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May 31, 2006

Arsenic, Old Lace and Automobiles.

Mortimer Brewster: Now look, darling, how did he die? Abby Brewster: Oh, Mortimer, don't be so inquisitive. The gentleman died because he drank some wine with poison in it. Mortimer Brewster: Well, how did the poison get in the wine? Martha Brewster: Well, we put in wine because it's less noticeable. When it's in tea it has a distinct odor.

Arsenic and Old Lace

From the Boston Globe

Undercover detectives watched the blind man climb into the suspect's car and start writing on document after document. They worried that he was signing his life away.

As 74-year-old Josif Gabor would later tell it, he was walking to the bank when a woman he had met briefly before offered to drive him and translate some banking documents into his native Hungarian.

The nice septuagenarians, however had several small vices. One was for lawsuits, having filed almost 40 lawsuits between them over the last two decades, usually demanding money for alleged wrongs.

One was life insurance fraud, both having being indicted Tuesday on 10 counts for amounts totalling two million dollars. The policies were taken out on two homeless men that were struck and killed by cars in 1999 and 2005.

Once inside, Gabor thought the woman was just trying to be helpful when she asked: Could she buy him some life insurance?

The woman, 72-year-old Olga Rutterschmidt, is now accused with a friend in a scheme to befriend vulnerable men, insure their lives for millions of dollars, and then cash in after they die in mysterious back alley hit-and-runs.

In an interview translated by his neighbor, Gabor said he has been afraid to leave his apartment since last Friday, when Rutterschmidt and 75-year-old Helen Golay were arrested and a police detective came to his door.

"She told me I was the next victim," said Gabor, a retired chiropractor who moved to the United States in 1980.

Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at May 31, 2006 01:56 PM

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