By Donna Fielder / Staff Writer

It’s a rare day when Nelda and Alton Luster don’t get an “overdue” notice from a credit card company or a nasty telephone call from a collection agency.

It isn’t their credit that’s in shambles. The bills are addressed to Alton Luster’s sister, Eva Jewell Rich.

It really isn’t her debt, either. Rich is a victim of identity theft.

But the 84-year-old farmer is legal guardian for his 89-year-old sister. It’s up to Luster to clean up the mess. He’s been trying for two years.

He’s learned that the elderly make world-class victims. Not only are they too trusting of people who are nice to them, but their age and decreasing mental faculties often lead to confusion, making them a liability for prosecutors who fear putting them on the witness stand against good defense lawyers.

District Attorney Paul Johnson dropped identity theft indictments against former Denton police Sgt. Mike Yeahquo and his schoolteacher wife, Ulinda, last spring with the explanation that Rich was mentally confused and on her deathbed, and that the Yeahquos had made full restitution. Yeahquo also resigned his peace officer’s license.

Rich’s financial reputation would be clean, prosecutors told her.

“They told me never to worry a minute, that my name is clear,” Rich said.

She was “tickled to death,” according to the district attorney.

But the duns kept on coming, and the family doesn’t remember events quite the same way as employees in the district attorney’s office.

“I thought they were sorry, sorry,” Rich said. “They said it was all over, but it isn’t.”

It was only after a Denton Record-Chronicle investigation involving open records requests that it became public knowledge that there was another trusted person in Rich’s life who took out six cards in Rich’s name and defaulted on them. That woman, a close friend and fellow member of a businesswomen’s association who is 73 now, has never been charged with any crime, and it apparently is her debt that is plaguing the Lusters.

The Record-Chronicle does not print names of suspects who have not been charged with a crime.

Jewell Rich lived in Denton most of her life and is the widow of longtime Denton firefighter Clarence “Pappy” Rich. She resides in an assisted living facility, still active and still sporting her signature dark red hair color.

She worked for the Beall’s department store in Denton for 40 years and for Beall’s in Gainesville for six years after the Denton store closed. The Yeahquos were frequent Denton customers who took an interest in her, she said.

“They would ask me if I wanted to go see the Christmas lights or to get ice cream,” she said. “He started coming by the house to see if I needed anything. He’d stop and say he was going for hamburgers and did I want one. You could not ask for better friends. I thought they were the best people in the world.”

Rich’s health began to fail, and in late 2006 she was staying with the Lusters in their Era home because of an illness.

“We got a call from one of her neighbors,” Nelda Luster said. “She said, ‘That cop has been in her house all day and he’s there a lot, and I didn’t know if he was supposed to be or not.’ We said he sure wasn’t supposed to be, and we started trying to find out what was going on.”

The Lusters ran a credit check on Jewell Rich, and the result shocked them.

“There were all these credit card debts, thousands and thousands, and Jewell said she didn’t know anything about them,” Nelda Luster said. “She had 18 credit cards on her report, and she said she’d only opened three in her life.”

Some of the accounts showed fairly regular payments. Others were in deep default.

Rich is adamant that she didn’t run up the debt, nor did she tell anyone else they could use her name to open accounts.

“I never owed nothing to nobody,” she said. “I always paid ahead of time.”

The Lusters could see the Yeahquos’ names as signees on one account that named Rich as the responsible party. The bills went to the Yeahquos’ address. Because Michael Yeahquo was a Denton officer, the Lusters took their findings to the office of the district attorney.

On Dec. 14, 2006, the final grand jury in Bruce Isaacks’ term as district attorney indicted Michael Yeahquo on two counts of fraudulent use of identifying information. Ulinda Yeahquo was indicted on one count. The Lusters and Rich believed that justice was coming.

But on May 11, 2007, Judge Jake Collier dismissed all the indictments at the request of new District Attorney Paul Johnson.

Rich had been working with Bryan Wolfe, an investigator in the district attorney’s office, and with Denton police Detective Rachael Flemming, who was assisting with the case. Rich trusted them and believed they had done a good job of gathering evidence to convict the Yeahquos.

But in May, two men from the district attorney’s office that Rich had never met visited her in a rehabilitation hospital, where her poor health was continuing.

The two investigators always had talked to Rich in the presence of her brother, who holds her power of attorney. These men didn’t notify the Lusters, the family said. They found out indictments had been dropped the next time they visited Rich.

“Jewell said, ‘Well, they dropped all the charges and they said it was OK because they paid back all the money and my name is clear,’” Alton Luster said. “‘They said he’ll have to give up being a policeman.’ We said, ‘What do you mean they dropped the charges? How can they do that?’”

Johnson says this is the first he’s heard of the family being unhappy with the case. He said the prosecutor, Tony Paul, told him family members were satisfied.

Nelda Luster said they were not even notified.

“I have never, to this day, talked to Tony Paul,” she said.

Johnson said it would be normal procedure to talk to Rich instead of her family.

“She’s the victim in the case, and we went to the victim,” he said.

Johnson said that Wolfe, the investigator, had no idea of any problems with the family. Family members never contacted Wolfe and did not ask unhappy questions, he said.

Nelda Luster remembers it differently.

“I went up to that courthouse and went in that big lobby and asked where do I find Bryan Wolfe. And they told me and I went in there and through a door and down a little hallway and around a corner to an office, and I said, ‘Bryan, what in the world is going on?’ He said, ‘I’m sorry. It’s out of my hands. It was someone else’s decision and you’ll have to take it up with them.’”

According to files on the case, the Yeahquos’ attorney, Rick Hagen, wrote a check for $22,500 that wiped out debt for one credit card. Johnson said it was the only credit card that could be proven to have been used by the couple. Michael Yeahquo indeed gave up his peace officer’s license, stating in a letter to the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement and Education that he wanted to spend more time with his family.

Ulinda Yeahquo, a teacher with the Denton school district who had been placed on paid leave when she was indicted, got her job back.

She had been an elementary school teacher but was reassigned as an instructional support teacher with the School Age Parenting Program at the Fred Moore High School campus.

It wasn’t Ulinda Yeahquo’s first brush with trouble over someone else’s credit cards.

In June 1996, she was a first-grade teacher in the Aubrey school district. During a 10-hour public hearing, a student teacher told the Aubrey school board that the Yeahquos ran up more than $13,000 on two credit cards belonging to the student teacher.

According to a civil suit filed by the student teacher and later withdrawn, Ulinda Yeahquo asked to use her credit cards to make $1,200 worth of charges, which the Yeahquos would pay off.

But they far exceeded her permission, including charges for a trip to Las Vegas and for family Christmas presents. They ruined her credit by not paying for the charges, according to Denton Record-Chronicle files.

Neither of the Yeahquos was ever charged criminally in that case. Ulinda Yeahquo, who had been with the Aubrey school district nine years, was placed on a probationary contract in June 1996, but she did not return to work the next fall. She started working in the Denton district in 1998.

Michael Yeahquo sat with his head in his hands during a recent interview with a Record-Chronicle reporter who visited his home to ask about the dropped indictments.

“I thought this was over,” he said. “All I’m going to say is that I was falsely accused. I have done everything I was supposed to do. If that family has problems, they are not my problems.”

Yeahquo said his affection for Rich had been genuine. “She was like part of our family.”

Hagen, Yeahquo’s attorney, said Johnson dropped the charges because Hagen was actually able to prove that his clients had Rich’s permission to use the credit card.

“They were close friends. She went on trips with them when the cards were used. It was a consensual agreement and we were able to prove that, and that’s the reason the indictments were dropped,” he said. “They made small payments every month.”

Some of the remaining credit cards had post office box addresses, and the records were not clear if anyone ever learned who used them. Johnson said some of the bad debts were sold to other agencies that, in turn, sold them again. When the investigators tried to track the debts back to the person who signed the credit slips, they discovered the original files had been shredded, he said.

Rich’s current credit report is a morass of charge-offs, debt sold to collection agencies and debt still outstanding. The credit record shows more than $44,000 in bad debt, including the $22,500 the Yeahquos finally paid that still leaves a black mark.

After Alton Luster became Rich’s guardian, he made a $5,000 payment from her bank account to one credit card company to settle a $7,500 defaulted account.

That account was opened by the 73-year-old friend, Johnson said. She apparently opened six credit card accounts using Rich’s name and defaulted on most of them. Johnson said that the statute of limitations had run out on any possible criminal charges associated with those accounts, and that the suspect was old and in poor health so she could not be prosecuted.

The woman does not reside at her last known address and her listed telephone number is not a working number.

Johnson said he didn’t know that those bills still were generating problems for the Lusters but that he would have Wolfe help them send letters from his office declaring the debts a product of fraud.

“It’s sad. She’s not alone,” Johnson said. “But we got restitution and he lost his license. She was an elderly lady in hospice. She had signed an affidavit saying they didn’t have permission to use her name, but in some interviews she indicated they did. These are the cards we were dealt, and that’s what we did.”

DONNA FIELDER can be reached at 940-566-6885. Her e-mail address is dfielder@dentonrc.com.