OUR 2023 INAUGURAL CHOICE

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 former good-hearted student of Dorothea, helped her deal with her loneliness and prepared her to retire in a house in North Carolina that Dorothea and Mary Anne had built together. 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 languishing in an assisted living facility. 

The author, Pam Trainor tells her true to life story, as she experienced it. 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’s exploration of our broken Guardianship and Justice systems, combined with Pam's personal story, make 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.