped to see about $900,000 from that auction.
Anyway all of the Lumpkins’ farm equipment has now been turned into cash and it is in the hands of the bankruptcy trustee. Next step is pay off secured creditors and then start fighting in federal court about how to divide up the rest.
I will never understand why none of this family has not been willing to make any attempt to settle our lawsuits. Once we actually get into court they are losing everything.
Not what you hoped for, but still a nice sum of money. I hope you can recover a big chunk out of it.
It sounds to me that this family is altogether lacking in values and morals, and probably dysfunctional all over. My guess is that they want you to fight them in court instead of settling, because they feel entitled and forcing you to work for it, plus the drama of course.