MY MOTHER’S NEW “CHURCH FRIEND” KEPT DRIVING HER TO A BANK TWO TOWNS OVER — SO I FOLLOWED THEM My hands still won’t quit shaking.
I’m Gil. 58. Retired lineman. Clarksville, Tennessee. My mother is Faye. She’s 83 and sharp as a tack. Or I thought she was. In August she started talking about “Corbin.” A nice man from her Wednesday night Bible study, she said. Mid-forties. Pressed khakis. Drives a silver sedan with a fish sticker on the bumper. Carries her groceries in. Fixes her porch light.
“He’s a blessing, Gilbert. He doesn’t want a thing from me.” Then the little things started. Her landline got disconnected. “Corbin says nobody uses those anymore.” She got a new cell phone. Corbin set it up. I don’t have the passcode. She stopped answering my calls on Tuesdays. Every Tuesday, 10 a.m., Corbin picks her up. “Just errands, honey.” Her bank is a mile from her house. Same bank she’s used since 1971. But her neighbor told me that silver car turns the wrong way out of the subdivision. Heads up the interstate.
So last Tuesday I parked down the street in my wife’s car and waited. 10:02, he pulled in. Walked her out by the elbow. I followed them forty minutes. Two towns over. A little bank branch in a strip mall I’d never heard of. He didn’t go in with her. He sat in the car on his phone the whole time. Through the glass I could see my mother at a desk, signing paper after paper.
When she came out, she handed him a thick white envelope. He didn’t even thank her. He just opened it, counted, and smiled. I got all of it on my phone. Every second. That night I drove straight to Teddy’s house. Teddy and I played ball together in high school. He’s managed a bank branch here for twenty-six years. “Tell me I’m crazy,” I said. “Tell me it’s nothing.” I hit play.
Teddy watched it once. Then he backed it up. Then he froze the frame on Corbin’s face through the windshield. He set my phone down on his kitchen table, real careful, like it might go off. “Gil, how long has your mom known this man?” “Couple of months. Why?” He didn’t answer. He went and got his laptop. And the color drained right out of his face. So who in the world was driving my mother around?
Type “TAXI” and I’ll post the rest. (Facebook won’t let me put the whole thing up here. The rest is in the comments. Please comment “TAXI” and Like to read Part 2.) Every son on our page said the same thing at this part. Would you have confronted him in that parking lot? The rest is below 👇 See less
“I’ve seen this face before,” Teddy said. “Not in person. In a fraud bulletin.” “Every bank in three states got it in June.” He turned the laptop around. Same khakis. Same smile. Different name.
Not Corbin. “He finds widows at churches. Gets close. Gets them to a branch where nobody knows them.” “Then he gets his name put on something.” I couldn’t breathe. “On what?” Teddy called a friend at that strip-mall branch first thing the next morning. My mother hadn’t been making withdrawals. She’d been signing papers to open a brand-new account. Joint owner. With him.
And every Tuesday she’d been moving money into it from her savings. $9,400 at a time. Always just under ten thousand. “He knows exactly what he’s doing,” Teddy said. Then his friend at the branch said one more thing, and Teddy put her on speaker. “Sir, the account isn’t the worst of it. Last Tuesday your mother also signed—”
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Part 3 — The Paper She Signed
The woman at the strip-mall branch read it to us slowly. Last Tuesday my mother had signed a durable power of attorney, naming Corbin as her agent. It was a form letter, bought online, with a notary stamp that did not match any commission in Tennessee.
Teddy put his hand flat on his kitchen table and let out a long breath. The branch manager had refused to file it. The notary number was fake, and the woman who ran the desk had caught it. She had slid the form into a drawer and phoned Teddy, who was the first person she thought of in a bank bulletin chain.
Nothing had been recorded, and not a cent had left the new account beyond the deposits my mother made. Every dollar was still sitting there, in a joint account that had never been used. The bank froze it that same morning, with a note on the file for the fraud unit.
We took the video and the paperwork to the Clarksville police. Detective Marlow sat with Mom at her kitchen table that evening and explained everything gently. She cried at first, and then she was angry, the clear, useful anger of a woman who had been lied to by someone she trusted. She said, What do you need me to do?
What the detective needed was an ordinary Tuesday. At ten oclock, the silver sedan with the fish sticker pulled up in front of her house. My mother walked out in her good coat, with her purse over her arm and a wire the size of a button pinned under her collar. She got in the car and smiled.
I sat in my wifes car down the street, with Detective Marlow beside me in the passenger seat. We followed them at a distance to the strip mall, past the interstate, to the same little branch. This time the manager had two officers in the back office.
Corbin held the door for Mom, as he always did. At the desk, the teller asked him for identification. He gave a name, and the manager said, Sir, that does not match the name you used last week. By the time he turned around, the officers were standing behind him.
His real name was Dennis Lakes, forty-six, wanted for similar schemes in Kentucky and Alabama. In the sedan were three prepaid phones, a stack of church bulletins from different towns, and a list of names, all women over seventy-five. He was not a blessing, he was a rehearsed performance, and my mothers own good sense was what finally ended the show.
He was charged with attempted fraud, forgery, identity theft, and exploitation of an elderly person, along with warrants from the other states. A judge refused bail. The bank returned all of the deposits, every $9,400, and the prosecutors added the money from the earlier victims to the file.
Mom took it hard for a week. Then she stood up in her Wednesday night Bible study and told the entire story. Four women came up to her afterward, whispering about their own new friend. By Friday the deputies had taken statements from all of them.
I had her landline reconnected on Saturday. She had me teach her how to read the new cell phone, and she wrote the passcode on a card and kept it in her Bible. We ate supper together every Tuesday after that, at her kitchen table, with the porch light on, and the bulb was one I had fixed myself.
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