“SHE IS MENTALLY SICK” MY MOM SCREAMED IN COURT. I STAYED SILENT. THE JUDGE LOOKED AT HIM AND ASKED: “DO YOU TRULY HAVE NO IDEA WHO SHE IS?” HER ATTORNEY FROZE. MOM’S FACE WENT PALE. “WAIT… WHAT?”…
My own mom scream in court. She is mentally sick. I stayed silent. My own mother looked the judge straight in the eye and said I was mentally incompetent. She said I’d been unstable my whole life. She said I should never be allowed to control my own finances, let alone inherit anything from my grandmother.
I sat there in the Milwaukee County Courthouse on March 14th wearing my grandmother’s pearl earrings and I did not say a single word. The judge, a woman in her mid60s with silver hair and reading glasses perched on her nose, listened to my mother’s attorney finish his opening statement. Then she turned to him with an expression I had seen many times before in 38 different cases.
Actually, it was the expression she made when something did not add up. She looked at Bradley Fenwick, my mother’s young attorney, in his oversized suit, and asked him a simple question. Do you truly have no idea who this woman is? The woman you are calling mentally incompetent. Bradley blinked. He looked at his notes. He looked at me.
He looked back at the judge. My mother’s face went from confident to confused to pale in about 4 seconds. Let me tell you how I ended up in that courtroom. My name is Nancy Bergland. I am 33 years old and I work as a certified fraud examiner in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. For the past 7 years, I have specialized in one specific type of crime, elder financial abuse.
I investigate cases where someone steals money from vulnerable seniors, forged checks, fake powers of attorney, manipulated wills. I have seen every trick in the book and I have testified as an expert witness in 38 cases. 31 of those cases ended in conviction. 11 of those testimonies happened in Judge Patricia Kowaltic’s courtroom.
She once told another attorney on the record that I was one of the most credible expert witnesses she had encountered in 20 years on the bench. My mother did not know any of this. We had not spoken in 19 years. Here’s what you need to understand about my mother, Daisy Hollister. When I was 14 years old, my parents divorced. It was not amicable.
My father moved to Oregon. My mother remarried within 3 months to a man named Theodore Hollister, who owned three laundromats in Rine County, Wisconsin. And my mother decided that her new life had no room for her old daughter. She did not fight for custody. She did not call on my birthday. She sent exactly one Christmas card the first year and nothing after that.
I was raised by my grandmother, Dorothy Bergland, in a small house in Oclair. Grandma Dorothy was a retired elementary school teacher who had never made more than $42,000 a year in her life. But she was careful. She tracked every penny. She kept receipts in labeled envelopes. She balanced her checkbook every Sunday morning with a cup of coffee that had exactly two sugars and a splash of whole milk.
That woman could account for every dollar she had spent since 1987. She taught me everything I know. She just did not realize she was training a fraud examiner. Grandma Dorothy passed away eight months ago, congestive heart failure. She was 81 and she went peacefully in her sleep in the house where she had lived for 43 years. I was holding her hand.
She left me everything. The house worth about $285,000. Her savings account with $167,400, a small life insurance policy. It was not a fortune, but it was hers. She had earned every cent of it by teaching third graders to read for 36 years. Three weeks after her funeral, I received a letter from an attorney named Bradley Fenwick.
My mother was contesting the will. According to the letter, Daisy Hollister claimed that Dorothy Bergland had been suffering from severe mental decline in her final years. She claimed that I had isolated my grandmother from her family. She claimed that I had manipulated a vulnerable elderly woman into leaving me her entire estate.
The woman who had not visited her mother in 15 years, who had not called on birthdays or holidays, who had abandoned her own child, that woman was accusing me of elder abuse. I actually laughed when I read it. Then I stopped laughing because the letter also stated that my mother had documentation. She had evidence that I had a history of mental instability going back to my teenage years.
She was petitioning the court to declare me mentally incompetent and appoint a conservator to manage my grandmother’s estate. The proposed conservator was, of course, Daisy Hollister herself. I called my boyfriend Cameron that night. Cameron Linkfist is a high school history teacher with the kind of family that still has Sunday dinners and keeps photo albums in chronological order.
His parents have been married for 41 years. He does not understand dysfunction the way I do. He told me I should reach out to my mother. Maybe there had been a misunderstanding. Maybe she felt guilty about the past and this was her way of reconnecting. I love Cameron. I really do. But sometimes he says things that make me wonder if hehas ever met an actual human being outside of a Norman Rockwell painting.
My mother remembered the exact dollar amount of my grandmother’s estate. $167,400. She put that number in a legal document. She still does not know if my birthday is in March or May. Funny how memory works when money is involved. Before we continue, if you are enjoying this story, please subscribe and tell me in the comments where you are watching from and what time it is there.
I see every single comment and it truly means the world to me. Thank you so much for your support. Now, back to my mother and her little scheme. Within 2 weeks, the situation got worse. My mother was not just contesting the will anymore. She filed a formal petition with the probate court claiming that I was mentally incompetent and should have a conservator appointed immediately.
She wanted emergency powers. She wanted access to my grandmother’s accounts frozen until the court made a decision. Her evidence was creative. I will give her that. As my legal guardian at the time, her name had been on all the intake paperwork, which apparently gave her attorney enough to request copies. After she abandoned me, I spent about eight months talking to a school counselor about depression and adjustment issues.
This is a completely normal response when your mother decides you are not worth keeping. The counselor wrote that I was struggling with feelings of abandonment and low self-worth. My mother’s attorney presented this as proof of lifelong mental illness. She also produced a signed statement from my stepsister, Merlin Hollister.
Merlin is 28 years old, Theodore’s daughter from his first marriage. According to her statement, I had always seemed unstable and erratic, and she had serious concerns about my ability to manage financial matters. Merlin was 9 years old the last time she saw me. I have not spoken to her in 19 years.
She knows absolutely nothing about me. But here is the thing about legal proceedings. Once someone files a petition like this, it does not matter that it is ridiculous. It does not matter that the evidence is flimsy. The process starts moving and you have to respond. You have to hire an attorney. You have to appear in court.
You have to prove that you are not crazy. And while you are doing that, word gets out. My firm put me on administrative review. My boss, a decent man named Harold, who had hired me straight out of my certification program, called me into his office and explained the situation. He believed me. He knew this was nonsense.
But the firm could not have an expert witness whose mental competency was being questioned in another courtroom. It was a liability issue, an insurance issue, a credibility issue. I was not fired, but I was benched. No new cases, no testimonies, no work that mattered. 7 years of building my reputation, and my mother dismantled it with one phone call to a lawyer.
Theodore and Daisy were in financial trouble. That part I figured out quickly. Theodore’s laundromats were failing. People do not use laundromats the way they used to, not with cheap washers and dryers available at every big box store. He owed $340,000 to creditors. Their house had a second mortgage. Their credit cards were maxed.
My grandmother’s estate was not about family for them. It was about survival. But I did not know the full scope of what they had done. Not yet. Cameron and I had our first real fight about two weeks into this mess. His parents had started asking questions. His mother, a sweet woman who bakes cookies for every school function, had gently inquired whether there was anything Cameron did not know about me, any secrets, any history.
He came to my apartment that night and asked me why I would not just take a psychological evaluation to prove I was fine. I told him that was not the point. The point was that I should not have to prove my sanity because my estranged mother wanted money. He said something about smoke and fire, about how it looked bad that I was refusing to cooperate. I asked him to leave.
He left. I sat alone in my apartment that night looking at the photo of my grandmother that I keep on my bookshelf. It was taken at my college graduation. She was 73 years old and beaming like I had just won the Nobel Prize. All I had done was get a bachelor’s degree in accounting, but to her it was everything.
She used to say that paper trails do not lie. She said that people can make up stories and twist the truth, but numbers are honest. Numbers tell you exactly what happened if you know how to read them. I decided to read some numbers. I was still listed as a joint holder on my grandmother’s bank account. She had added me 2 years before her death while she was still completely lucid.
She said it was for convenience so I could help her pay bills if she ever got too tired. But I think she knew something might happen. I think she was protecting herself or protecting me. I pulled the bank statements for the last2 years of her life. I created a spreadsheet. I tracked every deposit and every withdrawal. And that is when I found the first crack in my mother’s story.
In the final 11 months of my grandmother’s life, there were seven withdrawals that did not match any of her regular expenses. No utility bills, no grocery stores, no pharmacy charges, just cash withdrawals ranging from $4,000 to $12,000 each. Total amount $47,850. Each withdrawal happened within 3 days of a recorded visit from Daisy Hollister.
My grandmother had started showing signs of mild cognitive decline about a year before she died. Good days and bad days. She would forget where she put her glasses, then quote poetry from memory an hour later. She was not incompetent, but she was vulnerable, and my mother knew it. The woman who was accusing me of elder abuse had been systematically stealing from her own mother for almost a year.
I did not sleep that night. I sat at my kitchen table with my laptop and a pot of coffee, and I did what I do for a living. I investigated. The bank withdrawals were just the beginning. My grandmother had been meticulous about keeping records, but in her final year, things had gotten disorganized. I had assumed it was the cognitive decline.
Now, I wondered if someone had been helping that disorganization along. I drove to Oclair the next weekend to go through her house more carefully. Cameron offered to come with me, but things were still tense between us. I told him I needed to do this alone. The house smelled like her. Lavender and old books and that specific kind of clean that only women of her generation achieve.
I spent 3 hours going through her filing cabinet, her desk drawers, her closets. I found what I was looking for in a place I should have checked immediately. Her safe deposit box at the First National Bank of Olair. She had added me to the box 5 years ago. I had only been there once to help her store some jewelry after a break-in scare in the neighborhood.
I had forgotten about it entirely. The box contained her jewelry, as expected, her wedding ring from my grandfather, a few savings bonds that had matured years ago, her birth certificate and social security card, and a brown leather journal I had never seen before. The journal was dated. The first entry was from 14 months before her death.
The last entry was from 6 weeks before she passed. My grandmother had known what was happening to her. She had documented everything. The first entry nearly broke me. It said that Daisy had called for the first time in years, sounding sweet and apologetic. She said she wanted to reconnect. She said she had made mistakes. Dorothy wrote that she did not trust it, but she was old and tired and maybe people could change.
The entries got darker from there. Daisy visited in August. She asked to borrow $2,000 for an emergency. Dorothy gave it to her. Daisy visited in October. She said Theodore was sick and they needed help with medical bills. Dorothy gave her 4,000. Daisy visited in December. She brought Theodore. They asked Dorothy to sign some papers that would make it easier for them to help manage her finances.
Dorothy signed the papers. She wrote in her journal that she was having a bad day, that her mind felt foggy, that she was not sure what she had agreed to. Two weeks later, she had a good day. She looked at the papers she had signed. She realized they were a power of attorney, giving Daisy control over her accounts.
She was too ashamed to tell me. That was the part that destroyed me. My grandmother, the strongest woman I had ever known, was too ashamed to admit that her own daughter had tricked her. She wrote that she did not want me to see her as weak. She did not want me to know that she had been fooled. So, she documented everything instead.
Every visit, every withdrawal, every lie Daisy told. She kept records because that was who she was. Paper trails do not lie. The final entry was addressed to me. It said she was sorry. She said she had tried to tell me several times but could not find the words. She said she knew Daisy would come for the money after she was gone, and she wanted me to have proof.
She wanted me to fight. She wrote that she had always known I was stronger than her. She said that was why she knew I would win. I sat on the floor of that bank vault and cried for 20 minutes. The bank manager pretended not to notice, but when I was done crying, I got to work.
The power of attorney document was a forgery, not the signature. My grandmother had actually signed it, confused and manipulated, but the notorization was fake. The notary stamp belonged to a man named Ray Gustoson, who had retired from practice in 2019. The document was dated 2024. Someone had used an old stamp on a new document. It was sloppy. It was obvious.
And it was a felony. I started digging into Theodore Hollisterers’s background. What I found made my stomach turn. Theodore’s first wife had died in 2012. His mother haddied in 2017. In both cases, there had been questions about the handling of their estates. In both cases, money had disappeared.
No charges were ever filed, but the patterns were there. Daisy had not married a desperate man. She had married a professional, and I was not their first victim. I was just the one who knew how to fight back. I called my attorney, Caroline Jankowski, the next morning. Caroline was 52, a former prosecutor who had switched to civil litigation after burning out on criminal cases.
She was sharp and direct and did not waste time on sympathy. I told her everything, the journal, the bank records, the forged notoriization, the pattern with Theodore’s previous family members. She was quiet for a long moment. Then she said this was not just a civil matter anymore. This was federal wire fraud, mail fraud, elder financial exploitation.
if the pattern held, possibly more. She asked me what I wanted to do. I told her I wanted to destroy them, but I wanted to do it right. I wanted them to walk into that courtroom thinking they had already won. I wanted them to commit to their lies under oath. I wanted the judge to see exactly who they were before I showed her who I was. Caroline smiled.
She said she had hoped I would say that. The court date was set for March 14th. That gave me 6 weeks to prepare. I approached this case the way I approach every case. I built a file. I created timelines. I cross-referenced documents. I verified every single fact three times because that is what you do when your career depends on being right.
Caroline filed my response to my mother’s petition. It was deliberately bland. I denied the allegations. I stated that I was mentally competent. I requested a hearing. That was it. No evidence attached. No counter claims, nothing that would tip them off. Bradley Fenwick called Caroline the day after we filed. She said he sounded confused.
That is her whole defense. That is all she has. Caroline told him that I looked forward to my day in court. She said I was confident the judge would see the truth. Bradley probably thought I was bluffing or stupid or both. Two weeks before the hearing, Bradley scheduled my deposition. This is standard procedure. The opposing attorney gets to ask you questions under oath before the actual trial.
It is supposed to help them prepare their case and avoid surprises. I gave him nothing. He asked me about my education. I said I had a bachelor’s degree in accounting. He asked me about my job. I said I was an accountant. He asked me about my mental health history. I said I had seen a counselor briefly as a teenager after my parents’ divorce.
I answered every question in the shortest possible terms. I did not volunteer information. I did not explain. I did not defend myself. My mother was watching the deposition via video link. I could see her face in the corner of the screen. And I watched her expression shift from nervous to confused to pleased over the course of 2 hours.
She thought I was broken. She thought I had given up. She had no idea that I was a woman who had cross-examined money launderers and embezzlers and fraudsters for seven years. She had no idea that I had sat across from people who had stolen millions of dollars and made them admit to every penny.
She had no idea that the flat, boring, defeated woman in that deposition was a performance. I have never enjoyed acting, but I have to admit that was a good show. The week before the hearing, something unexpected happened. I received a message through my attorney from Merlin Hollister. My stepsister wanted to meet.
Caroline advised against it. She said it could be a trap, a way to get me to say something they could use against me. She said Merlin was on the other side, but I had seen something in the background of that deposition video. When Bradley mentioned Theodore’s name, Merlin’s jaw had tightened.
When Daisy laughed at one of Bradley’s jokes, Merlin looked away. There was something there. Fear maybe, or resentment, or both. I agreed to meet her at a coffee shop in Walka, halfway between Milwaukee and Oaklair, neutral territory. Merlin Hollister was not what I expected. She was thin and tired looking with dark circles under her eyes and fingernails bitten down to the quick.
She ordered a black coffee and did not touch it. She told me she was sorry about the statement she had signed. She said her father had written it and told her to sign it. She said she did not have a choice. I asked her what she meant by that. She looked at the table for a long time. Then she told me about Theodore’s mother, Geraldine Hollister, had died in 2017.
She had been 79 years old, living in a nursing home in Scranton, Pennsylvania. She had dementia, real dementia, not the mild decline my grandmother had experienced. She could not remember her own name most days. Theodore had power of attorney. He managed her finances. When she died, there was almost nothing left in her estate. Her house had been sold. Hersavings had been drained.
Theodore said the nursing home costs had eaten everything up. Merlin said she had believed him at the time. She was 21 years old and did not know any better. But a few years later, she started asking questions. The numbers did not add up. The nursing home had not cost that much. The money had gone somewhere else.
She confronted her father about it once. Just once. She did not tell me exactly what happened after that conversation, but she touched the inside of her left wrist when she said it, and I understood. Theodore Hollister was not just a desperate man with failing laundromats. He was a predator who had been doing this for years. his own mother, probably his first wife, though Merlin did not know the details there.
And now my grandmother. I asked Merlin why she was telling me this. She said she was tired. She said she’d been carrying this for years and she could not do it anymore. She said she knew what was going to happen in that courtroom and she did not want to go down with them. I told her I could not promise anything, but if she was willing to tell the truth, the whole truth under oath, I would make sure the prosecutor knew she had cooperated. She agreed.
