Abuse in Sun City: How conspirators stole the last years of Katherine Torricelli’s life
First they tidied up Katherine Torricelli’s home. Then they took over her life.
Now all three likely will be going to prison.
In a public denouement of one family’s five-year nightmare, a Charlotte woman was convicted Thursday for her role in an elder-abuse conspiracy targeting Torricelli, an elderly New York native who suffered from dementia and died in 2016.
The guilty verdict against Donna Graves, 58, involved two counts of conspiracy — one for money laundering and the other linked to wire fraud. Graves’ partners, Maxwell “Triple” Harrison and Elizabeth Robin Williams, pleaded guilty to related charges in May. All three now face lengthy sentences and massive fines for their crimes.
Yet the details behind the crimes — how the defendants first began cleaning Torricelli’s home in the Carolina Lakes Sun City retirement community, south of Charlotte, before quickly infesting her life — strike a harrowing note, even for veteran court figures.
“This is one of the most shocking cases of elder abuse I have seen in all my years as a prosecutor,” said U.S. Attorney Andrew Murray, whose Charlotte office tried the case. “The way (these people) took advantage of a defenseless and infirmed older woman, and then discarded her without a second thought after squandering her life savings, is both heinous and inhumane.”
James Exum, Graves’s attorney, did not immediately respond to an Observer email Monday seeking comment.
According to the FBI, financial crimes against the elderly are a $3 billion criminal enterprise that victimizes millions of Americans every year. Many of the targets are chosen because they have significant savings and trusting natures that make them prone to believe romance, lottery or sweepstakes scams.
Murray has made elderly abuse a priority across western North Carolina, launching his Elder Justice initiative in March 2019.
The Torricelli case started, literally, as an inside job.
In 2014, documents show, Graves and Williams began cleaning Torricelli’s home in Indian Land, S.C. Over time, they became her confidants, taking over her financial affairs and quickly cutting her off from friends and family, including her younger brother, Art Doumtjes, who lived three blocks away.
Starting in the fall of 2015, according to court documents, they began selling off Torricelli’s wedding bands, jewelry and furs. They stole her Social Security and Medicare checks. Prosecutors put the overall loss to the victim at around $300,000.
As Doumtjes pressed to see his increasingly isolated sister, according to documents, the conspirators repeatedly told her that it was he who was trying to steal her money.
In October 2015, when Doumtjes had to drive to Duke University Hospital for treatment of his bladder cancer, Graves, Williams and Harrison used his absence to empty a $265,000 BB&T account that the brother and sister jointly held. They moved the money to another bank, and eventually drained that account.
Around that same time, they also persuaded a New York friend of Torricelli’s to pay $2,000 for a Charlotte-area lawyer to remove Doumtjes’ power of attorney over his sister’s affairs.
In a particularly troubling effort to further isolate their victim, the conspirators also spent about $7,000 of Torricelli’s money to hire a private security agency to keep her brother and others away.
In October 2015, when Doumtjes tried to visit his sister, the security company owner put a gun to his back and told him he could not see or talk with Torricelli without the permission of Graves, Williams or Harrison, court records show.
According to Graves’ 2019 indictment, Doumtjes sought law enforcement help to reach Torricelli. But the elderly woman’s handlers had other plans.
First, they persuaded Torricelli to rent and move into a SouthPark apartment. Then they repeatedly tried to sell her Sun City home, intending to keep the proceeds. When a private detective hired by Doumtjes discovered the apartment, the conspirators moved Torricelli again — this time into a rental home in Mint Hill, which she shared with Williams and Harrison.
“It was kidnapping,” Doumtjes told the Observer on Friday. “I’ve been chasing these people for six years. This has been a goal of my life — to get my sister back.”
As Torricelli was moved from place to place, her mental and physical condition deteriorated, and her keepers, who already had siphoned off most of the elderly woman’s money, no long wanted her around. According to court documents, they alerted the New York friend in January 2016 of Torricelli’s failing health. The friend agreed to make arrangements to move Torricelli into a New York nursing home.
When the friend came down to get her, she asked Williams and Harrison about the whereabouts of Torricelli’s bank statements, credit cards and check books. According to court documents, the conspirators said they didn’t know.
After arriving in New York in mid-February 2016, Torricelli required immediate surgery for medical problems, including acute bed sores, that had worsened while she lived with Williams and Harrison in Mint Hill, documents show.
It was March before Doumtjes says he knew where his sister had been taken. He never saw her again. Torricelli died in the New York nursing home that December, a week before Christmas.
“She died of a broken heart,” her brother said. “She was begging them not to take her things, begging them ... They wiped out everything.”
Once he learned his sister had been kept in Mint Hill, Doumtjes began peppering Mint Hill police with phone calls urging that they investigate.
Detectives Errol Wedra and Marnee Moberg picked up the case in March 2016. Wedra told the Observer on Friday that the pair spent the next 2 1/2 years following the money, running down the bank accounts, piecing the conspiracy together.
Asked during a phone call why the department had expended that much effort, Wedra paused for a moment, as if he didn’t understand the question. “This is horrible,” he said. “Like the most vulnerable among us.”
When asked to reminisce about Katherine, Doumtjes, 85, thinks back to a time when they were both young, growing up together in the South Bronx. His outgoing big sister “was liked by everyone,” he said, “and you couldn’t put anything over on her.”
Now, Doumtjes wants to visit nursing homes and talk about the horrors of Katherine’s last months.
“I want to tell them to watch out, don’t trust anyone, because there are people out there who will prey on you,” he says. “I want to save some lives.”
First, Doumtjes will testify at the upcoming sentencing hearings of Graves, Harrison and Williams.
He says he has some thoughts he wants to share with the judge.
This story was originally published October 5, 2020 at 11:30 AM.
