Chapter 6: My Time with a Mafia Maven

 CHAPTER 6: My Time with a Mafia Maven in Central IL

I first saw her rental ad on Craigslist.  I know, I know - seriously don’t go to Craigslist for housing (or anything else for that matter) because that is where all the scammers and crazies are.  I know.  

But desperate times cause desperate decisions.  My 10 year wait for affordable handicapped housing in IL was only 2 years into the 10 year anticipated wait time. And for reasons I do not fully understand, Illinois is currently short AT LEAST a million affordable housing units that it needs to meet IMMEDIATE demand.  And no one is building new units for people making 40k per year (or less) anywhere near the scale that is required.  So, left with no good options and no good choices, I turned to Craigslist.  

I honestly assumed her ad was a scam from the outset because who places an ad on Craigslist for total strangers of Craigslist to come live with them in their Tudor mansion? Literally no sane person does that.   If it seems too good to be true, that’s because it is.  But there were simply ZERO other quasi-affordable options and I did NOT want to return to living in my car again during the Summer on the Central Prairie.  The heat alone would surely kill me. 

So, I emailed her and she wrote back in the most polished and welcoming tone and tenor I have so rarely encountered in this Central IL life.  It didn’t <seem> to be a scam after all, maybe? And thus and so, we set up that Sunday afternoon for me to go view her available room for rent.  Landing upon her large circle drive with her Bentley at the door, I assumed I had made a wrong turn upon arriving.  But just when I was about to pull away -some tall, lean black man dressed in black and white (her butler?) waved me in.  Upon entering, he never introduced himself and seemed to disappear into the woodwork or around a corner into the deep recesses of the home.  And then I turned as she descended down the steep staircase to greet me.

Just Wow. 

  This was a lady who knew how to make a dramatic entrance.  It was a Summer Sunday afternoon in early July 2021 yet she was dressed in a full formal, evening gown that was oddly a mini-skirt in front but had a long train trailing behind.  She had pounds of pearls 

around her neck and 5 rings on every finger and bracelets on both arms that reached her elbows.  Truly, the only thing missing in her ensemble was a literal tiara. 

Um….who does this besides Trump down the escalator - was my first thought.  

And there I stood in my Summer sandals and shorts feeling like something the cat dragged in. 

Fully arresting indeed. 

And yet, as I tried to fix my gaze upon her descent down the stairs, I noticed a stained glass window behind her on the landing in which the afternoon sunlight was streaming through; yet where she was, there was a disorienting darkness.  A deep, void of dark - the edges of which darkened even more and she literally blocked out the sun….

That was oddly unsettling.     

And I remember that first impression of her so vividly sitting here today while penning this Memoir because well - again, who does that? I now know the answer to that unfortunate question. But at the time I found it simply “bizarre.” 

But that first Sunday in July 2021, I met a superficially charming, much older lady who regaled me with stories of her alleged success as a famous high fashion designer in the 80s.  I had never heard of her but that means very little as I was never one to follow designers and fashionable clothing - even in my former affluent life.  She told me she made millions being a high end fashion designer and that she was related by marriage to Jane Mansfield (this, as with almost everything she says, turned out to be a baldfaced lie).  She presented herself as retired and someone who now simply likes to share her home and all of her “appreciable blessings” with doctors, lawyers, nurses, writers and artists by having them stay in her home.  

Okay….maybe….?

I had heard of eccentric old ladies who do this sort of thing to stave off the lonelies after their husbands pass but I had never actually encountered one who DID so In Real Life.  But here one was - and she was offering me a six (6) month lease for $625 a month which would FINALLY bring stability to my housing crisis. And the homeshare came with 2 beautiful house cats named Sammy and Garfield which was, in my mind, a big bonus.  What more could I want? The room was the perfect “writer’s loft” above the garage with a gleaming cherry wood desk for my writing of this Pandemic Memoir.  It seemingly had everything I needed and was simply shocking to me that it was available when literally no other rentals were available in July 2021 in Central IL.

She told me that the black man who greeted me at the driveway was named Ahab and he was her long-term boyfriend.  She told me that another tenant lived there named Judas who was a professor.  She specifically said that no one else resided in the home and it seemed like it would be a really good option for me.  

She took me on a tour of the home and all around the home, in every room, were GIANT selfies, or self-portraits of her - literally everywhere one could place or hang a picture frame. She had 37 large pictures of herself on a mounted altar in her bedroom alone.  And in a room off her dressing and makeup room there was nothing but wall to wall, floor to ceiling mirrors and hardwood floors.  It looked like a ballet studio only without the ballet bars.  How peculiar, I thought to myself.  And then she inexplicably began to twirl in the middle of the room and announced “this is where I look at myself every morning to gaze upon how beautiful I am - for hours even sometimes.” 

Oh. I see.     

I mean she was a vision to behold but more so, a very distorted exaggerated vision of what a pretty person looks like.  You could tell by looking at her that years of plastic surgery was starting to take the inevitable toll so to compensate for that she covered her whole face with this thick, ghastly all white makeup. And to offset that pallor she then had enormous, like ridiculously so, surgically enhanced lips which she painted a startling shade of hooker red.  She had long flowing white hair and stiletto heels.  Literally every single thing about her presentation, including her pounds of pearls, was like a crude parody of what tasteful and elegant would look like if executed correctly.  Well, I thought, maybe she just needed some help with her appearance.  Maybe her eyesight was failing her and she needed some help in this regard.   

I spent hours that Sunday listening to the details of her life and the many stories she told.  When I mentioned that I was writing my first book - a Pandemic Memoir - she said that she was writing her life Memoir as well. When I mentioned my deep Christian faith, she said that I would absolutely love her local Catholic Church and that she and Ahab attended weekly and were devout Christians. When I mentioned that my father had died recently, she told me all about her own father’s death.  I <now know> she was doing something called MIRRORING and it’s something all people like her do.  But at the time - I didn’t catch that.  I mistakenly <thought> I had found a kindred spirit in this life.  And honestly - only 1 thing happened to set my antenna up about her that day - well, besides the dramatic and very dark yet dazzling entrance.  At one point, she offered me chicken salad as a very late lunch and I noted her kitchen was disgusting - as in, it looked like it had not been cleaned in, maybe, YEARS? And there were breakfast leftovers still at the breakfast nook.  She went to the leftover toast from the plates at breakfast and legitimately began to spread the chicken salad on the leftovers half-eaten toast from breakfast. 

I was aghast…as the toast she offered me literally had a big bite out of it.  But not wanting to offend her, I accepted. Fortunately, her cell phone rang almost immediately thereafter and while she took the call I hid my sandwich buried in her kitchen trash can and pretended I had eaten it in my famished state when she returned.  That seemed to placate her. 

Beware of the wolf in sheep’s clothing offering everything you need and always be sure to look the gift horse in the mouth.  That’s all I can tell you, friends. But I signed the 6 month Lease Agreement and on a wing and a prayer - hoped all would be well.     

We agreed that I would move in that week and so I went to my bank and ordered a Cashier’s Check for the first month’s rent that she required. (Having no money because my IDES Pandemic Unemployment claim STILL had not been processed, I called my friend Riley in Georgia again and he was, honestly, just happy that I had found somewhere to live that wasn’t my potentially dangerous car or another hotel - so he eagerly sent me the funds to secure this housing.  God bless all the helpers who helped me along the way of this journey.    

At the bank, I had the Lease Agreement in my hand but I could not read her signature for her last name.  She had told me her first name was Delilah.   I told the teller at PNC what I thought her last name read as (for purposes of the Cashier’s Check being made payable) and some bank employee from somewhere I could not see yelled in an annoyed tone: 

“It is” and I looked around puzzled.  

Yet seeing not the source of the voice I countered to my teller: 

 “Oh, do you guys here know her?” 

And the teller rolled her eyes in the most dramatic way possible and said “EVERYONE knows her.”  I assumed that was because she was a famous fashion designer so I said “Oh, she’s that famous, eh?” to which my teller replied: “Sure. Let’s call her FAMOUS.”  

Oh. 

Nevertheless, I moved forward in this fated mission undaunted.  She <seemed like> a kind gentlewoman with grace and elegance and it was entirely possible that, being a small town, everyone DID know everyone there. I decided to let this obvious warning slide - to my grave peril. I <now> know the hard ugly truth about rural small towns in Downstate IL: yes they are all atrocious gossip mills where everyone makes it their job to know the business of everyone else.  No, we sadly haven’t moved past Mayberry days here in rural Illinois.  So, if you ever find yourself in a small town and want to dismiss the notion that a local woman’s <out loud warning> to you about someone there is just “your own urban inner dialogue” trying to spook you - it’s not.  It’s very real and very true - generally speaking. For some of them truly ARE as bad as you might imagine.    

Never ever disregard your gut instinct on something nor the negative warnings of others - because those are often sent to you by angels watching over you.  I had often heard religious people say “Never go against your Guardian Angel” and I can now tell you that - if you believe in such things in the spiritual realm - it’s 100% true.  Don’t ever do that. Do not do what I stupidly did.  

Yet, at the time, I truly did NOT have any sense of trepidation or foreboding in moving there.  I honestly saw it as a grand adventure that would hopefully solve my ongoing housing insecurity long term.  Also, if I’m fully honest, the fact that she was elderly appealed to me. I missed caring for my Dad and the other elders in that janky nursing home I had been in in 2020 and I reasoned that it would do my heart good to have a new elderly person to look after who was clearly in desperate need of assistance (remember the half eaten toast & filthy kitchen?) so I went into it with the BEST of intentions and looked upon this move with only GOOD vibes.

Oh, grasshopper, how clueless you STILL were. 

But at this time, I did not know what I did not yet know about the deeper levels of spiritual darkness which does, in fact, exist in this World. But I was about to get a front row seat to that very phenomenon.  

My first day there her maid, who was black, kindly helped move my belongings into my room.  The first thing I noticed about Delilah while moving in that day was that I was REALLY <deeply uncomfortable> with the “servile” status of both her black boyfriend and now her black maid in her home.  This woman Delilah seemingly really liked to surround herself with black folks and treat them as nearly nonexistent in the grander scheme of her life…and that was immediately bothersome to me. I then heard her speak in a brutish tone to the maid and say something really quite ugly to her.  She scolded her for manhandling my belongings and told her to “show some respect” to me at once. 

Well…that was worrisome and troubling, at best.  

But the maid honestly looked like such rude remarks from Delilah were not at all uncommon with the Lady of the House…

I moved in on a Tuesday and by that Friday there was what I will ALWAYS refer to as “The Butter Incident” that tripped my trigger for recognizing  “Problem People” in the wild.   

I had ALREADY noticed in my first few days there that Delilah seemed very absorbed in thoroughly highlighting about 5 books on narcissism and narcissistic abuse and she left them all over the dining room table - a central part of the house as well as serving as her “office desk.” When I asked her about it she told me that her live-in boyfriend, Ahab, was a terrible narcissist and very abusive towards her in profoundly cruel ways.  I shared some of what the lunatic landlord had done to me in STL and how the cops had to inform me that he was a narcissist and she very eagerly said: “See! So you understand the abuse. These people are horrendous monsters.”  

Indeed they are ma’am…

But then “The Butter Incident” happened that Friday of my first week living there.  I was leaving to go to Kroger for some groceries and she had Ahab making her breakfast and they were calmly chatting away.  She enthusiastically came up to me and asked me if I wanted to share in breakfast with them but I declined.  She then returned to the kitchen island and inexplicably started murderously SCREAMING at and physically assaulting Ahab.  She went from calm to crazy with a homicidal edge in the span of mere seconds and I just froze.

And she just kept screaming -  loudly and began banging on and on:

“How many times have I told you not to cheat me on the butter. Daddy never gave me enough butter and always gave my sister more than me.  Why do you do this to me? Why do you make me so angry? Why do you do this just to hurt me? Why can’t you be a better man? You are a loser and a cheater and you’re just HORRIBLE to me. You are as horrible as Daddy always was to me…” 

Ahab said literally NOTHING to this outburst…and silently began generously buttering a new piece of toast for her. 

And as my mind processed this scene and began to realize her rage was real and she was trying to literally claw at Ahab, I intervened and told her I would butter her toast.  Ahab, again, seemingly vanished into the woodwork of the home and I did not see him again for HOURS that day.  And when I did see him he made no excuses or apologies for the scene.  Because apparently he was just used to this level of violence over breakfast and for him this was just an ordinary morning with her.  

Oh,..

Well, that was worrisome. 

She tried to immediately cover for her inexplicable rage once Ahab had left the room by telling me that he had tried to strangle her in the overnight hours and she was still a little rattled and on edge by it all.  

Okay…so…an 80 year old woman still banging on about being slighted butter when she was but a child who suddenly turns HERSELF into the victim in the aftermath of her own violence all while claiming the victim actually (privately)attacked her. 

Oh…I see.

I went to my car and literally texted my best friend Elisha in STL: “You aren’t going to believe this but she’s ANOTHER Problem Person Landlord…”

She responded only: “You sure can pick them, can’t you?” 

And to that I want to say this because my Pastor had to explain this to me so that I would stop feeling literally “targeted” by these Problem People in the aftermath of my Dad’s death: there exists a natural enmity in this life between good people vs bad people, the righteous vs the evil and the good ones among us can often feel “targeted” by these predators when the reality is our wholesome goodness, light and love rattles their demons and their inner wickedness.  It’s as if I move in, begin to sus out who and what they TRULY are, collect demonstrable proof and evidence of it and then THEY KNOW that I KNOW what they truly are and they must immediately discard me before I can tell anyone else about their false front of faking being human.  At least by this point, I had gotten my PhD in sociopathic narcissism and I knew NOT to tell her what I suspected about her as I did with that stupid landlord in St. Louis.  NEVER, ever tell them you know.  Just go about quietly trying to escape from them and building anew far away from them where you can be safe from their malevolence and violence.  

And to be fair, at this point, I was not 100% convinced Delilah was a malignant narcissist 3 days into my tenancy --but I had witnessed some worrisome scenes and I was determined to just “observe her in her natural environment” and hopefully - I would be proven WRONG. I resolved to keep an open mind in spite of that troubling encounter I witnessed in the kitchen over breakfast.

Because of my nearly fatal bout with COVID wrecking my life in 2020, I was now eligible for considerable Pandemic Rental Assistance in the State of IL.  My first DAY as a tenant with Delilah included the deadline for applying for this Rental Assistance in 2021 and she eagerly agreed to do so as the landlord. The Program in IL had the Tenant initiate the Grant for past and future rental payments so she completed her portion on the website after I did mine.  I had never applied for Rental Assistance before in my life but I imagined it would certainly get to me by the time August 2021 rent was due.  Oh, grasshopper, how stupid and uninformed you always were…

Why STATE Rental Assistance takes nearly 6 months to receive I will never understand but you cannot tell me that, given electronic payments, this could not be more efficiently managed in the span of a month.  I realize this was an unprecedented Pandemic and the NEED/REQUESTS for Rental Assistance were crushing and overwhelming, particularly in the poverty areas of Downstate IL, but the State truly needs to figure out how to more efficiently expedite this process.  Because in the wait for the Rental Assistance, landlords CAN AND DO get fed up with the waiting for rent monies owed and inevitably either illegally evict the tenant OR take ugly advantage this “debt” and power imbalance such a debt causes and they then do HORRENDOUS things to tenants.  I worked an Eviction Defense case in Chicago with my pro bono work with Eviction Lab there where the landlord raped the tenant every night that he was made to wait for the money.  Then, he evicted her anyway and then kept the full check from the State and re-rented the unit in order to “double profit” off the unit.  Always count on landlords to do shady things when the State fails so catastrophically.  I mention this only because I truly need Governor Pritzker to <fully appreciate> how the failure of the State absolutely causes trafficking to happen among housing insecure and homeless people.  If the “process” only took A MONTH - and they only issued the checks to the tenants to put towards the housing of their choice - the landlords would have less time to take ugly advantage - is all that I am saying.     

That Saturday Delilah and Ahab were heading to the monthly estate sale at the local university.  She told me that they always go to this sale and she invited me to join them.  On the one hand, I still had NO MONEY; but on the other hand people watching the locals at an Estate Sale might be an interesting way to spend an afternoon.  I was hedging on whether I wanted to go or not but then she INSISTED.  And having no boundaries, I allowed her to bamboozle me into going.  That was my mistake.  One that would be repeated for months on end after that first time…much to my grave detriment. 

She had to go upstairs to fetch her purse but she said she would meet Ahab and me at the Bentley in the drive. Standing at the car while waiting for her to join us, I tried to make small talk with Ahab.  But I realized at that moment that the man mumbled a lot and he spoke in almost a whisper in a way that sounded as if he had a mouthful of unshelled walnuts in his cheeks.  Given my profound hearing loss post-COVID, actually hearing him was a near impossibility for me.  So I decided to make random comments about the lawn (because there were no flowers or other pretty garden things to remark upon) and I had no idea what else to say to this man I did not know and could not audibly hear to understand. It was awkward but I tried to muddle through it. 

And yes- I’m so glad you asked.  Yes it was a bit of surreal dissonance being in this considerable Tudor home, staring at a Bentley in the driveway and a Mercedes in the garage and trying to reconcile that with my ongoing penniless plight.  Money and material things simply do not impress me - for I saw how the very rich lawyers lived during my time in the law.  I went to their country clubs and their private boat parties.  I <fit> into this lifestyle and this home seamlessly because I used to BE of that lifestyle.  My home in Georgia was a half million dollar home in one of the most affluent suburbs of Atlanta.  Yet the sheer absurdity with the State of Illinois leaving me penniless FOR OVER A YEAR in never processing my IDES Pandemic Unemployment Claim was just ridiculous.  But, again, IDES simply broke under the full weight of BILLIONS in fraud in Winter 2020 and it simply never reopened or recovered thereafter for regular business.  By this point in 2021, the Springfield Office of IDES (and most others in Central IL) was still FULLY CLOSED and the remaining employees working fully remote.  The IDES employees simply went home, did not process valid claims, and failed to return for nearly 2 full years.  Welcome to IL - it’s not the Utopia of successful liberal governance that most Democrat voters WANT to believe that it is. In fact, my Memoir is nothing if not a fully candid testimony to what an utterly broken and dysfunctional pit it is here in Illinois - if you’re not a millionaire.  But if you are a b/millionaire, everything works great for you in Illinois. 

So, there I was, pondering the many contradictions and absurd dissonance of my life and trying desperately to make small talk with Ahab when I heard her screaming in the distance, growing nearer with her shrieking until she appeared at the front door from inside the house.  And with blood curdling violent screams (again twice in one week) she emerged from the house…dragging a shockingly thin and pale teenager by the hair while beating his face in with her ringed fists.  

I was dumbfounded. And struck stupid staring at this unfolding scene.  

And again, I just froze. I had literally no idea what was happening…or why…

Did she find a robber in the house?  

Yet I noticed the teenager was NOT fighting back against her at all - allowing himself to just be dragged and assaulted by her. And I literally had NO IDEA <who> the teenager was because this was my first introduction to him - her scratching and beating his face in while screaming very real death threats at him…

“I will have Ahab throw you in the Sangamon River and no one will ever care that you’re dead, do you hear me?  No one will even ASK about you - they will assume your stupid drugs killed you.  I can get away with murder and no one ever stops me so you better get on your knees and start begging me not to kill you, Zechariah…”

Finally my brain lurched into gear at this unfolding drama-trauma and I said her name very forcefully as Ahab physically had to pull her off of the kid. She looked at me and prattled on about “how DARE he disrespect me in my own home, how dare he do that. I’m going to kill him. I’m literally going to kill him…” 

I helped Ahab pull her up, off and away from Zechariah and he simply scurried away and ALSO seemed to disappear into the woodwork of that house. 

I looked at her with a long appraising look waiting for her to AGAIN make an excuse for her abhorrent behavior.  But she did NOT.  And Ahab simply folded her shouting body into the back seat of the Bentley and began driving the screaming Miss Daisy to the estate sale -  because for him - witnessing her nearly murdering a teenager in the house - this was just an ordinary Saturday with her.  

Oh. I see…

And the whole ride there she kept screaming about how she was right and Zechariah was wrong and how DARE HE and she kept promising to murder him in his sleep that night etc

By this point, she had screamed enough slurs and slander and violent threats at and about the kid that I had managed to piece it all together: Zechariah was her great, grand nephew from her sister’s side of the family.  He was apparently in the full throes of substance use disorder (addiction) with poly-drug use and he had just been evicted from the apartment Delilah had put him in in the same town because of his drug use.  And because of the eviction, he had nowhere else to live so he had arrived to live there with her again sometime between when I first looked at the rental room I was in and NOW - that day in early July 2021.  He apparently had been an addict for YEARS and no one in the family wanted him living with them because of it. So he landed at her door - because she will take anyone in who is fully dependent upon her for housing and who has no place else to go when she inevitably loses her mind on them.  Because that’s just how she likes her prey - no other good choices and therefore REQUIRED to take her abuse. 

I sat in the car fully silent at this point. In shock and trembling fear.  Fear -  because she was still carrying on in the back seat undeterred and threatening to murder Zechariah.  And at each blood curdling threat, Ahab would just quietly and in a very soothing way say: 

“Now, Delilah, …don’t be that way.  He needs our prayers and our love and understanding and our help and that’s why you brought him here.  Remember you promised to help him and God knows you don’t mean that you will murder him…”

She was having NONE OF IT - his placating her.  She just kept doubling down and screaming her verbal violence and ongoing tirade and tried to CONVINCE ME that her violence in this moment was fully warranted. I finally asked her:

“What exactly did he do that made you so angry?”

Answer: “He had the nerve to tell me I had to knock on HIS bedroom door before entering his room.  Can you EVEN FATHOM the disrespect of that POS loser kid…” Oh yeah - the verbal profanity was in full roar by this point and she was calling him and the mother he descended from literally every ugly and profane name in the regular and Urban Dictionaries.  And the many ugly times she F bombed Jesus Christ Himself during this unhinged tirade was so far removed from her so-called “devout Christian faith” she had told me all about days earlier when I first viewed the rental.  

Quite removed from the calm, classy lady who told me all about her successful fashion career just a week earlier.  This was who she REALLY was and when people show you who they are - BELIEVE THEM - or forever live to regret it.  Her anger is who she really is - the nice part, where she is convincing you she’s the moon and the stars - that’s just a manipulation she engages in to extract from you what SHE wants to exploit.

And as she banged on ceaselessly about “how DARE he disrespect her in her own home” she became even more violent and combative - to an alarming degree. At one point, she began yanking on the car door screaming about going back to the house to literally MURDER Zechariah. She nearly fell out of the vehicle because Ol’ Ahab at the wheel did not realize she had gotten the back passenger door FULLY OPEN and he kept driving - at highway speeds.  I had to reach back from the front passenger seat and pull her back into the car while he pulled over - before she killed HERSELF while screaming into the wind about her intent to kill Zechariah.

Fully unhinged.

Full stop.

There is NOTHING that excuses behavior like this besides acute mental illness.  The sooner I accepted that truth - the better off I would be.   

And so we sat there while she screamed and sent profane, violence laden text messages back to Zechariah.  She kept reading ALOUD what she was sending to him and when I tell you it was intentionally cruel and fully designed to upend any tenuous grip he might have had on sobriety - believe me - it was as ugly as I have ever seen a person be to another.  And that’s saying something - all by itself. 

I finally realized Ahab’s attempts at placating and suggesting prayer were simply not going to calm her and she was so disregulated with no ability to self-soothe or calm herself down from her rage that I could think of only one thing to do…

“So, tell me about your jewelry, Delilah. Your rings and pearls make you so beautiful. You have so many adorning you - and that is just such a unique look that I have not seen before. Tell me about that because I just think it’s so amazing and interesting”…I purposely let my voice trail as I pretended to admire her jewelry…(the truth is, it was tacky and gaudy and way overdone and it reeked of cheap perfume and bad costume jewelry from an unfortunate late night shopping bender on QVC - but who was I to judge?)

And just like that - her rage immediately dissipated as she began to talk about herself and her many earthly possessions.  She loved that I was admiring her and something she was wearing and she remarked: “There’s always all kinds of jewelry at these Estate Sales. I know you lost all of yours to your own drug addict kin.  I will help you find some just like mine here at the sale…”

And just like that - we were all walking into the estate sale pretending like her fit of unhinged raging, murderous violence had never even happened.  

Just wow. 

It was in that moment that I had an uneasy premonition and <just knew> that rage would one day soon be directed at me. I just knew that it would.  These types just cannot help themselves. They rage at everyone and everything and life itself 24/7.  They feel perpetually aggrieved and are never happy.  In fact, happiness to them IS daily combat with those they have pulled into their net snare.  It’s as disordered as it is sad, really.   

At least my PhD in disordered personalities taught me how to handle these uncontained monsters in their fits of wrath and rage: Just pretend to flatter and fawn over them and tell them how pretty and special they are and they instantly turn off the rage like a light switch going off. Which just proves it’s all just performative drama on their part in the first place - so that SOMEONE will bend to their whims and will.  These ‘Problem People’ are fully disordered and a threat to any community in which they live and work.  I cannot stress this enough.     

While at the estate sale, I saw many interesting things.  Delilah kept pulling me to the jewelry cases encouraging me to try on all the jewelry with her.  I studied many pieces there for sale and realized it was mostly all gaudy old costume jewelry and when I asked her about that she said simply: “Why buy the REAL jewels when the fake ones look just as authentic?  Even YOU thought my 15 rings are marvelous and they are all CZs and lab jewelry and no one can tell the difference from a distance so why would I ever spend the money for REAL jewelry? I don’t have any real jewelry and I don’t want any because the cheap stuff - when it’s good cheap stuff - fools everyone into thinking I’m rich and bejeweled anyway.” 

Oh, so this woman was a false front and fraud from the jump.  So noted. 

Her Christianity was also now proven a fraud. Her calm, demure demeanor was a fraud. Her “only 1 other person lives here besides Ahab and I” was a fraud - because I now had met at least one MORE person she had moved into the home since we signed the Lease Agreement a week ago.  There was also apparently some random guy who lived in the basement only 1 weekend a month but paid her for the full month.  So, I guess she thought mentioning him to me when I toured the home wasn’t necessary because why be fully transparent when trying to con your way into landing a new tenant? I am so tired of people being selfish dirtbags who are fully unfamiliar with the importance of telling the truth in all matters…

And thus and so, I absolutely knew on that day of the estate sale in July 2021 that this woman was going to be a problem for me.  Because that’s the thing about these Jezebels with a murderous spirit: you’re the shiny new best friend they love so much - until the day they decide your patina has dulled and they actually HATE you.  And THEN they turn their wrath and unchecked murderous anger on YOU. So it wasn’t a matter of IF, but when, she would decide I was the old, stupid toy she no longer thought was dazzling and interesting and on that day - whenever it was - it would all be curtains for me and my life.

I am so tired of being at other people’s mercy for housing…    

Just so, so tired…

Many people have asked me WHY I didn’t just put my things back in my car and just leave that day.  And that’s a reasonable question. And to that I say that hindsight is ALWAYS 20/20. But also: I had literally nowhere else to go.  No money, no IDES Pandemic Unemployment of 17k I was owed was coming, my Rental Assistance would take MONTHS to arrive and it was now tied to my tenancy with her -  and no other rentals available in Central Illinois.  With my wait on the affordable housing list estimated at 10 YEARS in IL - this big bucket of crazy was as good as it was going to get for me for the foreseeable future.  So, all I could do was hop on and ride the raging rhino carnival ride until she inevitably turned her horns on me. 

Plus, there was the matter of the legal Lease Agreement I had literally just signed with her. I had 6 months to endure this level of crazy OR leave and sue her for Constructive End of Lease - and that would cost a pricey lawyer and who knows how much time and expense?  And if you know these types like I do, you know that you never want to ever set foot in a courtroom with them.  They will testilie and slander your good name and drag you down into the mud with them throughout the whole process.  Because as the old saying goes: Never wrestle with a pig in mud because the pig loves it and you will just get muddy in the process.  Wise and prescient words indeed.    

And so in order to “placate her” in an attempt to keep her calm,I became her de facto indentured servant - full-time.  Just like Ahab was. And just like Zechariah was.  I became her in-house maid, her chauffeur, her spiritual advisor, her legal counsel, her medical advocate, her decorator, her buddy to go shopping and lunching with her and really anything she demanded whenever she demanded it. And this grave power imbalance came about precisely because of my failed and futile attempts to pry my Pandemic Unemployment out of IDES’ dysfunctionally broken system, I had no ability to pay her rent beyond August 31, 2021.  But that’s the thing: even though she was fully paid for July and August 2021 IN ADVANCE she acted as if I had to EARN MY KEEP to stay in her good graces in that house every single day - even when no monies were owed in the beginning.  So when I tell you that the catastrophic failures of the many governmental agencies FULLY FAILING in IL during the pandemic literally cost people their lives and had my life hanging in the balance more than once, please believe me.  There is just no excuse for such a catastrophic systemic failure of so many thousands of people in IL during a global pandemic.  Such a fully broken government literally caused people TO DIE.  And I had to bear witness to so much of it firsthand.  

But as I like to say, I didn’t come this far to ONLY come this far.  I was determined to make it work with her and keep her contained and controlled - no matter the cost.  I just never imagined that she would try and exact such a high price for my ongoing tenancy. Malevolent indeed.

One day, we had to physically turn in our applications for LOCAL rental assistance at the nearby Community Fund Office.  I reckoned why not try BOTH, State and local - hoping that just PERHAPS - the LOCAL rental assistance would be processed more expediently.  At this same time, she completed a fraudulent application for local rental assistance for Ahab, her shack up boyfriend, too.  I asked her about it and she said: “It’s the only way I will ever get any money from him.  I have to falsely pretend he’s a tenant in order to force them to give me money for him. I’ve done it before and it has sometimes paid off so I figured the Pandemic cash will be easy to get.” 

Oh. I see. 

So, she wasn’t above lying, signing false affidavits, manufacturing false Lease Agreements etc in order to steal funds she was lawfully not entitled to.  Just great.  What a shining star of a human being she was. 🤨🙄

And as we left the building I remarked upon the presence of a food pantry in the building.  She began to look around and eye it all as we left the building.  It was 3:30p and they closed at 4p that day and there was a pallet of bagged onions sitting outside for the food pantry that needed to be taken inside by an employee.  She seamlessly grabbed 2 bags of the onions and threw them into her trunk.  I told her she could NOT steal onions from the food pantry because those were reserved for poor people and they kept a count of such things. And I just kept repeating how one simply does NOT steal from a food pantry….

She replied: “Who’s gonna stop me? I drive a Bentley.  That allows me to do whatever I want.  Just watch - nobody will stop me!”

And just like that - Nobody did stop her from stealing from the food pantry - including her fully missing conscience.    

Just wow.

Seriously, who steals onions from a food pantry for the poor when they drive a Bentley and live in a tudor mansion? She does.  Because she is nothing if not arrogant, entitled and always trying to grift, steal and scam that which she is not entitled to have.

On another day while I was feeding and loving on her cats, Sammy and Garfield, she told me how she came to have the cats.  Sammy was a friend’s cat and when the friend went unexpectedly into the hospital for emergency surgery she asked Delilah to watch her cat, Sammy.  She did but she decided while the friend was hospitalized that she wanted Sammy for herself and she just stole him from her friend.  She told the friend that he darted out one night when she went over to feed him and she just couldn’t catch him.  The friend is likely, to this day, still looking for her cat.  Then she told me that Garfield actually belonged to a house up the road from her house, out of her gated community, and she saw him in a yard one day and just had to have him because he was just so pretty in all of his orange fur glory.  So, she waited until she saw him ACROSS THE STREET one day, on a nearby playground, and she just drove up and scooped him into the Bentley and off she went with him.  

Another day she told me the story of how she came to have her house in Illinois.  Apparently, she lived in it for many years with a paramour of undetermined status in her life until she decided she wanted the house to herself - even though BOTH of their names were on the deed.  She told the story of picking Ahab up in California on a trip out there a few years back and bringing him back with her specifically to help her terrorize this guy who both found and purchased the home for them; but she, eventually, blackmailed him into putting her name on the deed.  As she told it, she and Ahab terrorized the daylights out of that poor man and attacked a friend of his in the middle of the night with a baseball bat - permanently hobbling him.  The two men fled from the home, leaving all of their belongings in the house, never to enter the home ever again.  And that’s how she and Ahab came to live in the tudor mansion. 

Ok great. So, this Jezebel with a murderous spirit stole both her cats AND stole the house she lived in from the rightful owners.  For those keeping track at home, there is simply NOTHING this woman will not do to get whatever she wants. Simply because she feels ENTITLED to take it.   

How hideous. How truly and unspeakably hideous she was.  

But in becoming her indentured secretary, legal counsel and bookkeeper, I began to review so many of her personal, financial and medical documents that she gave to me that I became immediately alarmed for her finances, too.  By all outward appearances, she was a very rich woman living the high life.  But scratch the surface of her banking records, and you soon realize this woman was fully financially insolvent.  And THAT is the true reason she had to have tenants living with her in her home.  She was literally desperate for cash herself.  

She had her property where I was but then had another in California where she lived for many years.  That house had 2 “second mortgages” on it and she owed more than it was worth at this point.  Her house in IL she mentioned she TRIED to get a lower payment and a lower interest rate with a refinance deal during the pandemic but according to her “that was a big mess” she needed me to unwind for her.  Also: she had massive credit card debts.  Her spending far exceeded her income despite multiple tenants in both houses in both States.  When I asked her about it she blamed Ahab.  She said “he hasn’t contributed even 1 penny since I brought him back here with me from California 5 years ago.  He’s married to someone else in CA but keeps telling me he will divorce her.  She’s a millionaire so she obviously doesn’t want to divorce him and have to pay him lots of money.  But Ahab is penniless without me and he even gets EBT/SNAP because he is such a pauper.  Can you believe that he makes ME support HIM?” 

No - what I cannot believe is that you are so indiscreet and without any sense of decorum whatsoever that you just divulged all of his obviously very personal financial information to me. That was my running INTERNAL dialogue but I, of course, did not say THAT out loud to her.  Because I had learned early on that I must ALWAYS agree with her or have her fly off the hate handle AT ME.  So I said: “Gosh, Delilah, that’s really awful.  It must be so hard to be you. Why do you allow it to continue? Because, you know, as Dr. Phil likes to say: “The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior” and I just really worry about your shaky finances and your ability to dig out from all of this if significant things don’t change really quickly for you…” 

She replied: “Oh, I know, I scream at Ahab nightly about his lack of financial contribution to my home and all he ever says is he will ask her AGAIN for a divorce. We get into it regularly, often engaging in very violent arguments and fights.  It gets really ugly.  But can you believe he leaves me carrying the whole load?”

Actually - I could believe it. The maid had told me that Ahab was rather disreputable and had a criminal record for several scams he ran in California.  So, despite his assertions of also being a devout Christian too, it would seem that Ahab was a lifelong grifter who never amounted to much of anything at all and who simply married one rich woman and lived with another in order to stay in the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed.  He was a disloyal dirtbag - I sensed it long before the maid told me the score and long before I saw him meeting another woman across town one afternoon about halfway through my tenancy.  I never told her what I saw that day but I sure recorded it so I would have proof of just what a disloyal dirtbag and weak man he is - should I ever need the proof.  But Delilah was the type of person you could show her ironclad irrefutable proof of something and she would just casually dismiss it out of hand because it simply did not fit with her opinion or her false narrative on the topic.  So, I assumed I would never need to have a “heart to heart” with her about her married-to-someone-else shack up boyfriend in an effort to “be a friend to her” in that regard because she was absolutely the type to a) kill the messenger and b) ignore the evidence and believe his disloyal word on the matter so I kept that nugget of knowledge to myself all this time. 

From the outset in my work for her, she told me initially that she was a victim of so many “scams against the elderly” and THAT was why her finances were such a wreck.  Naturally, this caused me considerable concern because I never want that to happen to ANY elderly person.

Then there was the matter of all the scams and grifts and unlawful frauds she herself was apparently running.  In addition to the false request for Rental Assistance for Ahab which, apparently, she had done MULTIPLE TIMES during the pandemic, she also was running credit card scams.  She literally paid for EVERYTHING in life with her credit cards.  Then, when one amounted to $40k or so, she would report it as “stolen by an errant tenant or her drug addict nephew in the home” and just like that - the credit card companies would wipe the debts clean upon her completion of a fully false credit card Affidavit of Fraud.  I mentioned to her that doing that was a felony and she just laughed and said: “Oh, honey - I’ve been doing it for years and they always believe me because I’m rich.  There are so many advantages to being rich in this life - just one being that everyone automatically has to believe EVERYTHING I say.”

Oh. I see. 

She was absolutely, with intent, fully breaking the law and just did not care.  Good to know where her moral compass was: in the trash can.   So, it did not really matter to her - whatever lie she had to tell in order to unjustly enrich herself- she was ready to do it.  She was just that criminal and simply that entitled in this life. 

Just wow.   

She then started to brag about all the Pandemic cons she had gotten away with so far with all the Pandemic money floating around. She said that she received $17,000 in Pandemic Unemployment she wasn’t entitled just by filling out the IDES Application online.  She then, when the funds dwindled down to about $300, reported the IDES Claim itself as fraud against her by the errant resident drug addict in her home and they fully absolved her of all of it. That way, if anyone ever reviewed her fraudulent IDES claim she would be ON RECORD as having reported the fraud HERSELF.  

“They just sent me a debit card with all the money already preloaded and we ate dinner out at fine restaurants every night of the week and went on 2 vacations with the money because the State of IL is just so stupid and they give money to anyone in these programs - you just need to know how to lie and submit false documents that LOOK real. Illinois is the most corrupt State in the Country.  This is literally what EVERYONE does here. How do you not know that?” she implored me. 

(Gee, Delilah, I dunno, maybe because where I come from everyone actually WORKS for a living and honestly pays their bills as owed?) 

Just great - add a totally corrupt criminal to my knowledge of who she was as a person.  Knowing she was filing false affidavits for at least as long as the whole pandemic and fraudulent applications for Pandemic Funds with every IL Agency handing out Pandemic monies - money she was never entitled to receive - could translate to an immediate legal liability for ME now that I realized what a grifter, conjobbing robber scammer she truly was. I had a legal obligation as an officer of the court to REPORT all of her crimes that I had firsthand knowledge of from working for her and seeing the documents and from the confessions she confided to me.  She just automatically expected, though, that I would be as big of a criminal as she is.  

And that was her mistake. 

She then boasted about another con she had been running FOR YEARS: apparently she got paid to be Ahab’s nonexistent home health aide.  She said she filed paperwork with a friend of hers who was the director at a local home help agency and she just gets paid money for doing nothing at all for him.  She then said: “You know all those times we are out but I had to come back home and fiddle with my phone in the garage? That was me “signing out of work for the day” because they go by GPS tracker and you have to physically be at the home you claim to work at.  So I can check in to work in the morning but then run off to the country club for lunch and fun all day and just be sure to return around 4pm to log out so I get paid and they don’t get suspicious.  My friend runs the home health agency. I’m sure we can get you in on a fake contract, too, dear. My friend will set up any fake contract that I tell her to so I know she will do it as a favor to me.  Then you will have money to pay me rent!”

Aye Yi Yi. 

(Sigh.)

Needless to say, I told her I would not be joining in on her merry band of criming with all the IL agencies who just let her get away with it all.  She seemed genuinely perplexed by MY HONOR and my steadfast refusal to just go along with her rampant crime spree.  Go figure. 

So then I had to tell HER that I could do no additional paperwork for her involving her finances without somehow tipping her off that I refused to be a complicit criminal WITH HER in all of her financial scams.  Because that is just what she expects from all of her sycophants - obedience and compliance - no matter how unlawful or illegal her demands. So, I essentially told her that I was very behind on my Pandemic Memoir and that I had so much work of my own to do that I just could not help her anymore.  As you might imagine, that did not land very well with her, because you can truly never refuse these disordered types of people - anything. Ever. 

But at this particular time, I knew that she was laser focused on filing a nonviable plastic surgery medical malpractice claim and, because all lawyers she took the dog of a potential case to for handling refused her and the case - she wanted ME to somehow turn it into million dollar magic for her. According to her, the statute of limitations was about to toll on the case and she wanted to either force the doctor to settle with her OR file suit.  I told her I would work solely on that, moving forward, as that had the most potential payoff for her which would alleviate her many financial crises.  The added bonus is that working on a known dog of a future med mal case would not put me in LEGAL peril as handling her troubling finances would.  That seemed to placate her sufficiently, thankfully.  But to be clear, an 80 year old woman complaining that she doesn’t look 25 again after a facelift is a nonviable legal case from the jump.  I knew this; but she did NOT and I planned to PRETEND to work on this for her so as to not TOUCH any of her “criming and illegal scams and financial frauds” she was then running. She may have lured me with her false narrative of “I’m the victim of so many scams against the elderly” but she would not keep me lured into her illegal trap house now that I knew she was, in large part, the criminal actually running most of the scams. 

But as fate would have it, I also began to realize that although she was certainly a Jezebel with a murderous spirit, she was also suffering from profound dementia.  She lost everything, could remember nothing and had zero recall on any information conveyed to her in conversations - about half of the time. Her cognitive impairment was acute and getting worse by the day.  I was unaccustomed to THIS LEVEL of profound cognitive impairment because, in caring for my Dad for the last 10 years of his life, he remained mentally sharp as a tack until the day he died at age 90. But she confided to me that her mother “was put away” because of dementia and she worried about her future with no one to care for her.  She had literally no one who cared about her in spite of a large extended family, including sisters, because she had also conned and robbed everyone in her own family through the years and they were not on speaking terms.  

I actually spoke to her sister several times and she told me the many critical details of her life that Delilah left out. According to her sister, Delilah had coerced BOTH parents to leave both of their considerable estates to only Delilah - and she thereafter squandered it all.  After their father died and she plundered all of the proceeds from that to herself, she then did the same for the mother and then invited her sister to visit where she proceeded to regale her sister with all of her “winnings” from conning the dementia mother into leaving EVERYTHING to her.  The sister was so livid she fled and never spoke to her again. Ever.  

The sister also told me the REAL story of Delilah’s only child.  Delilah had told me he was murdered and that she was THE VICTIM of a murdered son.  But the truth was, she caught him dressing up in her stockings and bras as a little boy and she terrorized him FOR YEARS afterwards - driving him into lifelong addiction.  He finally fled her and went to live with her sister - in hiding.  But Delilah eventually hired a private detective and learned that the sister was harboring HER son and protecting him from Delilah’s malevolence and violence.  Shortly thereafter, Delilah showed up at the sister’s doorstep in a violent rage.  The son was so terrorized by this he FLED THE COUNTRY.  Shortly thereafter, he died of a fatal drug overdose in a gay bar in the Philippines.  What a truly tragic life for her son.  At least he is finally free from her and at peace in death - a peace she NEVER afforded to him while he was alive.  

FULL STOP.

Yes, she indirectly caused the death of her own son. 

There is no writer’s word trick I can employ here to “gloss over” that ugly truth.

As far as her entire extended family was concerned, Delilah essentially murdered her own son by driving him into despair - and they were absolutely correct.

And what did the “good Christian” Delilah do when God took her son from her? She cursed God and turned to worshipping Scientology which told her she was not to blame for his death; but rather, it was his weakness & human failure of being an addict & having anxiety & depression that caused him to kill himself. Because why not embrace a cult that will absolve you of any personal accountability or responsibility when the one true God fully rebukes your wickedness and your evil life? Count on Delilah to pay tens thousands of dollars over 20+ years to have total charlatans tell her that her son is dead because he was weak & stupid and intentionally seducing the demons of depression & anxiety to control his mind & ruin his own life. 🙄

And she made a very public victim of herself for it (without mentioning she CAUSED his death through her ridiculing, stalking and terrorizing of him) to anyone who would listen to her bang on about the very tragic death of her only child.  She had done it to me my second week living in her house.  When I mentioned my Dad passing she immediately launched into how her grief was SO MUCH WORSE because she lost her father and her son and he was her ONLY CHILD.  Ok, I wasn’t trying to have a contest with you, lady.  You asked me if my parents were still alive, that’s all. 

But I began to notice something thereafter regarding the relationship between Delilah and Zechariah.  He had a drug addict for a mother who had been fully absent his entire life; so he was desperately searching and longing for ANY mother figure in his life - specifically one who would love and accept him as an addict and not ask him to NOT use drugs all day every day.  Delilah had lost her own son to addiction.  So, to her, Zechariah served as this mental “second chance” as a sort of a son ‘stand-in’ for her.  She could still rage on and on at him for being a failure on every level BUT - since he quietly and submissively accepted her abuse of him - she constantly awarded him with cash and gifts after any particularly heinous assault of him.  And to be clear: she did not give him gifts to APOLOGIZE for her abhorrent behavior towards him.  She gave him gifts to ensure he would stay to take more, FUTURE abuse, from her.  Because she definitely craved her own violence and constant drama she alone created against her regular punching bags (housemates) on the daily.  And we are all she had - because everyone else who had any other option for housing had left her with no forwarding address YEARS ago. And her own family would have nothing whatsoever to do with her.  

Yep - she was full tilt awful alright. 

But accordingly, there existed this bizarre dynamic between Zechariah and Delilah that can only be described as a folie au deux - which is a delusion or shared mental illness shared by 2 people in close association.  He longed for a mother she would never be for him and she longed for the son she (indirectly) murdered.  So in their mutual longing for that which they both would never have - they engaged in this constant drama of her beating on him and being emotionally violent towards him and him just taking the abuse from her -hoping that would make her love him. No one ever told Zechariah that you shouldn’t have to pay for love with your bones and your flesh.  Pat Benatar was right: Hell truly is for children. 

But Delilah’s own advancing dementia was pronounced in 2021.  She routinely could not remember what day it was, she often could not finish her own sentences and she often got lost when out in public and could not remember the way home - which is why she always wanted either Ahab or me to go out with her.   She would lose 4 pairs of sunglasses in the span of 15 minutes and become so hysterical and animated over it that she would begin to accuse everyone in the house of stealing the lost sunglasses from her.  

Just why? Why would anyone even do that? I can’t wear sunglasses because I wear prescription glasses to see and the men in the house certainly were not going to steal them to wear “Gucci Cat Sunglasses” so why the theatrics of accusing everyone in the house of stealing from her when she fully knew she just had them in her own hand? Because by accusing everyone else she unwittingly drew them into the SEARCH for her sunglasses - because no one wanted to be so casually accused of such a terrible thing as stealing from her.  It was truly constant chaos amid constant accusations - usually aimed at Zechariah “stealing everything from her to sell it for drugs” as she claimed he already had done.  But invariably we would find her keys, her sunglasses, her sewing kit, her fingernail polish etc in the house or car where she left them.  But dealing with someone in full denial of her own mid-stage dementia diagnosis is problematic, AT BEST.   Add to that the paranoia that comes with a demented Cluster B personality disorder and you have a truly disordered human being who rages at everyone within spitting distance of her the mere minute something goes even marginally awry.  Because that’s another thing about these “Problem People” in the wild: they have ZERO frustration tolerance amidst their own inability to navigate life like everyone else somehow manages to do.  No, with these people, you literally have to spoon-feed life to them one tiny teaspoon at a time then stand back and wait for their praise or their rage.  

It’s all so exhausting.

She once lost her car keys and it took the entire household over 2 hours to find the keys where she misplaced them.  The entire 2 hours she accused Zechariah of stealing her car keys because, she accused, he was planning to steal her Bentley in the overnight hours and go out drugging with all of his druggie friends.  And poor Zechariah - he just faithfully kept steadfastly looking for her lost keys with the rest of us while having to endure her slanderous tirade of theft and planned drug shenanigans.  But he, like me, had literally nowhere else to go. After his recent eviction for drugs and only a part-time job at McDonalds, literally no one else in town would rent to him and most of the rest of the family had apparently long ago tired of the drama that addicts can cause with their substance use disorder when it stretches over YEARS. He was 20 and already had one out of wedlock child that he could not support. His life was quickly circling the drain right when he should be launching his life into great plans. And to be perfectly candid, Zechariah was disarmingly beautiful. He could very easily go be a runway model for Polo or the like- because he was just <that> flawlessly beautiful in a waif thin & fully detached sort of way and possessing the dead eyes of trauma all models seem to have. He absolutely could go seize that gig. But sadly, Substance Use Disorder is truly life-ruining and all addicts have my sympathy and compassion for I know in dealing with my own lifelong crack addict niece, it’s hard for everyone involved. But as for Delilah, being broke, desperate and vulnerable with no life plan and no place else to go was just how she likes her housemates as we were therefore entirely at her mercy for ongoing housing.  

How horrifying for us all.    

During my time as a tenant there, I began to notice something else truly unsettling.  I had only met Judas, the other tenant, that one day when I first looked at the room to rent.  And I had YET to see him except for seeming “mad dashes” he made to his car early in the mornings before she ever got up.  One day I literally accidentally banged into him while he was trying to sprint off to his car as I was rounding the corner into the kitchen.  He was pleasant and all but I joked about him “mad dashing it to his car” and how I had seen him do that several times already. I asked him rather pointedly if he was trying to avoid HER and he said: “Yeah, totally - I purposely try and cut and run from here early enough so that I never have to engage her. You’re better off if you do the same. I see you down here trying to be all things to her and all I can tell you is: don’t do it.  She will never be thankful and she will only use it against you and resent you for it.  Your best bet is to keep your distance and tell her nothing about you or your life…”

Huh, so apparently Judas had figured out exactly what she was also. And he was determined to give her a wide berth and never engage.  Wise course of action - INDEED.  

He also told me that her Dad was mafia and that he forced all of her ugly fashions into the fashion houses in California - under threat of death if they did not comply.  So THAT is how she came to be a “famous fashion designer” in her younger years - by Daddy’s mafia connections and murderous influence.  And honestly THAT tracked and made much more sense to me than the story SHE told me.  Because by this point, I had seen some of the clothes she had created and, even for the flamboyant 80s, they were “yikes” in design and color.  

Judas also made vague references to Delilah and Ahab having murdered another tenant before I arrived there.  He always said this with an “aw shucks, can you believe it?” attitude so I never really knew what to make of Judas and this admission that he knew they had killed before.  He one day told me that he had no choice but to be her willing sycophant - to an extent - because her mob connections could either open doors for him at Universities he sought to teach at; OR, they could forever imperil his chance of teaching anywhere in all of Central Illinois.  

Great. So essentially Judas lived in abject fear of her total devastation of his life, too.   

But sadly I did not take that wiser path that Judas so frantically admonished me to take - that of just trying to AVOID Delilah. I chose the path of caring for someone I should be able to trust but who I knew I could not  - because being good to people who don’t deserve it and who ultimately betray me the first chance they get is apparently just what I excel at in this life. 

One day while we were out shopping she opened her large purse to get her iphone and one of the many “narcissistic abuse” books fell out onto the floor by my feet. As I handed it back to her she looked at me like a little child and said matter of factly: “You know, I tell EVERYONE that I read these books because of Ahab and how mean he is to me but in reality I read them for me.  I just cannot believe brilliant doctors write all of these full books all about ME.  Plus, the doctors go into great details about how other narcissists terrorize their victims and I love to read them to get new ideas.  Isn’t that just fabulous that these books are all written about me?  In that, they will be a lot like YOUR book!” she exclaimed. 

To that I replied: “My Pandemic Memoir is actually about homelessness and the suffering in our janky Medicaid nursing homes, Delilah.” 

And she dead-ace said, without missing a beat: “Yeah, but nobody cares about POOR PEOPLE.  Nobody wants to read all about THAT.  You should write a book all about ME and then I could star in it when it becomes a blockbuster movie!”

Sure, you could, sweet cheeks.  And monkeys might fly to the moon, too.   

And thus and so, in the ordinary course of things I would begin my days cleaning her filthy and unkempt kitchen and making her coffee and her breakfast - because I always awoke much earlier than she did.  Then, she would invariably pull me into her phone calls and all of her paperwork - despite my protestations that I needed to spend the day on my writing and work.  That did not matter - her needs always trumped whatever I needed to do.  And that’s just the way that it goes with those types.   

One afternoon she began telling me about ALL of her own sordid money problems. She said there was this loan she was trying to get with a “select agent” that she found on Facebook. When I began asking specific questions about it it became immediately apparent to me that it was a scam.  The scam went something like this: Some lady unknown to her on Facebook had contacted her about a homeowners GOVERNMENT GRANT she was entitled to receive for being a homeowner in her zip code.  The agent was promising anywhere from $50,000 - $150,000 all depending upon how much money she put forth in earnest money for this alleged “government grant for homeowners.” I tried to tell her that there was no such thing as a government grant that you pay for - that same was not a legitimate offer - and that it was no doubt a scam.  She began to argue with me and said: “Look, I desperately need this CASH GRANT and my neighbor already received $150,000 from this same agent and I need that money because I’m going broke.  Ahab hasn’t paid one penny to me since he became my shack-up, married to someone else, live-in boyfriend, so I HAVE TO HAVE THIS GRANT MONEY. You don’t understand - it IS LEGITIMATE. And even if it is a scam for other people it will be legitimate FOR ME because I’m Delilah and I’m special and everything just always works out for me.”

Alrighty then…

I mean, what can you even do with a not-based-in-reality entitled mentality like that?   

So I told her that I understood ALL OF THAT but that it did not sound legitimate to me.  I asked her for the woman’s info so I could research her on Facebook myself and do due diligence on the woman and Delilah quickly complied and said: “Perfect you will see it’s all legit and I will have my $150,000 by tomorrow. I have already completed the application and was approved. You’ll see!”

Oh PLEASE TELL ME you did not give this scammer your personally identifying information already…   

She replied: “Well of course I did - how else was I going to get the money?” 

“Did you already send her ‘your $10k cash’ in order to unlock this alleged government grant?” I demanded. 

She replied defiantly: “No. But I was just about to this afternoon when I started talking with you!”

So I did some fast research on the lady and realized she did not exist on Facebook AT ALL nor in real life.  And the picture she was using as her “profile pic” was that of another woman, unconnected to the scam, who was a realtor in Des Moines, Iowa.  So I said to Delilah, who was STILL adamant that this scam was a legitimate business deal: “Why don’t we walk over to your neighbor who she allegedly already helped with the grant and talk to her about this woman?” 

“That’s a great idea - you’ll see I’m right and you’re just wrong.”

“Ok, that’s fine.  Let’s just go talk to her now and see what’s up.”

This theme of her having to prove me wrong would replay over and over again during the entirety of my tenancy and work with her.  And guess what? I was not proven wrong even once.  Which is to say this: When someone is this fully unable to handle their own financial affairs and falls for literally every scam that shows up on Facebook targeting the elderly like her, it’s a real shame when that person has literally NO ONE to care that she is in such a bad way.  Because with no guardrails, no one is watching what she is doing and what happens is literally anyone’s guess.  She purposely PREVENTED Ahab from every reviewing her finances so I assumed he had no idea how perilous their money situation was.  She told me she often “caught him” stealing all of her banking statements so he could pry into her business.  Again, she painted herself as the victim and Ahab as the aggressor and that tired old trope was wearing really thin by this point.  

She also got into 3 single car accidents in 2 months because her ability to drive was declining so appreciably.  But Ahab certainly wasn’t going to be the ADULT in the home and demand her car keys - and face her inevitable wrath therein.  So he just passively allowed her to continue on unabated - both driving and falling for multiple scams online.  He literally didn’t give a single care about her at all - except for her ability to keep being his high end meal ticket - and that was evident to me in everything he did and everything he FAILED TO DO for her.  

But thus and so, we went over to ask her neighbor about the government grant she allegedly received and, of course, her neighbor was horrified and confirmed that she NEVER received any such government grant.  The neighbor then became fearful that SHE would be targeted by this “agent” as well and she had so many questions about why the scammer chose her to use with Delilah. I told her she likely was just randomly chosen as one of Delilah’s Facebook friends who lived within her same neighborhood/zip code to make the scam seem that more legit; yet, I suggested that she should take her cellphone and have it assessed for malware or viruses or trackerware etc by her cell phone provider.  She agreed and left to do that directly. 

As we walked back home, Delilah said to me triumphantly: “SEE - I knew it was a scam.  I’m too smart for those scammers though and she wasn’t going to get a penny from me.” I replied: “You literally had your finger on the SEND button to authorize the transaction today, Delilah.  What do you mean you KNEW it was all a fake scam?”    

She then INSISTED for the next 45 minutes that she was the brains of the house and how clever SHE was to have rooted out this illegitimate scam all by herself!  And just like that:  the “Problem Person” rewrites history gaslighting reality in order to save her own wholly embarrassing face in the matter. I didn’t get a thank you, a heck you or anything for sparing her from this grave scam where she almost gave a complete stranger, on Facebook, whom she did not know - $10,000.  No really, Delilah you’re welcome.I was just glad to be of service and happy to help.  You’re welcome. I’m so glad I could save you $10,000.  No problem at all.”  👀🙄

Another afternoon,I began reviewing a mortgage matter she gave to me to assist her on but I realized she had ALREADY fallen for a significant mortgage scam therein. Essentially, she (again) gave a total stranger from Facebook $60,000 to make her mortgage payments FOR HER and simultaneously achieve a lower interest rate and a lower monthly payment.  Google “Reliance Financial Pandemic Mortgage Scam” and you will see countless others also bamboozled by these fraudsters during the early days of the Pandemic. Why ANYONE would hand over $60,000 to a total stranger online without doing any Due Diligence is beyond me but in this case the money was gone and she was quickly going from Pandemic Mortgage Forbearance of 18 months right into mortgage FORECLOSURE due to failure to pay her original mortgage holder.  In the interim of the 18 months, her credit had tanked and her mortgage with Chase had been sold to Deutshe Bank for a much HIGHER “bad credit” interest rate.  They were demanding a balloon payment from her of $90,000 which she did not have because she was flat broke.  She had already “maxed out” the equity in her CA home so she was literally at risk of losing her Illinois home if she did NOT come up with a payment by the end of October 2021.  She had only a month and no good options.  She had no real jewels to sell for cash and no furs. Her Bentley was a Lease (of course) and was costing her $800 month. She was maxed out on several credit cards and thoughtlessly spent $300 every time she stepped into any store - including the grocery store several times per week.  The woman was literally hemorrhaging cash.  She wasn’t even close to being rich.   She was in a $200k home which itself already had a second and a third mortgage on it, as well.  She was penniless and living entirely on second and third mortgages, financial scams AND other people’s money - any that she could beg, steal or grift. 

 She was, herself, completely dead broke - despite all of her unending efforts at scamming money from the State of Illinois, credit cards, and unwitting workers and tenants.  She was 80 years old and did not know how to manage money - AT ALL.  She had 5 ex-husbands she took to the cleaners in the State of California during her younger years and she always lived off her “divorce winnings” and then would just latch onto a new one when the well ran dry.  Well, that ruse had ended when she took on a penniless, married boyfriend named Ahab and shacked up with his pauper status for 5 years.  We are, in effect, the sum total of our individual choices in this life.

But that point does bring me some measure of comfort when I think back upon it all now: the fact that she was GETTING SCAMMED by other online scammers just as fast as she was trying to scam and defraud everyone else will always be amusing to me.  Don’t ever try to tell me that God doesn’t have a funny sense of humor along with his sense of righteous justice in the face of wicked evildoers.        

   But amidst this spiraling and escalating mortgage fraud/financial crisis of her own making, she became hostile and belligerent towards ME. (I warned you that the murderous spirit of hers would one day be turned on me and here we were.) She decided, in her infinite wisdom, that I was the single cause of all of her financial problems because I had not paid rent for September and it was now early October.  She agreed, when she entered the Pandemic Rental Assistance Program as my landlord, to not evict and to await payment - however long that took.  I was technically only “behind” one month by early October (for the month of September) and she was entitled to only 3 months of rent under my IL Tenant Rental Assistance Grant.  The rest of the $6500 would go to repay Riley for fronting the funds  for my hotel stay from December 2020 through April 2021 as he was my de facto landlord since hotels were covered in the Eviction Moratorium in IL during the Pandemic.  I really needed to repay what was owed to him because without his help when literally every other State Agency in IL fully failed me during the height of the pandemic - I surely would have died.  

But there Delilah was - in all of her entitled and indignant malevolence - insisting that my $1200 owed to her through the end of October for rent was the single point of failure in her fully failed and catastrophic finances.  She was becoming more combative and violent by the day as her stress skyrocketed with the very real threat of perhaps losing her own home.  And Ahab, as usual, was no help to her.  It’s not like he was going to actually divorce his millionaire wife in CA, get his settlement and help his shack-up girl out of her financial crisis.  No, as I reckoned it, ol Ahab was planning to ride the Delilah meal ticket until it inevitably crashed, or she died, and then return to CA to his much younger and wealthier wife.  And that was a GOOD plan if you were Ahab and a TERRILE plan if you are fully broke Delilah.  

Coupled with her financial crisis in October 2021, Delilah suddenly announced a life-threatening brain and lung cancer diagnosis.  I will admit, I was skeptical - at first - but only because her sister had told me she had been running “fake cancer scams” for YEARS in IL and living off the charitable compassion of her fellow townies.  She had apparently run at least 5 cancer scams in the past according to her sister, so hearing an all-of-a-sudden “cancer catastrophe” from Delilah wherein she was given a very bleak prognosis honestly struck me as some kind of scam by her.  And it was - just not the usual one…  

She announced her immediate need for brain cancer craniotomy that would happen at Mayo Clinic within DAYS in late October.  But prior to that, she was required to pass a 3 hour mental health status examination before they would even consider her for the high risk surgery.  She went to Mayo with Ahab for a week and returned in early October stating that she catastrophically failed the mental fitness exam.  

Fully unsurprising to me.  

This unfortunate turn would have ended life for most ordinary other people and it arguably SHOULD HAVE ended in hospice and dementia care for her - but it did not.  She engaged her usual violent, combative inner demon and threatened Mayo Clinic and every doctor there if they did not approve her for surgery ANWAY - in spite of her mental failing.  And that’s one of the main issues with these Problem People: they know exactly who to threaten and how violently to bend others to their will - because most civil people immediately capitulate in the face of such raging confrontation.  I watched it happen repeatedly with Delilah when she would not get her way so she would fly into “Jezebel with a Murderous Spirit” mode and suddenly EVERYTHING would just fall into place for her. One day we were at Arby’s and she wanted <fresh avocado slices with lime juice squeezed upon> on her turkey wrap.  They told her they only had the avocado smear.  She literally launched the sandwich at the unfortunate drive-thru worker and hit her right in the face with it SCREAMING and DEMANDING her FRESH avocado.  If you or I had done that to an Arby’s worker- we would have been jailed on felony assault charges.  But a raging (assumed) rich lady in a Bentley gets everything she demands from our society - and more.  I literally had to call Arby’s when we got back home to apologize FOR HER to the Arby’s employees.  They still seemed rather shook by it all and told me to keep “my crazy grandmother” on a tighter leash.  Oh, if only…

But that was just “daily life” with Delilah.  She was as charming one moment as she was combatively murderous the next - and you just never knew when the Jezebel with a murderous spirit would erupt.  I cannot fully convey how truly destabilizing it is to live with someone this erratic and disordered but it is fully terrifying for many victims of these abusers. One day, I was in my writer’s nook at the desk which overlooked the front circle drive and Delilah was bashing the back window out of Ahab’s car with a baseball bat.  I, stupidly, ran to see what the commotion was about and it seemed they were in the middle of a very violent argument about his infidelity (so, yeah - she knew about his local hot squeeze on the side after all apparently) and she was throwing it all in his stunned face.  She had warned me that they get into pretty violent arguments on the regular and - here we were. As the glass of his car window shattered to the ground, I asked him if he wanted me to call the police.  

She flew into a rage AT ME and screamed: “You’re supposed to be on MY side.  I brought you into this house and I can kick you out right now.  How dare you side with him!”

I looked at her very matter of factly and said: “Well, gosh, Delilah, I’ve just never seen you THIS enraged before. Are you ok? Can I help YOU?”

She immediately dropped the bat and fell into my arms screaming about how worthless and cheating all men are.  

See - make it about HER suffering while she is being the violent aggressor and suddenly she comes around to a place of crumpled, vulnerable defeat…

Problem People INDEED.

Another day I was speaking to another “cleaning lady” Delilah employed in her home named Melody. She told me this fully bizarre tale when I asked her how she came to know Delilah. I asked her if it had been through a Craigslist ad. She said “Oh no. I met her through my former boss. He was a big landlord in this town and I did all of the “move out clean outs” for him between tenants in his units. I worked for him for 7 years until I came here to work.” Her voice trailed off…

I replied: “Oh? Why would you leave a full-time cleaning gig with him to come do part-time work here?” (That made almost no sense to me - something <had to be> missing from the story.)

She replied: “Oh he died here one night when he came for dinner shortly after I met Delilah. She saw all the recent cleanings I had done in some of his units and said I did a really great job. She then had him over to dinner here that night but he died. So I was just so grateful when Delilah called me after his funeral and offered me this gig, part time or not, because otherwise I would have no money coming in…”

“I’m sorry, he DIED at dinner here? Like how?” I asked.

She seemed suddenly uncomfortable and started to nervously rub her ponytail back and forth and then said in a nonplussed, dead pan way:

“Well, he came here for dinner and she had alcohol and he wasn’t a drinker and apparently he took an accidental fall down her basement steps, cuz of the alcohol, when she took him on an after-dinner tour of the house.”

You don’t say…

The bodies seemed to be really stacking up around this black widow Delilah….

How profoundly disturbing…

Melody then went on to confide in me regarding how Delilah constantly cheated her on her hours worked. Like if she worked 20 hours, Delilah always tried to only pay for 10 and quarrel with her about the time it took her to do certain tasks. She essentially nickel and dimed the poor girl routinely over the most basic things and ALWAYS tried to get her to do unpaid work or just promise to pay her “later” for work she did today.

And truly - that jived with my own experience with Delilah too.

I honestly never felt like “I actually owed Delilah any money” because I had done AT LEAST 70 hours worth of work for her - which she agreed to pay me $20 an hour for but for which I never received ANY payment.  I mean, I intended for her to get her portion of my Rental Assistance when it came but I reasoned, even without THAT, she was coming out way ahead with all the free domestic work and legal work and administrative work and cat pet sitting I did for her while they traveled. Her normal petsitter charged her $25 per day and I was constantly doing what she had done for Delilah only I did it all now for free. And I did it BETTER because I actually lived with Sammy and Garfield and loved them and knew their likes and dislikes, their habits and their routine. And Delilah never ultimately paid me for ANY of that work.  Because this is who she is: someone who exploits the vulnerable and plunders everything of value from their life and just laughs all the way to the bank.  When people SHOW you who they are: believe them.  

But for this particular day and the time being, Ahab was the direct cause of all of her own money problems. The next day it would be the fault of Zechariah the addict.  Then it would rotate back to me.  Never did it ever occur to her that giving total strangers 10k and 60k over the internet in all the scams she fell for in her consummate greed TO SEIZE EVER MORE MONEY was the proximate cause of her poverty status. In fact, when I FINALLY convinced her that the scammers under the banner of “Reliance Financial” were scammers and cut and run with her money (and that of thousands of others) she was adamant that I was wrong.  When I proved it to her by way of thorough research and documentation, she insisted: “Ok, maybe all those other people got scammed by these crooks but I’m Delillah and I’m special so they will make it right for ME.” I assured her she was painfully mistaken.  And that whatever alleged affluence she thought protected her from being scammed simply did not apply in this particular case and that she was going to have to come up with that 90k balloon payment for her NEW mortgage holder Deutsche Bank - or else.  To that she would simply groan and demand we go shopping where she would proceed to charge more things with money she did not have in order to try and fix her own monsoon of misery. 

As Delilah and Ahab were planning her trip to the Mayo Clinic for her abrupt brain cancer surgery, she escalated her daily attacks directed at me - often having her maid, by proxy, come pounding on my always now locked bedroom door threatening me.  I finally told her that I would call the police because I was entitled to quiet enjoyment of my rental and ONLY THAT made her stop escalating in that way.  She then turned her focus on Zechariah and started escalating her violent fits against him. It was hard to tell how much of all of this was her maniacal cluster B personality disorder and how much was her brain cancer side effects and/or the dementia.  Regardless, it was truly harrowing times to live in her house in that Season.  One night she came up herself and threatened to have Ahab murder me and throw me in the Sangamon River because “no one would miss me” - 

Gee, where have I heard THAT threat before? 

She is as boring and unoriginal as she is repetitive in her nonsense. And just because I never told her anything about the friends I do have, that did not mean I was someone who she could just, flat out, murder and get away with it - or so I THOUGHT. 

So with her threats of murder on my mind, I sat down to write a letter to the Attorney General of IL.  Being in the IL Address Confidentiality Program due to the former landlord in STL and his prior violence against me, I had that attorney within the Program as a good contact.  I wrote to her and detailed ALL of Delilah’s many felonies and crimes.  I figured that writing to the top law enforcement agency of IL in Chicago to memorialize Delilah’s many financial crimes and her abuse against me was the best way to <document> everything I had learned about her shady scams - just IN CASE anything bad DID happen to me.  

Full stop. Pump the brakes.

When I tell you that NO ONE should have to sit down and pen such a letter in order to serve as evidence in the event they are murdered - please know how truly devastating this was to me.  I had given her ALL OF ME and it still just was never going to be good enough. 

So, I told the AG attorney how I literally feared for my life due to Delilah’s escalating violence against me and how she was having Ahab and her maid come at me as her violent proxies.  I told her I knew ALL OF HER secrets and all of her financial crimes which created a very real possibility that she would <actually> try and actually murder me.  Given her disordered state of mind - literally ANYTHING was possible, I informed her. But I also wrote this letter to create a written document of HOW I had been trying to report all of her financial felonies since I started to learn of them in August 2021 but that no one in IL government was interested in trying to mete out justice against this old con job scammer.  Everyone in IL government essentially told me they did not know HOW TO prosecute fraud and theft of government funds and services in IL.  Gee, no wonder the state lost literal BILLIONS during the Pandemic to IDES Unemployment fraud and Rent Assistance Fraud alone.  Finally, I told the IL AG attorney that I was worried that when my Rent Assistance grant came that Delilah would steal it ALL - rather than take only the 3 months she was entitled to under the Program as the CURRENT landlord and remit the rest to me so I could repay Riley.  I documented EVERYTHING this crooked con had been doing during the Pandemic - just in case.  And as it would turn out - this “JUST IN CASE letter” - literally ended up saving my life. 

With Delilah and Ahab gone for her surgery, an odd occurrence happened over that very weekend.  That Friday, I knocked on Zechariah’s bedroom door because a phone call from Delilah had come in on my phone for him. When he told me to enter, I saw him in his room with 3 white males, roughly his own age, that I had never seen before.  Now I was accustomed to this boy bringing literally every stray person home with him, sometimes homeless sex workers and sometimes just girls he met at clubs. Sometimes he brought a guy friend home with him to do drugs in his room.  He would always usher his “friends” out in the early morning hours before Delilah awoke and I never ratted on him. I figured he needed some degree of happiness in his life - no matter how fleeting.  

But these boys I had never seen before.  And they were all gathered around the coffee table/drug table in his room - but from what I could see there were no drugs laying about.  So, he was just in his bedroom - talking - with 3 guy friends.  Strange but I honestly thought “whatever” because, ya know what? Zechariah, like me, deserved a little peace and happiness while she was gone - whatever form that may look like for him.  If having friends over was his “happy” - go for it, bro.  That was my thinking on it anyway.       

That next day on Saturday, the house felt strangely abandoned and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.  The house was ALWAYS quieter and more peaceful with her and Ahab’s constant drama gone from it but now it seemed - too quiet and too still - for some odd reason.  Judas and I both typically went to bed around 8pm in the evenings.  But since I was caring for her cats in her absence, I set my alarm for 11pm to feed the one kitty, Sammy, who liked to eat in the overnight hours.  When I got up to feed Sammy, I found the front and back doors both unlocked and WIDE OPEN with the October wind bluster blowing all about, creating quite a chill IN the house.  I called out to Judas and he came running down and did not know what to make of the scene either. He called Zechariah’s phone and he informed that he did not leave the house that way and he was suddenly in Springfield IL for the night and he would not be home until later the next day.  Judas and I locked both doors and double checked and locked all windows in the house too as several had been found unlocked.  In this process, we realized that silver objects were laid out all over the previously bare dining room table.  There were silver candlesticks and silver punch bowls and silver serving plates laid out rather randomly along with really anything like that in the home that <might> have some actual monetary value.  I took a picture of ALL OF IT - exactly as we found it - and told Judas we should call the police.  He remarked simply: “And say what? That we found her own items on her own dining room table, unharmed? There isn’t really anything WRONG with this except that it is out of the ordinary for them to be set out like this out on the table instead of put away.  Maybe she told the maid to come by and polish the silver while she is gone. There is no crime in that.” 

He had a point… 

So off he went back to bed.  But I had a <gut feeling> that this was a harbinger of something very bad and very wrong.  I did not know what exactly but I felt like someone should stay up awhile and monitor things for a time.  And so I scooped up Sammy the cat and took him and his overnight munchies into my bedroom and sat there in the dark with him purring contentedly on my lap.  And then around about Midnight there came the same 3 guys on foot that had been crowded into Zechariah’s room the previous day.  They had literal trash bags with them hung over their shoulders.  

What in the world?....

Oh. I see. 

They were here to do an “inside robbery” of the house belongings while Delilah and Ahab and Zechariah were all conspicuously out of town - with provable alibis.  What I didn’t know was WHY? Who ordered this? Zechariah so he could actually steal from her for drug money?  That seemed unlikely because in his heart - he was a good kid. Troubled, but good. It seemed MORE LIKELY that DELILAH was doing it to get herself out of the $90k hole she had sunk herself into with that mortgage scam.  Facing imminent foreclosure with no ability to pay, desperate people do some very desperate things.  

And thus and so, I watched the guys inch closer to the house in the dark.  I grabbed that destructive baseball bat that Delilah frequently used in her fits of rage and went to the front door.  They tried to walk right in but found it LOCKED - because Judas and I had locked EVERYTHING.  They then walked around towards the back door.  I called out for Judas and he came running again.  He saw them approaching the back door with trash bags right through the back door window - standing in the dark right next to me.  They tried the knob and he quickly opened it to greet them.  

They looked startled, shook and terrified.

Judas asked them what they were doing there trying to get into the house and they mumbled that Zechariah invited them over.

“In the dark, ON FOOT and with trash bags over your shoulder, when you THOUGHT we would both be sleeping?” I demanded…

At that - they all three bolted from the property. 

I asked Judas if NOW we should call the police and he said “there wasn’t actually a robbery so, again, what would we report. Idiot teen boys being idiotic?”

As not a fan as I am of the police, Judas sure was clearly running interference on ALL of this and dismissing obvious CRIMINAL intent. 

I shrugged and said simply: “Have it your way.” And I went to bed. Inside job  robbery plan foiled. Move along…

In the morning, nothing had been stolen and the house was still all locked up.  I was puzzled about the whole thing but given the level of aggravated insanity that happened on the regular in that house because of Delilah, it seemed just par for the course honestly.   

They returned home a few days later and Delilah was wobbly but seemingly unscathed.  She had no bandages and no head stitches from alleged traumatic brain surgery for Stage 4 brain cancer - but who knows. I still do not know - to this day - if she was staging another fake cancer scam with that whole ordeal; or, if she was purposely putting herself out of town so that her “money saving inside job robbery” could occur - and they all would have an out-of-town alibi.  Truly anything was entirely possible with this criminal conwoman.  

The next weekend was Halloween and Judas had found a new place to live and was therefore abruptly leaving that Halloween weekend.  I saw him in the hallway that Saturday as he took his last box to his car and he looked at me sadly and said: 

“You need to follow me out this door.  I overheard these freaks planning to finger YOU for a robbery here at the house. I absolutely know they are capable of that - and much more - so you need to follow me out the door.  I don’t care WHERE you go but you need to get out of this house. Now.  Do NOT be alone here with these criminals.  They could murder you and not think anything of it.  I told you she’s killed before and I was serious.  It’s not safe for you here - no matter how good you try to be to her now - it won’t matter.  They are planning the UNTHINKABLE against you. You need to run…It’s why I’m leaving right now, too. Go, run, get out of here!” 

And with that he sprinted to his car one last time and was gone….

So there I was with no place to go and in a house with people who absolutely meant to do me harm.  

Oh. I see. 

I was in my room that evening when I got a text from Delilah.  She told me that she knew I stole and sold ALL OF HER jewels, furs and silver while she was hospitalized but if I left that next morning - she would let me get ahead of the law and wouldn’t turn me in if I just peacefully left. 

I could not believe it.

I literally could not believe it. 

First of all, what homeowner who seriously thinks they have been robbed by their tenant housemate wants to help the robber “get ahead of the law” and help them get a head start out of dodge WITHOUT getting their stuff back first? 

Answer: a really dumb criminal who thinks everyone else is as dumb as she is.  

Secondly, her silver was all STILL IN THE HOUSE and she had no REAL jewels to steal and her furs were all tacky fakes too.  There was simply no validity to her false claims.  

But there was malevolence in her words…

That much was abundantly clear to me.  If it wasn’t when Judas told me to run it was NOW with her threatening me with false accusations and threats of police.  When crazy people with cravenly cruel plans suddenly demand that you get out of their house - or else - you should listen. At least I’ve learned THAT MUCH by now…

So, early the next morning, I took 2 loads of my critical personal belongings to my car.  I was on my way to officially leave when I realized my purse was still in my room.  As I went to go get it Ahab cornered me in the kitchen.  He very OVERTLY pressed RECORD on his iphone and then started to interrogate me on missing things I knew absolutely nothing about and that were not really missing.  I told him IL is a 2 party consent State to record and that I did not consent and that, furthermore, I refused to even respond to his slanderous accusations.  I told him I was leaving and I would send someone for my belongings because he and Delilah could not be trusted to be honorable and I turned to go up the stairs to my room.  Ahab launched after me from behind and shoved my back causing me to trip and fall on the landing.  He stepped on me and ran up the next stairs to flee.  I screamed in pain but managed to get up and retrieve my purse and leave the house.  As I sat in my car, a shooting pain screamed in my low back.  Oh great - I’m injured, I thought aloud.   

And now before you say Ahab is the bad guy because she CLAIMS he harms and hits her too - realize you cannot believe anything she says because she slanders everyone in order to TRY and make herself out to be both the hero and the martyred victim in every tale she tells.  And Ahab hasn’t had a thought of his own in YEARS because she is always there telling him what to think, what to do, how to dress, what to eat and when to take his bowel movements etc.  Entirely dependent upon her for the roof over his head and every meal he eats means exactly THAT - and it means he just does her evil bidding even if that means actual murder. It’s why Judas warned me they had committed murder of some inconvenient tenant before I even got there. He knew exactly what this duo of Delilah and Ahab was -and the terrible evil they are capable of doing - and that’s why he got the hell out too. Ahab is as guilty as she is, in one sense, because he will not stand up to her and he just lets her attack him and everyone in that house - and even attacks by proxy FOR HER - if she demands it. But ultimately, he’s nearly 80 so what good OTHER options does he actually have either for alternate housing?  Where is he going to go? Into a Medicaid nursing facility (I already showed you how janky those are) or a homeless shelter? Not a chance when he can continue to live HER LIFE with her with the cost of admission being doing her daily bidding.  He is her step-n-fetch guy, her submissive sycophant, her servile butler and bully by proxy for all of her demands - no matter how criminal they are. So, in that sense I suppose, my first impression of him when I <thought> he might be her butler wasn’t too far off from reality. 

So as I pulled away from her house I got an email alert saying that my landlord, Delilah, had just received my Rent Assistance Grant.  

Oh. I see. 

This is going to go almost exactly as I expected it would…

Delilah perpetrated violence against me by proxy via Ahab rendering me homeless fleeing from her home. In the process, she stole my entire rental assistance grant from IHDA because why not rob me after rendering me homeless just to be fully evil? 

So, she renders her Pandemic penniless tenant HOMELESS, because of her false & slanderous robbery accusations & her domestic violence by proxy, and then she steals ALL of my housing funds from the State/IHDA - funds she is NOT entitled any of due now to perpetrating violence against me in Illinois.

Oh. I see…

I called the police to report the violence and the theft of the thousands in rental assistance and her bonkers robbery accusations against me after I got checked out at the ER because the ER told me I should file a police report against them both, Delilah and Ahab.  And so I did.  And the police referred me to the local Domestic Violence shelter in town. 

My God…why didn’t anyone ever tell me how horrendous THOSE PLACES are when they are found in rural, economically distressed failed places like all of Downstate IL?  This is the <end stage> of a fully failed system of governance in Downstate IL.  That pits like this exist because the people in political power don’t want to fund them and make them ACTUAL and legitimate community resources is just too sad and needs to be fixed in America.    

At my first hearing of the Order of Protection against Delilah and Ahab I was simply there to seek a continuance as the attorney the DV shelter provided was seemingly unavailable.  Again, Delilah made a spectacle of herself via a grand entrance into the courtroom wearing a crushed velvet formal that was a miniskirt in the front with a long train in the back and her cleavage spilling out all over the floor - and her trademark “pounds of pearls.”

Apparently no one ever taught her how to conservatively & appropriately dress for Court.

But Delilah also showed up to court WITH THE COPS in tow and told the Judge she wanted the whole matter dismissed IMMEDIATELY because I was homeless and she brought the cops to ARREST me because I stole all of her furs and jewels and I would be going to prison for my alleged robbery of her.

Oh. My. God. 

She did not tell the police her slanderous lies about my so-called theft of her belongings - none of which were actually missing.  

Oh yes she did… 

So I got my continuance for the OOP from the Judge and then had to tell the cops, for 3 hours, just what a full nightmare and criminal Delilah was.  I gave him all of my text messages between Delilah and me and the video of all the stuff laid out on the dining room table by presumably Zechariah the weekend Judas and I found the house all unlocked and ready to be robbed.  He asked for Judas’ number so he could talk with him about it all and then I gave him a copy of my letter to the IL AG about what a criminal Delilah was.  

THAT is right where he stopped interrogating me. 

And I did not truly <know why> in that moment but I figured I had easily proven what a full liar Delilah is.  

But no - it wasn’t that see.  

They were actually there to maliciously arrest me on her false say-so alone that day. This is weaponization of corrupt law enforcement in its full form. 

But when they realized I had already drug the IL AG/Chicago into the matter, 10 days earlier, by way of my email, the cops themselves went running from this fight.  Why? Because they did not want STATE attention gazing into their fully corrupt garden in Capone’s Cornfields.  Had I not had the presence of mind to email that letter to the IL AG lawyer, with a time and date stamp on it, detailing ALL OF HER CRIMES, I absolutely would have been falsely arrested by these corrupt hillbilly rural cops on Delilah’s evil demands.  

But for the grace of God go I. 

Delilah’s grave betrayal of me and evil scheme against me for profit ultimately turned upon her own wicked head and was snuffed out. 

I later learned from Zechariah that arresting me was not really NEEDED or necessary in order for her insurance scam to pay off for her.  She filed the knowingly false police report about her false allegations of theft - and sadly, a police report ALONE gets her the homeowner’s insurance claim for theft that she needed in order to secure the full $90k needed to save the house from foreclosure. I’m told she ultimately claimed more than age 90k amount was stolen and gave the corrupt cops part of the “winnings” just to keep them on her good side for helping her out.  

Oh. My. God.  

The wickedness that corrupt evil people plot is just diabolical to me.

 And yes, in April 2022 when I found out from Zechariah that she actually PROFITED from her slanderous lies against me, I reported her to the National Insurance Fraud Oversight agency. Did they stop her clear fraud? I will never know as that particular Agency doesn’t call you back to provide you any updates on their investigations regarding the fraud you report.

And remember how I told you I found her rental on Craigslist? Well I also came to learn that she fully KNOWS the desperate for fast housing are likely to be found ON CRAIGSLIST and <for that specific reason> it was her fertile hunting ground FOR YEARS before me - to find her next victims. But I shut her down there. Anytime she tried posting on there, I would post right under her ad WARNING EVERYONE TO STAY AWAY FROM HER RENTAL.

So she moved to Facebook Marketplace. And I covered every ad she placed and in every local Facebook Group - I warned everyone to stay away from her. I literally was a one-woman offense against her wickedness and I drove her off both platforms. Which is when she found DISABLED VETS from the local Veterans Affairs Office. I warned THEM so she pivoted to foreign exchange students - the most vulnerable of ALL possible tenants.

That local authorities and NO ONE IN IL Law Enforcement will stop her craven malice -in spite of being repeatedly warned and put On Notice about her - is fully maddening to me. That’s why I had to ultimately just let go and let God deal with her. Her ability to invent new avenues to prey upon new victims is exhausting to me. I need a little backup here but LAW ENFORCEMENT is nowhere to be found in Capone’s Corrupt Cornfields of Central IL.

Yet I did not know ANY OF THIS at the time, in the moment of living this nightmare in late Autumn 2021. And it would take me nearly 2 years to research and learn the full scale of the corruption problem <generally> there that exists in that town and County. But fortunately for me, a local “guy gone good” named Jaguer Clark began putting the corruption on blast in this town in February 2023 - May 2023 and it all came out then.  Essentially the cops, the courts, the judges, the lawyers, the mayor, the sheriffs and most of the businesses have all been hijacked by organized crime there.  How horrendous. Welcome to the Heartland of America, baby.  And Chicago has its own love of corruption so the two just have a tacit agreement to “leave each other alone” and never the two shall meet.  If the present state of corruption in IL does not convince you that BOTH political parties are fully hosing the people - cuz Chicago is Democrat but most of Downstate is Republican run - then I don’t know what WILL convince you of this sad fact.  

When looked through the lens of organized crime and how THAT works & infects a community, literally EVERYTHING about this blighted & forsaken town immediately makes sense. I even came to learn that my storage facility where I stored my belongings from Delilah’s is run & operated by the local mobsters and they have late night human trafficking parties in the back of the compound on Saturday nights. The cops help coordinate it. I also came to learn that a local billionaire Republican who tried to buy his way into being the Sheriff has seemingly set up FALSE FRONTS doing evil but calling it good. For example, the local drug treatment facility he donated the funds for? It was actively engaged in human trafficking the vulnerable addicts treated there. The local anti-trafficking agency his millions created? - it was actively trafficking refugees from Ukraine all while claiming to be the SAVIOR of victims of trafficking. It simply does not get any DARKER than what I came to learn about that town in Central Illinois. And to support my charge that there just is no legal oversight over this entire Capone’s Cornfields territory - know that the closest FBI Field Office who would be at all responsive to any of this is in St. Louis. The DOJ shuttered it’s strike force there in 2010 and organized crime has flourished because it is literally FULLY LAWLESS. The only people going to jail there are the dime-bag poverty addicts. The courts literally exist to incarcerate the victims of the trauma a lawless town like this creates when their trauma invariably results in drug dependence, homelessness or mental anguish. THAT is who they incarcerate there: The VICTIMS of this scofflaw city. All the real criminals in town like Delilah who are engaging in the most heinous crimes against humanity are all “protected” from any prosecution or legal inquiry.

The things I learned about that town in the aftermath of fleeing from Delilah would make your blood run cold - because it surely did mine. I will spare you my 500 page treatise on the topic, though, and tell you to imagine the very worst you can conjure up - then realize it’s actually ten times worse than that.

I came to learn that there is literally a “protected from prosecution list” in this town and the cops just KNOW not to ever touch those people because THOSE PEOPLE pay into the racket and pay the cops via their annual “Support the Blue Line Fundraisers” in the town.  At those “charity fundraisers” bumper stickers are given out to all high dollar donors in the town and it is black with nothing but a thin blue line.  If you have this on your car(s), which Delillah did, you are fully protected from any police involvement in that whole County. Because they are the true criminals living there who pay into the racket to be protected from such things as abiding by the laws of this land.  And Delilah was definitely On the List.  It’s why I later learned her residence has over 100 pages of police incident reports since 2010 but no one ever holds her accountable for her violence.  Because I don’t know about you, but I lived at the same address for 10 years with my Dad and the police were never called to OUR address even one time - because we are honest people who live peacefully in the land. So this is just how evil Delilah rolls and she does so with the full protection of the local legal system. Remember: Judas told me that her Daddy was mafia. It’s no accident that after she aged out of swindling rich husbands in California that she chose Capone’s Cornfields to crime in.  It was very much intentional and very much HER mobster territory.  

And I learned all of this over the next 2 years because her next victims after me who ALSO had to flee her violence all eventually contacted me to lament how disordered and dangerous she is.  And she just gets to keep on terrorizing innocent people because the corrupted cops refuse to stop her.  When organized crime sets up shop after all industry has collapsed in a town, THIS is the chaos and lawlessness that ensues. This entire topic is covered, in detail, in my full BOOK on this chapter - because it is truly ANOTHER book all by itself.              

And the domestic violence shelters in Downstate IL are all dumps - and this MUST CHANGE too. They are your new abuser. The staff are violent themselves and uninformed to the point where I literally considered perhaps apologizing to Delilah and making it work somehow because the staff at the DV shelter were way worse in so many ways by a factor of a thousand.  I always USED TO wonder: Why do women stay with their abusers?  Why did they return to him? (or her, if the genders are reversed because if my past 4 years taught me anything it’s that violence from Jezebels with a Murderous Spirit is gender-blind and WOMEN are often far more cruel in their malevolent violence than men could ever dream of being.  Women will absolutely “cross boundaries” in their craven, lacking-a- conscience cruelty in a way most male abusers just won’t. So understand that MEN were abused by Delilah both before and after me - often in totally horrifying ways.  She left a wheelchair-dependent disabled veteran in her basement with no way to cook or wash himself while she traveled on a 2 week cruise.  He was forced to call the Elder Abuse Hotline and report her for disabled veteran abuse and neglect. But again, because of her corrupt connections in that town - he was rendered homeless in a janky motel and then STREET homeless when motel funds ran out.  When someone shows you who they are: believe them!

I found out about her abuse of Roger the disabled veteran in the Spring of 2023 when God sent me an enemy from Delilah’s camp to join mine and help me try and hold her legally accountable for all of her crimes.  She had told this “new Admin worker” of hers (name: Candi) that I had caused every problem in her life. So she hired her to STALK ME online and try to find out where I currently live so she could send Ahab to attack me again.  This was in direct violation of the Court’s instructions to her but she does not care because she is FULLY LAWLESS.  But “Candi” told me that NONE of what Delilah told her about me made any sense and none of it could be tracked or proven. I have receipts and a video of her cashing the IHDA check at her bank as proof she stole my Rental Assistance Grant. I don’t tow it if I can’t show it.  But Delilah just wantonly slanders everyone all day - regardless if it makes any sense or not.  In the face of me exposing all of her crimes in the State of IL, she is telling everyone I am a lifelong felon with a 20 year rap sheet for murder.  Every accusation is a confession with these “problem people” who are so disordered all they can do is gaslighting and flipping the script and constant false narratives.

But Candi spoke with me just one time and knew I was the truthteller.  She could instantly VERIFY most of what I say OR she already knew the truth of it in finding it out herself through her own research.  She told me Delilah was currently, as in that day, engaging in massive credit card fraud ~AGAIN~ by reporting the use of her credit card for their recent 2 week cruise as “Ahab stole my card and charged all the charges!” in trying to get ANOTHER 40k in credit card debt she could not afford - fully erased.  How long does she get to pull this conjob and lawless ruse before the credit card companies all get wise to her? If I did that even one time (I wouldn’t) but I would be in jail within a day for filing the False Affidavit of Fraud. But that’s the thing: She had Candi MAIL IT so that if she is ever caught - she can blame “her errant employee” for doing the fraud behind her back - just like she did with the $17k in Pandemic Unemployment.  She keeps Ahab and random workers and shifting tenants and her drug addict great nephew in and out of her house so she always has someone to BLAME for her own criminal acts. 

It’s as devious and evil as it is brilliant.  Delilah was DEFINITELY trained by the mob to ensure other, innocent people, always take the fall for HER crimes.

And there the cops are of the town - who have been paid to never hold her accountable on anything - aiding and abetting her crimes all the way.   

It’s also worth mentioning that the corrupt cops of this janky town who were under Court Order to safely escort me to retrieve my belongings at her house allowed Delilah to keep HALF of all of my belongings -anything she told them was hers despite it being in MY frig or room and they allowed her maid to terrorize me, by proxy, the entire time. Then they wrote a false police report indicating I attacked the respondent so I was ordered to leave. I recorded this whole interaction myself and have proof that the local cops are lying liars who lie and that they are just there to prop up their white collar criminal buddies in the mobster town.

I am SO TIRED of losing all of my belongings to evil people. I cannot rebuild from losing EVERYTHING to my COVID hospitalization when evil people are allowed to continue to just unlawfully steal my belongings- aided and abetted by corrupt law enforcement all the way. This loss of my personal belongings was acutely traumatic to me because the people who helped me rebuild from Reddit and the churches who DID help me - the GOOD people, the helpers among us - I valued these items the most sentimentally because they were given to me in love. And then stolen from me in avarice.

But her abandonment of Roger, a disabled veteran, while she cruised the islands just highlights that other government scam she was running: Medicare Fraud. She had confided in me that she was running a scam with her friend Jean at Help at Home where she got paid to be Ahab’s in-home caretaker but she never did a single thing for him.  In fact, Ahab was her step-n-fetch servant all day every day.  Like who in their right mind at Medicare Payment Services would ever believe that an 80 year old woman was working 40 hours per week for Ahab? Especially riddled with cancer and major disabilities as she constantly claimed she was? 

So the con went like this: Delilah got paid $14 per hour of the fraudulent contract and Jean as the Director at Help at Home got paid $14 per hour of the fraudulent contract because Help at Home billed Medicare $28 per hour.  See - win win for the criming criminals of this town! So in my absence, after I left, she moved in disabled veterans and set up ADDITIONAL fraudulent contracts with Help at Home to get paid for not performing the work these disabled tenants needed.  And when I exposed this con and Jean, the Director at Help at Home was fired, Delilah just pivoted to giving rooms to foreign exchange students who often arrived without transportation and entirely dependent upon her for housing, food and transportation.  She gets paid $3k per month, per student, BY THE PROGRAM for each foreign student she claims to house and the students step into a total nightmare of her violent malevolence.  See? Holding her LEGALLY accountable is truly like playing an exhausting and never-ending game of whack a mole: the minute you put out one of her grifting fraudulent scams, she just engages in 2 more.  

And the State of Illinois is so dysfunctional with CORRUPTION that the State seems fully powerless to stop her. Because TRUST ME - I have tried my level best.  I am the Justice Angel she never saw coming to her life when she rented to me as a tenant.  Yet every oversight Agency in IL who should prosecute her, including the IL AG Office by way of Barb Healy, told me “they don’t know how to prosecute the misappropriation and theft of State Funds - Pandemic or otherwise.”  Really? Because every other State has set up DOJ Strike Forces specifically to recover such stolen government funds and bring the scammers to justice. But not in Illinois - known as being THE most corrupt State in the Country.     When a State is identified by objective sources as being THE MOST CORRUPT STATE IN THE COUNTRY -  believe it and avoid it accordingly.  

And, to be fully transparent, I was relentless in trying to hold Delilah legally accountable because the $5500 she outright thieved from me via my IHDA Tenant Housing Grant belongs to Riley - for sheltering me during Winter 2020/2021 when Centerstone & the State of IL just left me to DIE. He needs to be repaid because he was rightfully awarded those funds by the State. But since NO ONE in all of IL Law Enforcement seems to know how to prosecute a conjob grifter like Delilah for absconded with State Pandemic Funds - that’s just ANOTHER debt I will have to repay myself - because the State of ILLINOIS is fully nonfunctional in this regard and capacity.

And because that’s the problem with rampant corruption in Illinois - the Governor can keep throwing literal BILLIONS towards spiraling homelessness and rampant domestic violence and the janky, poverty Medicaid nursing homes engaged in Regulatory Capture by private equity investors and NOTHING CHANGES because the entire governance system in Central IL is created to be a cover for organized crime and corrupt government and agency employees and NONE OF IT actually serves the people of Illinois.  So all of those BILLIONS are just an unauthorized wealth transfer from the State Purse to all of the corrupt and fully failed players WITHIN the State.  For example, Governor Pritzker just earmarked $5 BILLION DOLLARS for his homelessness cure plan THIS NEXT BUDGET YEAR 2023/24. And at the end of this year homelessness will still be spiraling and out of control, human misery will be multiplied and elongated during this year and no one will ever be effectively rehoused ever with those BILLIONS.  So next year the Governor will give EVEN MORE BILLIONS and well, rinse and repeat.  Homelessness cannot be solved until we start building the housing NEEDED to house the homeless.       

Illinois is currently short roughly 1 million affordable housing units, as are most States.  So if there are no actual houses in which to house the homeless, those BILLIONS the Governor just earmarked simply go to pay for the inflated salaries and bonuses of his new “Homeless Czar” along with all the IL State employees and nonprofit Agency VP Grifters within the Homeless Outreach Sector - including the local Domestic Violence Shelters.  Until we make permanently and safely rehousing EVERYONE currently trapped in the “no available housing in IL” like me the END MEASURABLE GOAL, no performance metrics in terms of long term safe housing attached to these billions just GUARANTEES that the Governor is merely throwing good money after bad.  The Governor needs to commit to quickly building massive housing on a scale not previously ever done before for the 1 million who need such critical housing in IL - if he truly wants to be remembered as a visionary in this regard.  Because engaging in the same unauthorized transfer of wealth to State Minions instead of ACTUALLY HOUSING PEOPLE that every other State is ALSO doing simply guarantees that we NEVER end the housing crisis currently engulfing America.  Housing is what cures MOST homelessness problems.  As I have said repeatedly in this Memoir, I am on a projected 10 Year Wait List for handicapped affordable housing in Illinois.  The housing I need has not even been built yet and there are thousands just like me who will quite literally DIE in this wait. That is unconscionable and a full failure of government and government resources.        

But to complete my summation of the DV shelters in rural, economically desperate Downstate IL, the shelter I entered after fleeing Delilah’s home is plagued by rules and protocols that are only randomly and occasionally enforced.  There is NO food.  You will starve if this is your only source of food.

Full stop: You will literally starve in these rural domestic violence shelters in Central Illinois.   

The staff buys themselves opulent lunches and dinners with all the charitable donations and all the government grant money they receive; yet  they then turn and serve strange smelly fish sticks or food from unnamed local  “places” that is not even remotely nutritional or healthy.  You will starve if you stay in these shelters and they literally don’t care if you do.  Because their <internal> mentality is that you obviously deserve bad food without nutritional benefit and there was probably a reason your abuser was beating you - because you deserve it.  If you don’t think this mindset is not the RULING MENTALITY of most IN CHARGE in these shelters, you would be wrong.  They are your new abuser and no food or food that is fully unrecognizable food with no nutritional value is just part of the routine of your NEW abuser.  Their cruelty in these shelters IS the point.  Because they want to ensure that should your life ever hit the bricks again, that you KNOW BETTER than to ever avail yourself of these pits.  They are there to launder money for the local organized crime - not HELP YOU.  Please take note of this fact and come to understand it fully and quickly so you will be on your pathetic way in short order.     

Also, the DV shelters in Downstate IL demand to control all of your Rx medications and they decide IF you get your medications - when they are uninformed and not medical professionals.  The Director of this facility - you could tell by looking at her she was crazy and a control freak who barely had control of her own life.  She literally told me that if I did not let them go through and toss out what meds THEY DECIDED I didn’t need - then she would toss me in the street and have the cops come arrest me.  

Truly - meet your new abuser.  

When I told her that injecting themselves into my Huntington’s Treatment Plan was a massive HIPAA Violation that the DV Shelter simply could not lawfully engage in, she suggested that perhaps hers was not the shelter for me and that I should go elsewhere with my legal knowledge - somewhere far away from her fully lawless shelter.    

And most importantly, because everyone knows everyone else in a small town like this pothole town in Downstate IL, this Director was actually good friends with Delilah and telling her EVERYTHING about my stay at the shelter, my interactions at the shelter and my proceeding legal case for the Order of Protection against her and Ahab.  When I tell you this town is fully corrupt - believe me. They actually hosted an IN-HOUSE Christmas FUNDRAISER at this Shelter and I had to leave for the entire night because the Director INVITED MY ABUSERS to come gawk at me at this Christmas in-house FUNDRAISER.  It simply does not get anymore stupidly dysfunctional and brazenly corrupt in small town rural Illinois than THAT, folks.

Things are just THIS OFF THE RAILS in all of Central Illinois.  And everyone just ACCEPTS IT because how can you PREVAIL against such rampant corruption when it is literally systemic and just how things work there? You can’t.  All you can do is move far into the woods somewhere fully away from ALL OF THIS and pray to God you never need anything from the government ever again.  And if you don’t have what it takes to live in isolation far from all these evildoers, then like Elijah in The Bible - you just gotta pray to die.  Yes - when things are THIS BADLY CORRUPT - I often despair of the omnipresent evil.  Read about Sodom in The Bible - it wasn’t JUST sexual immorality present there - it was every kind of evil under the sun - especially corruption. And I simply do NOT entertain crooked tables that Jesus would have flipped.  Friends, I present to you Central Sodom IL, America - for they are one and the same.     

Just <how> corrupt was it in this town in Central IL? My caseworker at the shelter orchestrated everything WHEN I originally filed my OOP and told me to hold off 2 weeks in the filing of it because the “bad male judge who never grants those Protection Orders ever was presiding while THEIR judge was on a break.” 

I’m sorry what? “Your judge? What did you just say to me about YOUR judge?”

Yep, that’s what she said.  The DV Shelter had a local judge “in the bag” to guarantee any of their clients received the OOPs sought.  So, if you showed up needing an OOP without the advocates at this DV Shelter in tow, you did not get an OOP granted - especially if you got “the male judge” in the Circuit who was apparently not “in the bag” on every case presented by this DV Shelter.  

Just wow. 

Okay, so I was just supposed to be FINE with this massive court and judicial corruption simply because I would be the “prevailing winner” of it all? How fully awful and how fully corrupt.  

This particular shelter ALSO tried to <coerce> me to lie on my Order of Protection Affidavit.  The caseworker just kept telling me: “The judge likes to see instances of raw, repeated PHYSICAL violence - along with all the other stuff Delilah and Ahab did to you.” 

I replied: “But they were honestly more violent TOWARDS EACH OTHER, than they were, broadly speaking, violent to me.”

She replied: “Just lie. We will prevail anyway with OUR JUDGE and so the DETAILS don’t really matter.”   

You have got to be kidding me.  

Nope.  

She was not joking. 

Sadly, she was as serious as a heart attack.  

I told her I refused to lie just to run cover for “their judge” and that I thought my Affidavit, as written by me, was more than sufficient. Because after all, I had personally seen such Orders granted on FAR less than what I documented.  It would have to be sufficient on its own merit.  Come what may…  

And thus and so, I gave her my Affidavit as it was written by me because <their policy> was THE SHELTER CASEWORKER e-filed it on your behalf.  And curiously, I did not get a COPY of the e-filed Affidavit with MY JUDGE SIGNED COPY of the ex-parte temporary OOP until the morning we were scheduled to go to trial in the matter - a full 3 months LATER! I asked her WHY I did not receive a copy of the Affidavit I drafted that was filed on my behalf and she said that was because I only needed the actual Order in order to violate Ahab or Delilah should they come near me again and I had to call the cops - during the pendency of the case.  But the actual <truth> was this: they embellish the Affidavits to support the crooked judge always ruling in their favor SO THAT, in the event anyone ever questions the judicial record of such “constant wins” they would see ONLY Affidavits with egregious violence - BOTH physical and emotional - justifying those Orders of Protection signed by that judge.  And if you look online at reviews of this particular shelter, you will see COUNTLESS reviews from other victims just like me who had to endure such a similar corrupt horror of the same shaft show at this DV Shelter after fleeing unfathomable violence in the first instance.  These other PUBLIC reviews bear my truth out herein.   

Therefore, when the trial date for the Order(s) of Protection finally came 3 months later, I had no choice but to DISMISS my Request for an Order of Protection because that shelter had EDITED my Affidavit prior to e-filing their “fictionalized version” of events WITHOUT MY PERMISSION - and they omitted many things I believed were important and ADDED several other things that simply NEVER HAPPENED and were not at all true.  And I simply would not perpetrate nor be party to such a fraud before the Court - no matter how fully corrupt the Court itself obviously was there.  THAT IS NOT WHO I AM or who my Daddy raised me to be.  If you are counting on anyone to always stand for integrity and do the JUST and the RIGHT thing, you can fully count on me. I usually stand alone in a party of one on my principles and my integrity - but I sleep like the dead at night - undisturbed by a guilty conscience.       

And please know that I have truly TRIED, over the course of 2 years now, to hold her legally accountable for all of her crimes. But the corruption runs too thick in Illinois and no one seems to know HOW to hold a lifelong criminal accountable for all of her WHITE COLLAR CRIMES in Illinois.  It is as infuriating as it is revealing to me about how the State of Illinois truly operates.  I reported her IDES unemployment fraud to the HEAD of IDES, Kristen Richards, to no avail.  The State of Illinois just chalked up BILLIONS in pandemic fraud related to IDES as a loss and simply moved on.  Therefore nobody cares how much she scammed from IDES or how.  I have tried, to no avail, to force IHDA to claw back my stolen and misappropriated State and Federal Housing Grant/Rental Assistance funds from her.  But all they can say is “that Program is closed now and we have no way of going back in time to rectify what she has stolen.” I even reported her to OIG and the IL AG for the theft and misappropriation of these Federal and State Pandemic funds and they, too, say there is just no system in IL to claw back stolen State funds - so she just gets to get away with the theft of it all - to my grave detriment.  And I reported her Medicare Fraud and seemingly only got her buddy Jean fired.  As far as I know, Delilah is still unlawfully grifting off that government teet.  For you see, when a State is THIS corrupt, they aint really tryna convict the white collar criminals in this State.  Because this whole State is run by them and FOR them.  And that’s just the way that it is in Illinois and things will never be any different.       

And to be fully transparent, I also dismissed the Orders of Protection against both Delilah and Ahab because I worried about them both - given their advanced ages. Any FINAL Order of Protection entered against them could adversely affect them in terms of being admitted into a nursing home - which they are both likely to need sooner rather than later given their advanced age - and I could not be the person that caused them to not get the care they likely may need one day - especially with her dementia. I would find a path forward somehow in the aftermath of Delilah, because I always did - through God’s grace and the kindness and guidance of total strangers online who always stepped forward to say: “I see the justice and the importance of your cause in showing America ALL OF THESE BROKEN SYSTEMS - and therefore - I will help you.”  Without all of you, I would not be sitting here today penning this Pandemic Memoir.  I owe you a debt I can never repay but I will carry on in this assignment determined to show the World every GOOD thing that still exists about America, which is all of you, and every bad thing about America - which is people like Delilah and places like corrupt-as-can-be, Central Sodom Illinois.         

I can tell you that I did not <automatically> arrive at this “mercy and forgiveness” position for Delilah naturally - I had to be stubbornly dragged to it - eventually - by my faith in God and my belief that His Justice always reigns supreme in this World.  Ultimately, I showed Ahab mercy because I possess the capacity to discern that, in reality, he is just another one of her many victims, fully dependent upon her to even live. And I chose to show her mercy and compassion where she had shown me ONLY betrayal and craven cruelty because I firmly believe that we must realize we ALL have, ourselves, been bad - at one time or another in this life.   And we all have had days in our lives where WE have been the petulant person filled with too many selfish demands at some point.  We have all - if we’re honest - had our moments of pure pride, vanity and cruelty towards others.  And it was in the process of relentless self-examination over the span of my own prior life (prior to the Pandemic) that I found mercy and forgiveness for them both.  

And yes - I certainly could spend 10 paragraphs DEFENDING my “less than hers” sins while excoriating her far worse crimes and insisting that I have never been purely malevolent as she INTENTIONALLY is and with grave malice aforethought every day.  

But comparing levels of ugly or bad isn’t really the point, now is it? 

The point is: she, at times, made me see pieces of my former self in her - who I was before I found God in 2020 - and I, frankly, did not like what I saw.  She was a very vivid reminder of who none of us ever want to become -in any way - or end up as in this life.  She is to be pitied for her joyless, pointless existence and nothing more.   I chose to have mercy and kindness towards her craven betrayal of me - and a fair degree of understanding - for both her personality disorder and her dementia that play a role in WHO she is and HOW she relates to people now.  But make no mistake: she has always been this bad - old age is just advancing and exacerbating these acute problems in her malevolent mind. But I can look back at her and think: But for the grace of God go I.  If God had not left the 99 to come save me, I, too, may have grown into a really unfortunate and selfish, vainglory-filled petulant 80 year old some day - and that’s just frankly too horrible to ponder. 

Amazing grace

How sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me

I once was lost

But now, I’m found

Was blind, but now I see

No one ever wants to be her. But do you hate her because she’s pieces of you? So yes, but for the grace of God go I. Indeed.   

I also chose mercy and compassion for Delilah because I can look back at it all and see that God was protecting me from the WORST her evil can do all along. And in the aftermath of fleeing Delilah - God abundantly blessed my life. They say your greatest testimony comes from your greatest pain caused by people you only helped & were always good too - and indeed it does. So I choose to focus on the miracles that sprung forth on my life because of the evil of Delilah and how my God fully rebuked her & foiled all the evil she tried to plot against me. The Bible says: “He will turn upon them their own inequities and destroy them for their evil wickedness. The Lord our God will destroy them!” And that is fully true - as I personally have witnessed it repeatedly in this life.

But I don’t pray for total devastation of Delilah - only that she be neutralized and stopped from harming anyone else but herself moving forward. I pray for that EVERY day. Delilah had to happen in my life so that I could learn that pure evil absolutely does exist among us in this life because that is not something I <fully> understood or knew in my past. More importantly, I had to learn how to combat such evil with good because only light can drive out the darkness that Delilah fully imbues. I now know just <how> pervasive demonic evil IS in this life and I also know how to call upon my God to deliver me from such heinous evil - and He does- every time. And that is saying something REALLY important all by itself.

And I like to believe that some part of her has the capacity to remember that I was always only honorable towards her during my tenancy in both how I cared for her and her cats as well as her home - despite her many slanderous and defaming false accusations against me in the end.  That I cared for her with as much love and tenderness as I did my own father - more so, in some respects, is just the beautiful ending to this otherwise horrid tale of true tragedy.  

Yes- it used to truly bother me that I gave so much of myself to someone so undeserving and so ultimately ungrateful; but then, I have to remember: sometimes God asks us to be kind to unkind people - for reasons we cannot understand at the time.  Maybe Delilah truly needed someone to care for her, her home and her cats in the run-up to her brain cancer craniotomy; or, maybe God sent me to her home to be the catalyst that finally set Zechariah free from her evil clutches so he would not suffer the same awful death that her son had. Because he did end up going to live with other, more stable, family members in the aftermath of all of this - and I will always consider that a win.   And it’s really not my place to question why things happened as they did.  Only God knows WHY.  But I do know I cared for her more fully and more profoundly than I have anyone since my Dad died.  Because I believe our elders NEED that kind of care - even if they may not always DESERVE it.  And people like Delilah - they just take ugly advantage of the love and compassion extended to them by others and they mistake kindness for weakness.  But that’s on her and them.  I sleep blissfully all through the night because I have a clean conscience AND because I know I played my part in her dramedy but I was always honorable and genuinely good to her during my part in her Theater of the Macabre. Looked at in totality, there is not a thing I would do differently in terms of how I handled life with Delilah and choosing to answer her evil with goodness and her wicked betrayal of me with grace and compassion. Because that is just who I am now. And because, regrettably, there are a few things I can recall prior to 2020 in my life before 2020 - about which I cannot say the same and that causes me grave regret.  And in the end, that’s all we can ask of ourselves: to do better and to do good, love generously and treat other people fairly and gently.     

The best way I can think to express my feelings towards Delilah and how they have evolved in the past 2 years since I was forced to flee her home of violence is a poem a TwitterFriend posted recently.  I have changed 2 of the words to make it more fully applicable to my situation with Delilah but the essence of the written work remains the same.  The tweet by Joseph Fasano went as follows: 

I’ve been thinking a lot about atonement, forgiveness and what it means to change and be greater than our mistakes. So I used one of my own poetry prompts to write in the voice of forgiveness, knowing that each one of us is always, somehow, both shadow and light.  Cain and Abel:

Abel’s Body to Cain

I know. I know you know. 

what you've done to me.

I know your days are blackened ash

and briar. 

I know that you are lost now

in the dust.

Listen: there are words to say

that can change us

Will you say them? Will you live them? 

Will you be them? 

Sister, 

I, too, have done harm in this one life.

Look up at the starlight in the darkness.

Even the dark stars get to shine awhile.

Come, then. Come home again and talk with me

Tell me we are not what we have done.  

• Joseph Fasano 

•  

For we must always endeavor on the path of forgiveness and be kind and compassionate towards one another, forgiving each other as Christ forgave us.  Or at least I must do so - for me. Because I don’t ever want to be the person stubbornly sitting on my high hill of grudge and grievance refusing to extend the mercy and forgiveness my own heart so desperately needs in order to be free. Because that’s the thing about forgiveness: it has very little to do with the offender and, instead, sets our own hearts free - from the pain and the damage they caused.  And I don’t know much about this wild thing called life but I do know that KIND of freedom which forgiveness can yield is extraordinarily uncommon and is something we all ultimately seek for ourselves.  So I choose to let her <aggravated insanity> against me go far away from me so I am free of her at last.  

I must now, above all else, focus on building a stable and happy future and no longer dwell on the cruelty of the monsters who haunt my past. Because in that past of mine, every time a monster appeared - there, too, 5 good people also showed up to help me. And those 5 people are my focus. Because I never want it to be said that there is more bad than good in this life. That’s just not true, although I am fully aware it can sure seem like that sometimes. But those 5 people, the lovers in this life, the helpers who help without even being asked - they are the real heroes of this Pandemic Memoir.  And they are everywhere all around you.  You just need to look for them. I promise you they’re there. For it is we as humans, with our infinite capacity to love, that give meaning to an otherwise ugly and indifferent Universe.  

Because that’s the thing about <most> Americans that I’ve learned these past 4 years: When your luck hits the bricks and you’re out of options and out of hope - people will truly rally to help you - if only you show them how and make them aware of your acute need. And to that I say this: Keep shining, friends.  Your light of love towards others literally lights up the whole World and cancels out the evil.  Don’t ever stop being exactly as you are, my friends. Because this fallen World is counting on you to be the love we all so desperately need right now.                      

This Chapter (6) has been diminished in length because it has been requested by a publisher to become a full manuscript (book) in its own right.  I am currently negotiating this possibility; however, I am likely to ultimately decline.  I do not want to give Delilah’s toxic energy and demonic presence any more voice than I already have - and I certainly do not care to write an entire novel-length book about my time with Delilah.  I prefer to focus on the positive people, the angels among us, the helpers and the true rescuers because that is who this Pandemic Memoir is ultimately about.  People like Delilah already take up too large of a presence in our culture and our everyday lives.  Maybe let’s not keep making stupid people famous and platforming these malevolent monsters among us, ok?  

And if this chapter <seems> somewhat “jagged”, lurching forward and backwards in time, interchangeably and randomly, please realize that is intentional by me.  I was trying to give the reader a sense of how destabilizing and crazy making these Problem People can be - always coming at you from 12 different directions simultaneously without ever giving you even a minute to touch ground and orient in the now.  Delilah serves up a heaping helping of aggravated insanity on the daily and I only hope my writing conveys the sheer terror and the violence of that full reality.  

Up Next: Chapter 7 - The Shelter of More Harm: Running from the Fry Pan Straight Into the Fire - 🔥 I fell in to a burning ring of fire…