Did Tom Childers Tamper With His Mother's Will & Steal $400K? Part 4.

Fairfax CA

Description

Over the past decade or two I've occasionally heard people using the term "gaslighting". It drove me up the wall. Why? Because when you'd ask them what they meant, they, themselves, did not know what the term meant. They would tell me to see the movie - which they, themselves, had not seen, so they couldn't tell me the plot, either. It was like talking to an idiot. Nowadays, what with online dictionaries, and online video sites, it's a lot easier to include a URL or two to help someone better understand what one means when one says 'gaslighting', but the metaphor still fails, for most people. So what do I mean when I say 'gaslighting'? Rather than reinvent the wheel, I am going to quote Wikipedia, which says, "Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment, often evoking in them cognitive dissonance and other changes such as low self-esteem." Even that is too complicated, however. We can make it much simpler: gaslighting is a fancy way to refer to perception management - perception management, as an act of undeclared war. It's still worth your while to see the movie; if only to study the portrayal, of an arrogant and masterful manipulator. One might marvel at the skill of the actor portraying the character, in the movie, of Sergis Bauer; but, indeed, dramatic acting is nothing more or less than just that - manipulating perceptions. How many pretenders have crossed the line and been unable to return, spending their whole life pretending to be something they were not? Honestly, Sergis Bauer reminds me of a dozen CEOs I've worked with over the decades. Pretentious predators. There's a lesson in there, somewhere. I've mentioned, previously, that Tom Childers was diagnosed with sibling rivalry when he was a child, but did not receive any treatment for his diagnosis of nascent mental illness. This is of interest, in the context of the above-mentioned movie, because at the end of the movie, it is revealed that Sergis Bauer is driven to lie and to manipulate everyone around him because he insane with a desire to be wealthy; and it's not too hard to draw parallels between Sergis Bauer's determination to be wealthy, no matter what it costs his wife, and Tom Childers' determination to be wealthy, no matter what it cost the others in his family. Originally, my analysis of the events that form this narrative - the death of my grandmother, my mother's subsequent eviction of my family, her abandonment of us, her death, and the discovery that I had been disinherited - was shaped by a belief that my mother was a willing participant in the entire sequence of events. However, as time has passed and I have studied the information that is available to me, another possibility has emerged - the possibility that my mother attempted to negate the disinheritance - and that Tom, abusing his powers, as conservator, interfered with my mother's efforts, while lying to her and assuring her that he had done what she had asked. Such a possibility rests largely upon a prior acquaintance with the parties involved but there is also objective evidence to indicate that this latter version of events may be true. Proving such a thing is difficult, moreso when one takes into consideration the large number of lawyers, judges, and other legal officials whom stand to lose credibility and authority were my version of events to be shown to be true, as this would call into question their competence and attention to detail. However, as someone who has been involved in exposing criminally incompetent legal professionals and judiciary for over thirty years, I am assisted in this matter by the State of California - which has become much more strict about document control and access to originals as they have discovered, time and again, that unknown operatives of unknown agencies were making unauthorized additions, deletions and modifications to court files, so that now, everything is required to be scanned in and archived, in a database, where it can't be changed without leaving traces. I am also assisted in this matter by the COVID-19 pandemic, which is making access to courthouses much more complicated these days - so that even if a crooked lawyer wanted to pop in and yank a few pages out of a file and make them disappear, he or she would find it much harder to get into the relevant buildings, these days. It's still possible that, by sharing with people what I think might have happened, that I am instructing the bad guys on exactly what needs to be added, deleted or modified, and that I am shooting myself in the foot. It's also possible that the California Superior Court has taken notice of these same details and that my older brother, Tom, is wearing an orange jumpsuit, or an ankle bracelet, and is serving a sentence - and that the only reason I don't know is because no lawyer was or is willing to work on this case, for fear of being sullied by my reputation. All that having been said, here is how *I* would arrange things so as to tamper with my mother's will and steal my brother's inheritance, if *I* were a crooked, cocaine-addicted, multiple-BMW-owning, asshole of a conservator. If *I* were suffering from sibling rivalry, I would constantly be on the lookout for opportunities to put my younger brother down. I would not, for instance, tell people that my brother skipped a grade, because that would make my brother look smarter than I was, and I would need to be seen by everyone as the smartest. I would tell people that my brother dropped out of high school. I would not tell them that he left school with a California High School Proficiency Exam certificate, at age 15, to attend City College. I would not want them to get the wrong impression. When my brother followed me into Silicon Valley and became a self-taught programmer and UNIX systems administrator, I would do nothing to help him with his career. When my mother pressured me to help him get a job at the company I worked at, I would pretend to help, but secretly I would sabotage him, and try to get him terminated. I would remain alert for opportunities to cause trouble for my brother, such as intervene behind his back and advise his girlfriends, when they had disagreements, to get restraining orders against him - but I would certainly not let him know that I was doing this, and if he caught on, I would threaten him with a restraining order - which, if he already had been targeted once, would be easy to get, as civil, hearsay-based restraining orders are handed out like candy to children. In other words, I would be a back stabber, a side swiper, a blind sider, and a traitor to my family and my honor. But it would not matter, because nobody would know. Everyone would believe that my brother was a wife beater, especially after I repeated it a few thousand times. I would also remain alert for opportunities to drive a wedge between my brother and my mother, and would never miss an opportunity to lower my brother, in my mother's eyes, when my brother was not there to defend himself. I would engage my wife in doing the same thing, which would be easy as my wife would be a domestic violence sisterhood codependency zealot whose entire knowledge of my brother would come from me and what I said about him when he was not present to defend himself. It's likely that my wife, with very little encouragement, would take it upon herself to punish my brother in various ways for the rest of his life for daring to hit a woman, even though he didn't, and so I would turn her loose, comfortable that she would never admit to herself that she had been played for a fool. If my mother, after returning from the East Coast, where my grandmother had just died, violently, were to announce that she intended to disinherit my younger brother, I would not ask any questions. Or if I did, I would pretend that I did not, lest the answers to those questions incriminate me in my grandmother's murder. If I were to be successful at eliminating my younger brothers - one, homeless and abandoned for twenty years, the other falsely accused of domestic violence and woman hating and driven away from the family - then at some point I would be the only one left to act as conservator - a matter which I would have planned for, over the past ten or twenty years, and which would explain why I had never tried to help my youngest brother escape homelessness - because my baby brother was exactly where I wanted him - sleeping on the sidewalk, and no threat to my plans. But here's where there might be a problem. What if my mother changes her mind about the disinheritance? Mothers have been known to do that. To have mercy upon their children. To think of the future. To think of their grand-children. To think of disasters. Wars. Pandemics. Old people do that, you know. But I'd have a plan for that. I'd have it all worked out. I'd have thought about it ahead of time. And here's what I'd do, if *I* were an MIT-trained, cocaine-addicted sneak thief of a conservator. I'd start by convincing my mother to transfer all her monies to the Mechanics Bank, where I already had an account. Then, I'd look for a lawyer that was located far, far away. This would be difficult, because Mechanics' Bank's Wealth Management offices are located in San Francisco. But the offices of Mechanics Bank are located in Walnut Creek. I'd use this as an excuse to employ a lawyer in Walnut Creek, an hour's drive away from San Francisco. Knowing my mother does not like to use computers, does not like electronic mail, and is not able to sit in cars for long periods of time and in fact is no longer licensed to operate a motor vehicle, I would generously offer to act as her messenger, between her and her lawyer - which I had carefully located, an hour away from Marin, where my mother, and I, both lived, on the other side of the San Francisco Bay. This would allow me to inspect all materials and to remain up to date on the contents of my mother's will, even while she attempted to keep it secret from me. If my mother got talkative one night after a few glasses of wine and told me what REALLY happened, on the East Coast - the burglary, the theft of the will, the theft of the deed, and the death of my grandmother, when she discovered the theft - I just might use my inside knowledge of what REALLY happened, on the East Coast, to pressure Dear Ol' Mom into giving me an advance on my inheritance, so that I could build a home to live in, there, in fabulous Marin County. If my mother started demanding that I arrange for either of my brothers to visit her, I would lie, and tell her that they refused to visit her, while I would conceal her whereabouts from my brothers. I would create artifacts and exhibits to support my narrative, and show them to everyone, while repeating my narrative about how one of my brothers was a homeless bum, while the other brother was a wife beater, and how there was nobody but me to take care of my poor, abandoned, senile, millionaire mother. Maybe set up a Twitter feed so I could talk about how I was helping my niece move, stuff like that. The lawyer would eat it up, hopefully, and not ask any questions or do anything diligent, like verify the accuracy of what he was told. Alerted by my mother's desire to see my disinherited brother, I would be on the watch for any attempts to change the will, as I would have already made plans for my brother's $400,000 share of the inheritance. If I spotted any attempt to change the will, I would unhesitatingly edit the will or, more likely, selectively replace pages, so as to reassemble the will into the form that it originally had. I would have three plans for achieving this end goal. My first plan would be to offer to keep my mother's will on a computer. I could offer to leave the computer at her house. Then I could just make a copy on a USB drive whenever I was there, so that I knew what it contained and so that I had material from which to rewrite the will to contain the clauses that I wanted, cut-and-paste style. Then I could reintroduce the new version onto my mother's computer, print it out on my mother's printer, have her senile self sign it, find an idiot to witness it, scan it in, and deliver it, as a scanned image, via the Internet. If my mother did not like the computer idea, my second plan would be to receive the signed will from her, get on my motorcycle and head for Walnut Creek. On the way, I would detour to a friendly copy shop - or back to my house - and print out the pages that *I* wanted to see in the will. I'd remove the page(s) of paper that I did not like from the will, insert the page(s) that I did like, carefully reinsert the staple, and deliver the modified, but still, signed, document, to the lawyer. If all else failed, my third plan would be to fall on my knees before the lawyer, with my wife at my side, and swear that the woman was senile and that she could not POSSIBLY intend to revoke her disinheritance because my little brother is a WIFE BEATER, and here's my wife to back me up, she SWEARS he's a wife beater, you don't actually plan to give a WIFE BEATER $400,000? He'll just drink it up! Etc. Between these three plans, I would be fairly confident that I would persevere, and succeed in my plan, to rob my brother of his inheritance, and gaslight everyone into believing that one of my brothers was a wife beater, and that the other was a homeless bum. Much of my success would rest upon selecting the right lawyer and so I would be careful to select a lawyer whom either had a reputation for stupidity... a reputation for criminality... or, perhaps, somone I had a prior relationship with, perhaps via a BMW motorcycle gang I had previously belonged to, or via a fellow criminal, from my MIT days. Because I was MIT-educated, I would know for a fact that I was smarter than anyone else in California - a belief that I would reinforce, as needed, with microdoses of cocaine, throughout the day - and so I would be confident that nobody in the California Department of Justice (DOJ) would ever bother to examine the originals under a microscope, looking for indications that the paper used came from two different vendors, and were embedded wit two different watermarks... or, that the watermarks used in THIS will were different from the watermarks found in EVERY OTHER WILL FILED BY THIS LAWYER... or, some peculiarity of the fonts, revealing that THESE pages were printed on a Windows computer, but THAT page was printed on a Macintosh... etc. Yes, it's true, the devil IS in the details, but, confident that the lawyers, judges, and legal personnel were all morons who didn't bother to read the papers that they signed, or filed with the Court - why, they hadn't even noticed where I had stripped my little brother of funds by which to carry out his trusteeship! - I would be pretty confident that nobody would notice anything. Of course, the discovery that my mother killed my grandmother might mess things up, but as long as I wring my hands and act all shocked, nobody will ever suspect anything different. Yup... that's how *I* would steal my brother's inheritance, if *I* were a cocaine-addicted sneak thief of a conservator. It's a good thing I'm not, ain't it?