Money, Money, Money

She was found face down in a creek... only her head was in the water. 
She died sometime during the late night or early dawn.
Her car was found parked by the side of the road.
The car was properly parked, the doors left unlocked.
Oddly, the passenger side door was open.
Her purse was on the front passenger seat of the car.
The car was parked next to a small park in a suburban neighborhood.

The family called me after she hadn't come home that night. They were worried.
I was 3,000 miles away.... so I told them the same thing I'd tell them if we lived in the same house.
"Call the police" I said.
They did and within two hours they found her car, then her body.

She must've walked down the path through the wooded area that led to the stream.
Strewn all over car seat and floor were pills, I believe they were benzos and painkillers.
She was high. For some reason she was escaping reality.
Then some event happened.
Did she trip and fall face down in the stream and hit a rock, black out, then drown?
Was it the pills that brought her down?
Or did she drown herself? Though it hardly seems a way to commit suicide face down in a stream.

Regardless, the coroner concluded suicide, her family disagreed.
They thought it was more like an overdose.
They thought maybe she was a prescription pill addict who hid her addiction with great expertise because they really had no clue she was using valium, oxy, and who knows what else until the tox screens came back postmortem.

A week earlier, she blacked out in her home kitchen at dinner time in front of the husband and kids. 
Everyone was stunned and terrified when they rushed her to the ER.
All kinds of tests proved inconclusive.

I believe they wrote it off as a random single seizure... because she never had seizures before.
I wonder now as I write this whether... had the ER  checked her blood for alcohol and drugs the night she blacked out... they would have ID'd the prescription pill addiction. And maybe that could have been one way to change what turned out to be the inevitable.

Because on the day she was found dead... face down in the stream... she had high levels of  prescribed meds in her system. I don't recall how old she was now. I think in her 30's.

She drove the family corporate ship into a rock and the whole boat sank. All the investors lost their lifetime savings. Her entire family lost their inheritance. All the money went away.

Were she alive today she'd face criminal charge, jail time and a civil suit.  Instead there was her death and a civil suit against her insurance company.

The insurance company refused to pay out. They said she killed herself. There was an one story that the morning she was found dead was the morning  the banker she'd been doing business with  called a meeting involving her. She may have known the jig was up, the insurance company said, and killed herself.

The family said, no way she'd choose that way to kill herself.  Certainly not face down in the stream. The stream she went to was a place she often went to contemplate, get away, she'd gone there since childhood.
Yes, she was high and yes, she knew she a meeting with the banker....however, the family believed she just tripped and fell and drowned.
Or the drugs caused her to black out and  took her down.
Either way, there was a large contusion on her head.

Ultimately, the family won the civil suit against the insurance company. Some members of her family got insurance money, others did not. The investors lost all theirs -- including an 81 year old woman who had her life savings obliterated. Her own mother lost her deceased husband's inheritance and company, which went bankrupt.

I was so curious what she did with all that money.
I think now most of it went up her nose or down her throat.
Or into her kids' and husband's elegant and discreetly extravagant lifestyle... involving designer things and exotic trips.
I believe her husband had no clue she was using or ripping people off.
That's how good people can be at deceiving others.
I was deceived like the rest of them.

The morale of this story is no one is what they appear to be.
Wolves wear sheep's clothing.
Trojan horses carry armies.
Ultimately, the one person we need to rely upon in our lives is ourselves.
So be ever vigilent.
And guard your cash.
There are a whole lot people out there right now trying to separate you from it.