Shattered Dreams

Dorothea, a 75-year-old retired history teacher lost her lifelong friend Mary Anne to cancer. Soon after the funeral, Dorothea's family began to maneuver to obtain guardianship over her and have access to her considerable possessions. Pam, a good-hearted, former student of Dorothea, helped her deal with her loneliness and prepared her to retire in a summer home in North Carolina that Dorothea and Mary Anne had custom built decades earlier. Dorothea's family saw Pam as a threat for...
More Description

Dorothea, a 75-year-old retired history teacher lost her lifelong friend Mary Anne to cancer. Soon after the funeral, Dorothea's family began to maneuver to obtain guardianship over her and have access to her considerable possessions. Pam, a good-hearted, former student of Dorothea, helped her deal with her loneliness and prepared her to retire in a summer home in North Carolina that Dorothea and Mary Anne had custom built decades earlier. Dorothea's family saw Pam as a threat for their guardianship plans and managed to have her jailed for exploitation. For three years Pam fought to prove her innocence while Dorothea was held captive, against her will, in an assisted living facility.This is Pam's real-life story as she experienced it, and is written in her own words. This tragedy becomes a true crime story and a chronicle of human and civil rights violations. Incompetent police officers, corrupt prosecutors, shady lawyers and guardianship judges colluded to help the family obtain and maintain guardianship over Dorothea. The author explores the broken Guardianship and Justice systems based within the backdrop of Pam's experiences, making this book a manual for protecting elders from predatory relatives. Pam's story reveals some of the complexities of the human soul and its dark corners: the power of money and greed, the ease in bending the truth, the deviousness of the human conscience, and the fragility of family relationships and human institutions. It also reveals some of the bright corners of the human soul: the desire for justice and truth, selfless compassion and charity towards others, and the uniqueness of each human being.