Episode 72: Estate Case Stories with Brian Willingham and Clay Glasgow
This summer while at the ACFE Global Fraud Conference several speakers and friends of the podcast got together to play an escape room. Before and after the escape room adventure, Leah found herself engrossed in stories from investigators around the US and didn’t want the conversation to end. It was these valuable conversations that inspired the format for the next 6 episodes of the podcast. For the remainder of 2022, Leah is joined by investigators to share case stories from investigations worked in a variety of areas.
In this episode, Leah is joined by Brian Willingham, PI, CFE, and Clay Glasgow, CPA/CFF/ABV, CFE who discuss cases involving estates.
Data Sleuth: Using Data in Forensic Accounting Engagements and Fraud Investigations by Leah Wietholter, CFE, PI, CPA
When Leah joined the financial investigation industry over 15 years ago, her goal was to work as many cases as possible, but getting those first few cases felt extremely challenging with questions like, “How do I get the casework without the experience? And how do I get the experience without the casework? And when I get the casework, will I know what to do?”
Based on her experience of working over 200 cases in her career, she wrote Data Sleuth® to help others facing this very problem. It is the book she needed so many years ago. In this book, she explains how to start a financial investigation from case planning, to finding best evidence, to incorporating non-financial evidence – like interviews and open source intelligence, and ultimately, how to put it altogether for clients or even law enforcement with step by step details and case examples. If you want to gain confidence in financial investigations to build your case experience, you need to read Leah’s book. Data Sleuth® is available on Amazon, Goodreads, or wherever you like to buy books!
Brian Willingham, PI, CFE
Brian Willingham has been a private investigator since 2001. For the past 13 years, he has been the founder and President of Diligentia Group and is based in New York. Over the years, he has developed an expertise in open source / public record research and developed an open source intelligence course in conjunction with PI Education. He has been a regular contributor to a number of industry magazines and publications like PI Magazine and Pursuit Magazine. Brian is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts and a Certified Fraud Examiner.
Connect with Brian:
Website - https://diligentiagroup.com/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianawillingham/
Clay Glasgow, CPA/CFF/ABV, CFE
Clay Glasgow is a partner with HoganTaylor LLP and leads the firm’s Forensic, Valuation, and Litigation Services practice. He has over 20 years of experience in public accounting and has provided forensic accounting services throughout most of his career. Clay and his team serve clients in the areas of financial investigations, business disputes, economic damages, and business valuations. Clay enjoys using his accounting expertise to help clients navigate high stakes matters that require careful, objective investigation and analysis. He is a Certified Public Accountant, and has also earned the Certified in Financial Forensics, Accredited in Business Valuation, and Certified Fraud Examiner credentials.
Connect with Clay:
Email - cglasgow@hogantaylor.com
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/clay-glasgow-cpa-abv-cff-cfe-7851256/
CONNECT WITH WORKMAN FORENSICS
Youtube: @WorkmanForensics
LinkedIn: @workmanforensics
Subscribe and listen to this and more episodes of The Investigation Game on Apple Podcasts, Android, or anywhere you listen.
Transcript:
Leah Wietholter:
Welcome to the Investigation Game Podcast. I'm your host, Leah Wietholter, CEO and Founder of Workman Forensics in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the author of Data Sleuth: Using Data in Forensic Accounting Engagements and Fraud Investigations. This summer while at the ACFE Global Fraud Conference, several speakers and friends of the podcast and I got together to play an escape room. Before and after our escape room adventure, I found myself engrossed in stories from investigators around the US and I didn't want the conversation to end.
It was these valuable conversations that inspired the format for the next series of Investigation Game Podcast episodes. So for the remainder of 2022, at least, I've invited investigators to join me in sharing case stories from investigations worked in a variety of areas. In this episode, I'm joined by Clay Glasgow and Brian Willingham, and we discuss investigations involving estates.
Clay is a partner with HoganTaylor and leads the firm's forensic valuation and litigation services practice. He has over 20 years of experience in public accounting and has provided forensic accounting services throughout most of his career. Clay and his team serve clients in the areas of financial investigations, business disputes, economic damages, and business valuations.
Clay enjoys using his accounting expertise to help clients navigate high stakes matters that require careful, objective, investigation and analysis. He's a certified public accountant and has also earned the Certified in Financial Forensics, Accredited in Business Valuation, and Certified Fraud Examiner credentials.
Brian Willingham has been a private investigator since 2001. For the past 13 years, he's been the Founder and President of Diligentia Group and is based in New York. Over the years, he's developed an expertise in open source public record research and developed an open source intelligence course in conjunction with PI Education. He's been a regular contributor to a number of industry magazines and publications like PI Magazine and Pursuit Magazine. Brian is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts and is a certified fraud examiner.
Welcome to the Investigation Game Podcast. Thank you to both Brian Willingham and Clay Glasgow for joining me today. Today, we are going to be sharing some case stories that involve estates, investigations, issues, things that we might have gotten into as it related to estates or trusts. So, I'm just going to jump in and let Brian... Brian, jump in! Tell us one of your stories.
Brian Willingham:
So, the thing that comes to my mind when we talk about estates is a case of one of the first cases that I worked on when I started as a private investigator. When I started, it was a fascinating case. We were heavily involved in high indemnity life insurance cases, so big insurance policies where there's some unusual death. International death, big policies where there's some mysterious form of death and they needed to do some investigation relating to it.
So the case started, and this is a long story, but I'll kind of pare it down for posterity sake is two gentlemen, who were cousins, who owned a number of gas stations in the Connecticut area. Over time, they had collected $80 million worth of life insurance on each other as key man insurance. In business, you want to have some key man insurance in case your business partner passes away.
In fact, backing up for a second, at this time, we only knew about one $20 million life insurance policy. For somebody who owned a couple of gas stations seemed a little bit crazy. For somebody who's a wealthy individual in their thirties or forties, it might be a little bit different.
So we get into this case and as we're doing some investigation, we're contacting other life insurance companies and we determine that there's multiple other policies relating to them that adds up to $80 million. So the antennas start going up, and me being this new investigator who really doesn't know anything going on, I'm thinking to myself, "Well, I know a friend that owns a gas station. I'm interested in how much is a gas station really worth?" What I find out pretty quickly, and this is just my curiosity, is that gas stations don't make a whole lot of money. They make six or seven, eight cents on a gallon of gas.
Doing the math, this gas station was off of a major highway, so it was obviously pumping quite a bit of gas, but doing the math, they had to pump gajillions of gallons of gas in order to be worth the amount of money that they were claiming to be worth. So when you get a $20 million life insurance policy, Joe Schmo can't walk into the life insurance company and say, "Hey, I want a $20 million life insurance." You have to show some sort of reason why you're worth that or to show some financial statements that you're worth that much.
So, they had provided some financial statements saying that each of these gas stations was worth 20, 25 million, and the only way that they would be worth 20 or 25 million is if they own the property, they own the building, and they were pumping gajillions of dollars worth of gas. So in short, our antennas were going up, because they didn't own the gas station and there was no way that they could become pumping gajillions of dollars.
So one of our first things that after we'd done some sort of initial investigation, we interviewed... One of the people dies and we interviewed the surviving spouse. The surviving spouse, they put on this good show for us and the business partner, we interviewed together. And my job was to do surveillance on the person who was... Anybody who left the house after the interview. The person, the people that did the interview, they get out and they say, "Hey, why don't you back off a little bit, because this seems pretty legitimate. It's all seeming to add up. Why don't you back off a little bit?"
But we tail them, and the first thing they do is go to a payphone and make a phone call from a payphone. So it's bizarre. I mean, this is in the 2000s, so we're not talking about... Cell phones exist and phones exist. And what repeatedly happens over the next hour is this person goes from payphone, to payphone, to payphone, making all these various calls. So now our antennas are raised up even more. And we ended up doing lots of surveillance on these people. And ultimately... What we ultimately come to the conclusion... This was around the time of 9/11. These were foreigners that were from countries that may have had some terrorism ties. And the main concern was this $80 million, was it possibly going to fund terrorism? And obviously this estate that was collecting this money, who these people were, where the money was going, and all of this stuff, to cut a very long story short, through lots of investigation that wasn't just the surveillance, but the meat and bones of it.
Well, I've kind of told you about it. It turns out that the person who had passed away had died several years before and reentered the country under a different name. And the reason we were able to determine that is because we found some... We got fingerprint records, we were able to match them to people that had died previously. We had also determined, when we were doing research in on the foreign country, the person that died, died in a fiery car crash. And the only reason they were to be able to identify the body was through a wallet that was next to the person. We subsequently were able to determine that the doctor who witnessed or signed off on the statement had some shady past. And the only thing that identified him was this wallet. And we were able to determine that to buy a body that was burnt to a crisp in that country cost something like a US $100.
Leah Wietholter:
Oh my god.
Brian Willingham:
So ultimately, these two gentlemen who claimed they were cousins, were actually brothers. They had pulled off the same scheme 10 years earlier for $9 million. The brother who had supposedly died came back into the country under a different name and they plotted this whole scheme. And we've never been able to find the person who claimed they were dead. The other person spent many years in jail. It was not ultimately ruled to be tied to terrorism, but it was a fascinating case. It was sort of an interesting entre vous into the private investigator world. And the surveillance is what everybody always thinks about with private investigators. I haven't done surveillance probably since that case, but it's such an incredible adrenaline rush. You're watching this guy making a call from a payphone, and you're like in the movies. And you're like, "What are they talking about? And why are they going to the next payphone?" So it was a fascinating entrance into the investigative industry.
Leah Wietholter:
So a couple of questions. Who hired you for this case?
Brian Willingham:
So the life insurance company. So there's a contestable period. There's a two year contestable period after you get your life insurance policy, if you can determine there was some sort of fraud in the policy or something that they signed, there is a way that they can simply not pay it. After the two year contestable period, there's obviously a way to challenge it, but it becomes much more difficult. So it was one of the life insurance companies. Interestingly, a couple of the policies I don't think were within that contestable period. And they had actually already started paying them out of the money for some of the other policies. In fact, I don't think it was actually the insurer, it was the reinsurer. So the reinsurers are the ones that are really on the hook for all this. So I think they were ultimately the ones that had hired us.
Leah Wietholter:
So had they filed a lawsuit or something that made it where you could go get all of those other policies?
Brian Willingham:
No. So we were sort of cooperating. They hadn't filed a lawsuit yet. It was just in this initial sort of contestable period. And having worked in the industry, our firm had done a lot of work with a lot of these other companies. And they don't have this one database. I don't even think it exists even now, today, where you can see if there's policies all around from the various other carriers. There may be something today now that we're sort of in the digital age, but this was 15, 20 years ago. So it did not exist then.
Leah Wietholter:
And so then which person was going from payphone to payphone? After the interview, it was one of the subjects?
Brian Willingham:
It was the business partner. The business partner and the wife, supposed wife who was actually not his wife. It was like his other cousin.
Leah Wietholter:
Oh gosh.
Brian Willingham:
Yeah. The business partner was the one going from payphone to payphone. And we ultimately determined that he was calling somebody in their home country. We were never able to determine who that was, but we presume that it might have been the person who was supposedly dead. But we've never been able to find that out.
Leah Wietholter:
And so did the business partner go to jail? Is that the one who went to jail?
Brian Willingham:
He did. Yep, exactly. So it was financial fraud. They filed all these financial fraudulent statements and they had actually successfully collected I think 410 million and were trying to collect the remaining 70 million, which would've been a nice little payoff there.
Leah Wietholter:
No joke. And then you mentioned fingerprints. So I have to ask, was that in coordination with law enforcement or was that something you were able to do on the private side?
Brian Willingham:
No, that's exactly right. So ultimately the postal service got involved for mail fraud and law enforcement got involved, partly because of the whole terrorism angle and partly because we've realized that this was a much bigger... There was identity theft, we had determined that there was this other person who had entered the country and received this insurance policy many years ago. So yeah, law enforcement did have to get involved for that.
Leah Wietholter:
And was it federal law enforcement?
Brian Willingham:
Yes, it was. Yeah. Yes, it was. Yeah.
Leah Wietholter:
Awesome. Such an interesting case.
Brian Willingham:
It was really fun, really wild.
Clay Glasgow:
What kind of team did it take to crack that? That's pretty complicated.
Brian Willingham:
It really is. And life insurance fraud is... you don't hear about it nearly as... You hear always about the guy who killed his spouse kind of thing. This one was fascinating. It's one of those... This actually, I was working with my father's investigative firm, and he had done a lot of these in his life. And there's some fascinating cases, some that he's tried to pitch to 60 minutes. But it's one of those things that you see on Dateline, people that have died in some foreign country falling off a cliff and mysterious times. So they're fascinating. And people are so motivated by... Obviously it's one of the key motivations, motivated by money. And they'll do a lot of things in order to get that money, including killing their significant others or fake killing their significant others too.
Leah Wietholter:
Okay. So was the 10 million, or were the payments that had been paid out, were they recovered or were they already spent?
Brian Willingham:
I think they ultimately were, no, I think some of the money might have been transferred, but I think it was ultimately recovered. Yeah, I think it was.
Leah Wietholter:
Okay. That's super interesting. I have to say I've never worked one like that. I'm on this kick right now that I think that cases are... The types of cases that investigators work are geographical. You're in New York, and just the types of companies that are represented there as opposed to Tulsa, Oklahoma is just a little different.
Brian Willingham:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, listen, I wind up getting involved in a lot of massive financial fraud cases. [inaudible 00:14:05] Was at the ACP conference a couple years ago and he mentioned his four most successful cases that he had worked on. And I had worked on three of them. I had a small part in them. But because they are geographical... And the Bernie Madoffs happen out here, they don't happen in Tulsa. Or maybe you might have your own...
Leah Wietholter:
Smaller versions.
Brian Willingham:
Yeah.
Leah Wietholter:
Yeah. We got some smaller oil and gas versions. When I joined the financial investigation industry over 15 years ago, my goal was to work as many cases as possible. But getting those first few cases felt extremely challenging. For example, how do I get the case work without the experience? And then how do I get the experience without the case work? And when I get the case work, will I know what to do?
So I wrote Data Sleuth: Using Data in Forensic Accounting Engagements and Fraud Investigations to solve this very problem. It is the book I needed so many years ago. In this book I explain how to start a financial investigation from case planning, to finding best evidence, to incorporating non-financial evidence like interviews and open source intelligence, and ultimately how to put it all together for your client or even law enforcement with step by step details and case examples. If you want to gain confidence in financial investigations to build your case experience, you need to read my book. Data Sleuth is available on Amazon, Good Reads, or wherever you like to buy books. All right, Clay, I'm curious, what types of investigations have you worked in an estate?
Clay Glasgow:
Well, my example does not have quite the same level of intrigue as Brian's. Little Rock may even be a rung down from Tulsa, so...
Leah Wietholter:
Oh, Little Rock, Arkansas?
Clay Glasgow:
Yeah.
Leah Wietholter:
Maybe. I don't know. I've never actually been there.
Brian Willingham:
Neither have I.
Clay Glasgow:
Yeah, so I have had several embezzlement cases involving estates. I picked one that I think really kind of shows the human side of fraud. This is a case where we were appointed by the Pulaski County District Court, the probate division, to investigate what was referred to initially as discrepancies in a guardians accounting. So in Arkansas, and I think it's the same in other states, when someone is placed as a guardian over another person, they have to file annually with the court. They have to file an accounting because they're basically given complete control of that person. And there's a specific form that they have to file that... Where you start with the beginning estate value and account for all of the income, all the expenses, anything... Assets that were sold, liabilities paid off or incurred to get to the ending estate value. So in this case, there was a daughter that had been placed as her mother's guardian for the last five years or so of her life.
Her mother was basically an invalid the last five years. And the daughter was her mother's caregiver, she sacrificed a lot. She was from Dallas, the daughter, the mother lived in Little Rock and the daughter moved to Little Rock just so that her mom could stay in her house in her final years. And it was just a huge sacrifice. The daughter's husband had to stay in Texas because he worked. And so she was basically separated for those five years from her husband to care for her mother. So just a big significant burden. When her mother passed away, the daughter and her brother, the mother's son, were the co-administrators of the estate. So as they were trying to settle the estate, the brother started noticing some problems with these annual accountings that his sister had filed over the years. Basically the accountings... The value of the estate that should have been there based on the accountings, was much more than what was actually there, is kind of the short of it.
So the brother, through his attorney, raised this issue with the judge and then the judge appointed me to investigate what happened, is there true any validity to this, and if so, figure out what happened. So it was kind of an interesting situation where we had to work with the daughter to investigate her because she had all the records. And to cut straight to the chase, she and her husband were basically living out of her mother's checking account. I mean they were taking trips and paying for home renovations and restaurant expenses, just anything you can imagine paying for themselves out of her mother's account. And that's the reason why the estate filings didn't match what was there because they weren't estate expenses. So she didn't claim them as estate expenses, but she spent the money, so the money wasn't there.
So the numbers didn't add up. And so we testified in court at a hearing about all of that. Ultimately there was about a $300,000 deficiency in the estate. We weren't able to account for all of it, but it didn't matter, really, because she had an obligation, a legal obligation to take care of the funds and the funds were missing. And she admitted it. So the court held her personally liable for that deficiency. So it was a really sad situation. From her perspective, she was sacrificing. Her brother lived across the country, he wasn't doing anything for her mom. So she just kind of rationalized that this was fair for her. Although she also received compensation, she had a court approved salary that she paid herself, so fair or not what was allowed under the arrangement. So she broke that and the court held her responsible for it. And whether, I don't think the money's there anymore to repay it, but it was settled up at least partly through the estate distribution.
Leah Wietholter:
Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. Was it was some of that just allocated to her share?
Clay Glasgow:
Some of it was. There wasn't enough left to really make the brother whole. I think she's probably going to have to make payments to him over time. But yeah, ideally there would've been enough in the estate to where he could have been gotten his fair share and then repaid what she had taken. But there wasn't enough to make it all wash out in the end.
Brian Willingham:
Did she ever talk about how she rationalized it? Did she ever rationalize it in open court or to anybody? I'm always fascinated by how people rationalize it.
Clay Glasgow:
Yeah. She tried really hard to convince the judge or... She got into kind of the sob story and it really was a sad story of her mother's kind of state that she was in. So the story definitely pulls on your heartstrings, but the judge is the judge, so he's not... That doesn't really matter. But she claimed that this is what her mother would've wanted, that she was sacrificing a lot. This was fair. Her brother wasn't doing anything. But at the end of the day, none of that really matters to a judge.
Leah Wietholter:
Yeah.
Brian Willingham:
It's funny, I'm always fascinated by the rationalization part and just telling the story. I can hear it in my head, is that she was sacrificing, her brother was doing nothing. She was going to get the money anyway and she wasn't hurting anybody. The victimless crime, maybe her brother was not going to get nearly as much, but she deserved it because she was the one sitting there putting in all the effort. And he probably either didn't care nearly as much as she did, or she's the one that picked up her whole life and did everything for it.
Clay Glasgow:
Exactly. Yeah. There's very similar dynamics in other cases, similar cases that I've worked on. In fact, my very first fraud examination, I was just a couple years into my career, was an estate matter where there was two brothers and one brother was in business with his father and they had a construction business together. The other brother was a CPA. And subsequent to his father's death, the CPA brother had a stroke and became an invalid. But he had this kind of moment of lucidity where he told his wife that he thinks his brother's stealing from the dad's estate. It hadn't been settled yet. And so the wife hires an attorney that hires us to investigate. And sure enough he was stealing. But it was a similar thing. It was sort of the prodigal son and the older brother situation. He's been there, he and his dad were in business together. He's due more for that reason. So those family dynamics definitely come into play.
Leah Wietholter:
Yeah.
Brian Willingham:
We've all got them.
Leah Wietholter:
Yeah. I know. And I have actual, a similar story to yours, Clay, that... There was this family and they had mom, dad, like six kids, eight kids, something like that. And the baby was mom's favorite for sure. And he worked on the ranch all these years with them while all the kids... They pretty much all lived in the same area, but they had their own ranches or their own oil and gas type things because this is in Oklahoma. And they had gotten a really large ranch, they had oil and gas royalties. And so the dad, at some point, was advised you need to put everything into this company and then you can save all this money on taxes. And anyway, it really complicated things because it ended up having, I don't know, 20 partners or something by the time there were children and grandchildren and all this stuff, and fractional shares of things, it was kind of crazy.
But the siblings discovered, and this was around the time we were hired, they discovered that the youngest brother had purchased the prime 3-400 acres of the ranch that had corrals and barns and fences and all this stuff. And had purchased it from the company and he was the general partner for the company. Dad had passed away. Mom is not really with it. I mean that was a whole argument in the case, I'm sure, as you can imagine, was she competent, was she not when all this went down. And he, being this general manager or essentially a glorified ranch hand for his parents, he wasn't making a ton of money, although he had a salary from them. So how was he able to buy this prime farmland or ranch with everything on it. And so he had figured out how to create or how to... what he told his siblings was that his parents had loaned him the money.
Well of course by the time all the siblings hire an attorney and everything to start requesting things, there's definitely concerns about this loan document, and there's concerns about the legitimacy of the loan document. Did mom actually sign it? All of these things. And not to mention there had been plenty of stories, over the years that, "Oh mom just gave me this money." But then of course once you get attorneys or forensic accountants involved, investigators, they start asking, "Oh, so was there a gift tax return for this $200,000?" "No, darn it. We didn't file one of those." So we ended up discovering actually that he had also taken money out of his dad's trust because his dad had passed away and the trust should have gone to the mom, and then after she passed, it would be divided between the children.
And he had taken it out of his dad's trust and said, "Oh mom said I could do it." And then of course that was a loan too. And so the story that I would always, or this case, gosh, these were some of the nicest clients I think I've ever had. This case went on for about six years. I think it switched attorneys three times and all this stuff finally mediated last year. And actually at mediation I was in the room, they had to get this ginormous training room at the attorney's office because there were at least 20 members of the family who showed up. Because they're all fractional, they have tiny shares in this right business, but they have to all sign off on any settlement. But essentially what this guy did and what we kept saying over and over every time we had the chance to in a deposition or even at the mediation, was this guy took his inheritance, he made sure he carved out his inheritance ahead of time.
And what's so unfortunate about this situation was yes, they got it settled and my clients were happy. The 20 clients were happy with the outcome, but because of the legal fees and everything involved, they still didn't end up with the best property then there was no money to really claw back. So it just came out of his inheritance and then I think he still got some additional money. So it was like, he did all this shady stuff and took out the best first and then he still ended up getting a little bit of inheritance with no penalty for doing any of this as the trustee of the trust and as the general manager of... Any of those fiduciary responsibilities. Because they chose to settle some of that, you just have to give that up. That's really unfortunate. But I mean just, I'm sure that was the rationalization too.
Brian Willingham:
You were working for one of the members of the family or the...
Leah Wietholter:
I was working... This was a divided family by the time I got in.
Brian Willingham:
Right.
Leah Wietholter:
So there were a couple siblings who sided with the youngest brother. And of course, if we had time for the whole case, one of them... The ranch bought one of them a house. Some of them had some...
Brian Willingham:
Convenience.
Leah Wietholter:
Yeah. They also got some of their inheritance early too because they were chummy with the youngest brother. But so I think there were two or three siblings, including the younger brother, on one side. And then I had the rest of them. So the other 15 to 20. And anyway, fortunately that one did resolve in mediation because I can't even imagine. I mean we had flow charts of how all this money flowed and then you've got the trust document involved and what it said.
And then he ended up, the longer the case went on, we kind of ended up having to update our report a lot. And so then we saw where his mom had "decided"... I'm doing air quotes for our audio listeners. His mom "decided" that she needed to invest in some working interests in Texas, I believe. And she's in her early nineties. So he did a bunch of stuff like that too. And once the ranch became his and he had taken all this property, he also kept paying to fix it up and paid people to improve fencing and stuff as well. So all of that added up. I mean it was well over a million dollars worth of expenses after that. But yeah, the rationalization, though, was the same. He was mom's favorite. He took care of mom till she died, took care of dad.
Brian Willingham:
He deserved it.
Clay Glasgow:
Yeah. Well, and that person, that child, whichever the others are likely to resent, that's probably the one that's going to be in charge as the administer or the executor of the estate. So I've tried to think, what do people, parents, need to do to avoid that before they die? Leave some instructions, separate some of that out, get others, third parties involved in paying the bills and review and transactions so that those temptations don't come up.
Brian Willingham:
I think the sadder thing happens in not necessarily these big estates where there's a lot of money at stake, is when these people really need it and they're smaller estates, and I imagine this happens all the time and we never hear about them because it's not worth paying tens of thousands of dollars to experts to do this research. Yeah, I mean that's a really good question. And how do you try to avoid some of this stuff? And I don't know if some of it is avoidable. Because the people are still alive, they're still of right mind. And even my own family. My wife takes care of my mother-in-law's stuff. Could she be doing something? I mean, of course she could be, you know, just hope that you're all on the same page with this kind of stuff. So I imagine there's tons of other stories that we'll never ever hear is my point with that.
Leah Wietholter:
I've even told my dad in recent years, "Hey, you're on this bank account." Well, he and his sister are on this bank account that belongs to my grandma. And I'm like, "Hey, just check it every now and then." Just go in and just see, not that you want to feel like you're spying on your mom or your sister or whatever, but just check it so that the conversation can happen. Because once that money's gone in these situations, you can't get it back. Just like Clay you were talking about in your example. So yeah, it is really unfortunate and just because of some recent trust work we've been doing, people say, "Oh, you need to put all this stuff in a trust." But then the trust document doesn't even say how some of these things should be handled or it's so confusing or contradicts itself. So that can create a whole mess too.
Clay Glasgow:
Yeah. Well that would be the easiest thing is just to make sure that everything's clear in the documentation before you die.
Leah Wietholter:
Right.
Clay Glasgow:
That would avoid a lot.
Leah Wietholter:
Well, Brian, Clay, thank you so much for sharing your stories with me and with our listeners today. I really appreciate your time.
Clay Glasgow:
Thank you.
Brian Willingham:
Thanks for having us.
Leah Wietholter:
Thank you for listening to the Investigation Game podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review wherever you listen. The Investigation Game podcast is a production of Workman Forensics in Tulsa, Oklahoma. To learn more about our investigation,services and resources, please visit workman forensics.com. If you have an investigation case story you'd like to share on a future episode, please email us at podcast@workmanforensics.com.