I Left My Dying Father in the Hands of a Psychopath

I woke up to a voicemail from Staci, my father's private nurse. "We lost our dad this morning at 9 o'clock!" She sounded nearly hysterical. "He called out your name three times. The last thing he said was: "Tell Paula I love her. I'm just ready to go into a deep sleep."

The news left me stunned, nauseous in disbelief. An hour later, I'd receive an even bigger shock—one that would irreparably shatter a reality I'd trusted.

Daddy was 89, widowed, and diagnosed with dementia. In October 2000, I hired Staci to be his live-in nurse and companion through his many hospital and rehab stays, while I divided my time between L.A. and my apartment in San Jose.

At 39, Staci was still pretty, her looks enhanced by black eyeliner and bright red lipstick. She had an instant rapport with my father. She offered to shave him and as she was doing it, I mentioned that he'd written comedy for several iconic TV shows.

"I'm shaving a celebrity!" she exclaimed. "Can I have a lock of your hair?"

"I can't spare any," he said.

Staci stood almost six feet tall and was loud and bawdy. She wore her jet-black hair as short as a boy's and she sparkled—all the way down to her toe rings. She was funny, and her husky voice and Georgia accent made her seem even funnier.

I enjoyed her pearls of wisdom. She'd often remind me: "Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see." Another favorite was: "A psychopath is someone so charming, you want to meet them again."

During my father's several hospitalizations over the next nineteen months, Staci frequently ran into his physician, Dr. Berg. She eventually started seeing him as a patient herself and told me about her visits and the lab tests he ordered for her.

As co-owner of a caregivers' agency, Staci had responsibility for hiring and firing other helpers as needed. I got the impression Carol and Gail didn't like me. At one point Staci told me Gail threatened to burn my house down and made other hateful comments about me. When she was let go, Carol told Staci she'd "put the fear of God in me" if I ever spoke to her again.

I'd always brought my most valuable ring with me on trips to L.A. I was shocked to open the ring's case one day and discover the diamond was gone, the prongs that held it pried open.

By the time I discovered the check fraud, my parents' bank account had been cleaned out. Staci fired the other employees. We weren't sure who the thief was, but they all seemed suspicious for different reasons.

I looked to Staci as my best friend and my rock, the one constant in a parade of short-term workers. Her detailed, humorous anecdotes about the fun she and my dad had always lifted my spirits.

I made written notes of everything she told me; I wanted a chronology of my father's final months so I could never forget that she and I had done our best for him.

In May 2002, my father was hospitalized with his fifth bout of pneumonia. I planned to visit L.A. in a few days when Staci called and said the shower door in the house was leaking. She knew my preference for avoiding toxic chemicals, and the shower guy would use a toxic sealer. I decided to postpone my trip until the door was fixed.

The next week Staci informed me that the shower door company kept canceling their appointment. She couldn't stay home and wait for them when she needed to be at the hospital with my dad to do his morning care, assist in all his physical therapy sessions, and keep him company at least ten hours a day.

"When I left him last night, he was fine. He's recovering so great; all his labs are normal. He'll be discharged any day now," she assured me.

Two days later, I was reeling from the news of my father's death. How could he have just slipped away from us? A torrent of regrets flooded. I should have been there! If not for that stupid shower door, I would have gone down sooner...

The only comfort was that Staci was with him as he passed.

An hour later, Dr. Berg called, and I brought up the subject of Staci's being his patient. He told me he had never treated her.

An eerie sense of disbelief and shock crept over me.

"I've never even met her!" he said. "I've spoken to her many times on the phone."

From deep in my throat came an anguished sound.

"Then she was never there when you visited my father in the hospital?"

"No, never met her."

"And she seemed like the most trustworthy of all the workers!"

"Oh my God," he said softly.

I call the hospital and left a message for the nursing supervisor. When Jean returned my call, she told me there was nothing documented in my father's chart about a sitter at his bedside.

"I couldn't find anyone in physical therapy who'd ever seen her. I talked to different staff members, and nobody had seen her. The nurse who was on the morning he passed said nobody was there."

She said Staci had called them twice a day to ask how my father was doing. That's how she found out he'd died.

Was Staci behind my car's vandalization as well? One day the car had suddenly started smoking and was undrivable. A mechanic told me someone had put water in the car's oil tank. At the time, Staci was the only person who had access to it.

I'd suspected she wasn't always putting in the hours she claimed—but I never imagined her dishonesty could be so deep or insidious.

And there was the cassette tape I'd left on my dresser. Staci knew it was worth $2,400 to me if I played it for my CPA. The tape had worked fine the last time I'd played it, but on the morning of my appointment with the CPA, I discovered it was broken.

Panicked, I called a repair place and told them I was bringing it in. The technician who spliced it back together told me it was too clean a cut to be mechanical. Someone had cut it in half with scissors.

When I got home, Staci told me she'd redialed the last number I'd called and spoken to the technician herself. "It could have been a mechanical failure," she said and laughingly added, "I wouldn't want you thinking I broke it, since I'm the only one in the house!"

I remembered the phone call I'd gotten from Holly, a nursing assistant who worked for us briefly. She quit because she suspected Staci was forcing ER visits and other treatments on my dad he didn't need.

She called me one day to report that Staci was stalking her. "She's sitting in her car, parked in front of my house. She's dangerous, Paula," she told me. "If she does it again, I'm calling the cops. I saw her in the coffee shop around the corner, too." She said Staci was wearing an orange top.

The idea was absurd. Staci's at the rehab facility visiting my father. I was so amused by the conversation that I immediately called Staci to share it with her.

"Staci's not here," the facility informed me.

An hour later I look out and see Staci sitting on my porch steps. She was wearing her orange scrubs. "I don't even have any idea in the world where she lives!" she exclaimed when I told her about Holly's call.

That night, halfway between sleep and wakefulness, I remember Staci telling me when she hired her that Holly lived a few miles from my father's house. Her address was on her job application.

Staci had never been my friend. She was a master con artist. A colorful storyteller. A gifted actress. And a criminal.

The horror was my father's loss. If I'd known he was alone...nothing would have stopped me from being in L.A. Staci knew the story about my shower would keep me away, given my fear of toxic chemicals. I'd later discover the shower had never leaked. The company said Staci was the one who'd kept canceling. A year earlier, she'd told me my father had contagious scabies: Another ploy to keep me from visiting.

A sickening thought occurs to me. Staci had talked about other nurses medicating their patients to have a good day themselves. Had Daddy been out cold during all those "fun times" she'd told me they'd had together?

I remember hearing Staci yelling angrily and cursing at her daughter on the phone one day. It surprised me to hear her so enraged and so completely out of character. Had she ever talked to my poor, trusting father that way?

Besides stealing everything of value from the house, she'd accepted thousands of dollars pay for services she didn't perform. Why didn't I report her for fraud? I was afraid of her retaliation.

At some point, I realized she'd conveyed her resentment of me by putting her words in the other employees' mouths. The vicious threats she attributed to them had all come from one person: Staci.

After Daddy died, my boyfriend and I moved into my parents' house. One afternoon, a young real estate agent came to the door, canvassing the neighborhood for homes to list.

"Your sister had only good things to say about you," he told me, smiling.

"I don't have a sister."

He said that he'd come by the house in January and talked to a woman who said she was my sister. She told him I was very shy and didn't want to talk to anyone, so he'd be dealing with her alone. She said she was in the family trust and wanted to sell.

She requested a print-out of the neighborhood comps, she invited him in to show him the whole inside of the house and asked for his appraisal. He described Staci in detail, including her accent and toe rings.

My father had been in the hospital for the entire month of January. Staci had no reason to be at the house.

As I listened, the familiar surreal feeling of sickness enveloped me. Daddy died before the house was listed for sale...but could Staci have gotten away with stealing it? The chilling answer: Not while I was still alive.

I've since learned Staci has a criminal record of grand theft and has gone by different aliases. The good news is she no longer has a nursing license so she's not conning other families.

In the last phone conversation I had with her, she volunteered that her daughter took my diamond when she spent the night at my house. I know for a fact her daughter never spent the night when I was there...and I had the ring with me at all times in San Jose.

Staci answered the house phone a few times when my aunt Rita called from Florida, and I believed that was the extent of their acquaintanceship. When my aunt died a few years later, her guardian sent me her personal effects.

From among the old black and white photos, out popped an 8x10 color photo of Staci with her daughter. Staci knew Rita had money. How close had they been?

In sharing my story with others, I've learned how prevalent caregiver fraud is. Horror stories abound.

I refuse to let the experience make me overly paranoid or suspicious, but it did teach me something Dr. Berg had advised: "A little skepticism always does you well."

And it's forced me to learn the difficult task of forgiveness. I've forgiven myself for the actions—and inaction—that allowed such a grievous outcome. I've forgiven Staci, not because her crimes are forgivable—but to enable me to move on.

"Believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see," Staci always said.

I don't know about "half"—but from everything I saw, my father adored her. I choose to focus on my own memories of Staci and Daddy together, making each other laugh, and seeing him so happy with her. It's all I have.

It has to be enough.

Paula Finn is an L.A.-based author of Sitcom Writers Talk Shop: Behind the Scenes with Carl Reiner, Norman Lear, and Other Geniuses of TV Comedy. The book is a tribute to her father.

All views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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