Janet Reaves, a 71-year-old grandmother, got caught up in a felony case involving financial exploitation of the elderly.
But if you thought Reaves was the victim, you’d be surprised to see her in an orange prisoner’s outfit in Kendall County Jail, convicted of stealing more than $113,000 from her 100-year-old father, Wendell Cummings.
The case has sparked headlines and gossip in far west rural Yorkville, added a new twist to the problem of financial crimes against the elderly, and split apart a once-close family.
And both sides, displaying healthy doses of pride and stubbornness, appear to be sticking to their versions of events.
Consider Cummings, who is firm in his belief that his daughter did him wrong, spending his savings, including buying a house, without his permission. He said she should face up to what she has done. In fact, he once said he wouldn’t mind if she had gotten 10 or 15 years.
Consider Reaves, who could have avoided her 6-month jail stint by pleading to a misdemeanor charge but chose to sit in a cramped cell with eight other women rather than admit she’s wrong. She was sentenced last month and is appealing her felony conviction.
Reaves said her father, an accomplished artist, is being manipulated by relatives, including her sister, Maxine Cummings, and is “just parroting back what he’s been convinced of.”
“We’re talking about a 100-year-old man who doesn’t remember what he had for breakfast, doesn’t remember people, doesn’t remember that he painted 20 of his own paintings,” she said recently during an interview from jail.
But her father, a former carpenter, was mentally fit enough to testify in the trial.
“I think a 71-year-old person should know right from wrong, and if they don’t, they should take their medicine,” he said in an interview at the North Aurora assisted-living center where he lives.
The trouble began in 2003 after Reaves, a former longtime Yorkville resident, sold the home where her father lived in Yorkville and moved him to be with her in Monticello, Fla., near Tallahassee. Both sides agree that Reaves, acting as her father’s trustee, used his money to buy a home next door to that of her daughter.
Reaves said she had her father’s permission, and she insists she was the only one willing to take him in.
But Cummings and his other daughter insist he never gave permission to use his money to buy the house. And prosecutors say Reaves bought it in her name.
When Cummings began expressing unhappiness about his life with Reaves, Maxine Cummings said she urged him to return to Illinois.
Reaves’ daughter drove her grandfather back after he and her mother started fighting.
“Florida was horrible for him,” the granddaughter, Paige St. John, wrote in an e-mail. “Too wet, too green, the trees were `too close.’ I remember how delighted he was, as we drove through what I consider to be the most monotonous landscape on earth, to see the large, blank fields.”
After Cummings returned, Maxine Cummings and her son began looking into the case and discovered money was missing . They reported it to the authorities.
Reaves accuses them of being interested only in Cummings’ money.
Last year, in an attempt to settle the case, Reaves mortgaged the house and issued her father a check for $76,000, said Jeannie Fletcher, who prosecuted the case. “And then she got back to Florida, she stopped payment on the check,” Fletcher said.
In March of this year, a bench trial began under Judge James Wilson.
Days before the trial, Reaves found a document apparently signed by Cummings authorizing the purchase of the house, her attorney, Fred Morelli, said.
Cummings testified that the signature looked like his but insisted he hadn’t signed the paper. But he also didn’t recognize signatures notarized as his on other documents, suggesting he was confused, Morelli said.
The timing of the document’s discovery was suspect, and the signature could have been traced, prosecutors said.
Wilson–who called Reaves “deceitful, dishonest and sneaky”–found her guilty.
Such cases are likely to multiply as the elderly population increases nationwide. Those 85 and older comprise the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population, expected to reach 5.7 million in 2010, according to the non-profit Population Resource Center in Washington.
In Illinois, 5,015 cases of financial exploitation against the elderly were reported in fiscal year 2005, said Januari Smith, spokeswoman for the Illinois Department on Aging.
“Often when the victim finds out that [the accused] is a family member, which it usually is, they don’t want to press charges,” Smith said.
Reaves’ daughter can hardly believe it has come to this. She said the dispute involves two old people “with their backs up, fighting not just about the house they moved into together, but … who gets ownership of a large rock.” (Among the items in dispute is a souvenir rock at the Florida house.)
Reaves and her father said they are fighting to restore their reputations.
“People admired him,” Maxine Cummings said. “He was a person of utmost integrity. And he feels his reputation has been ruined, his honor has been torn to shreds. Because she’s his daughter.”
Reaves said her daughter urged her just to settle and avoid a jail sentence. But Reaves said she is a stubborn woman, and she isn’t about to say she did something wrong when she believes she’s innocent.
“I was helpless,” said Reaves, a former Yorkville school board member. “Once someone is accused of elder abuse, the stain is there forever.”
Yorkville, a fast growing town of 11,200, is no longer the close farming community Wendell Cummings once knew. But people are still talking about the case.
School Supt. Thomas Engler finds irony in Reaves’ conviction: As a board member, she was quick to accuse the schools and administration of illegal activities, he said.
“It was an interesting time, and not one that we’d like to be repeated,” Engler said.
Nowadays, Reaves’ life has narrowed. She said she and eight other women were living in a cell with six double bunks. There’s a TV, and they get clean clothes twice a week. The food is pretty good but it isn’t exactly comfortable, being locked up among burglars, drug abusers and thieves.
“I would say the nerves are pretty raw,” Reaves said. “Some of them are on drug withdrawal.”
Cummings has settled in a North Aurora retirement center, where he has set up an easel to paint. (His second wife, Elizabeth Cummings, who is senile and unable to care for herself, lives in another nursing home.) On the balcony, he grows tomato plants and flowers.
At the retirement center, there has been gossip about the Cummings case. Not all of it is sympathetic.
“They said, `How can you do this to your own daughter?'” Maxine Cummings said. “And he said, `Well, look what she has done to me. I don’t feel guilty at all.’ But deep down it bothers him, when people criticize what he has done.”
Despite the bad blood, St. John thinks her mother and grandfather still love each other.
“My family is blessed with longevity,” St. John said, “but not accord or a sense of what’s important in life.”
