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Carolyn Holland and David Foute became a couple shortly after they met.
5 hours ago
A homeless man moves in with a much older, rich woman is this a real love story or something much darker?
Carolyn Holland was a wealthy 80yearold widow living in the idyllic seaside neighborhood of Cayucos, California, when she met David Foute, a man 23 years her junior.
He came to do some odd jobs for her. Within weeks they became a couple and declared their eternal love.
Carolyn said she never expected to fall so deeply in love or have a romantic and sexual relationship with a stranger at her age: “He gave me something special because of his caring nature. We share so much. I love his personality and I love him. I hate it when He leaves.
“I’ll take care of her as best I can, unless I can’t,” David told me. “All the boys know that Carolyn is my girlfriend and I don’t joke about that. I don’t stay out late because I have someone at home.”
However, Carolyn’s daughters saw things differently.
They believed that David wanted to cheat and steal from their mother and that he would hurt her heart.
I heard about David and Carolyn’s story because I live on their street. Life in the Cayucos is slow and people have time to sit and talk.
There is a pier that extends almost 300 meters into the sea, and at night, as the light fades, you can see the silhouettes of surfers against the setting sun. It’s the perfect setting for a love story and I wanted to believe David but like Carolyn’s family, I was suspicious.
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Carolyn on a 2014 cruise vacation with her late husband Joe
“The age difference really bothered me it was a red flag,” Carolyn’s niece Kim told me. “Why would someone that age pretend to be in love with her other than to have an apartment?”
I was in a unique position to watch the story unfold. Everyone involved wanted to talk. Carolyn’s daughters welcomed the opportunity to voice their concerns. David and Carolyn thought they were being judged unfairly and wanted to tell their story.
When I met David I really liked him. A neighbor recommended that I do some home renovations for myself through the local church he attended regularly. David charmed everyone at work. He played the harmonica and guitar, was funny, and seemed to be very open about his past.
However, the more I listened, the more I understood why Carolyn’s family was worried. David had arrived in Cayucos homeless and was living a hard life, sleeping on the docks when he first showed up at Carolyn’s house to do odd jobs.
He readily admitted that he was addicted to methamphetamine. This led him into drug dealing and eventually made him so paranoid that he was arrested for making homemade bombs that police believed were related to a possible attack on the Walmart supermarket.
David was and still is convinced that the supermarket chain planned to microchip us all, a belief that has no basis in reality.
David claimed to have quit drugs, but I noticed that he drank a lot and also smoked a lot of marijuana.
Carolyn’s daughters Susan and Sally were horrified by the change in their mother’s personality after she met David. “It’s like she’s in a fantasy world, it’s so bizarre,” Sally said. “She started acting like a teenager when he showed up. She laughed, laughed strangely.”
The daughters never believed for a moment that what they were seeing was love. What they saw was a lonely old woman in need of company and a wise stranger on the run.
The question of inheritance also arose. With her late husband Joe, Carolyn built a wealth of multimillion dollar real estate.
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Sally, Carolyn and Susan celebrate Carolyn’s 80th birthday in 2022
“It’s our family’s money, my parents worked hard for this money. Should we accept that this money will not go into the hands of anyone?” She asked me.
Carolyn’s daughters believed that her mental capacity was already declining by the time she met David. They wanted to have her declared mentally incapable of managing her own resources.
“They think I have Alzheimer’s,” Carolyn told me. “Yes, I forget a lot of things, but that’s because I’m so stressed.” I can make my own decisions.
Her relationship with David took Carolyn away from her daughters, but she felt she had every right to have the partner she chose. Carolyn said her daughters did not support her after their father’s death: “They never came to me before David. They really didn’t.”
The daughters disputed this version of events. Susan, who lives five hours away, said she wished she could spend more time with her mother, but both she and Sally were raising children and working full time. “We tried to include her in everything,” she said, adding that her mother was reluctant to be more involved in her life.
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David said Jesus wanted him to be with Carolyn.
Before David arrived, Sally who lived closer helped her mother with her bills and tax returns. However, the breakup resulted in Carolyn regaining control of her finances.
Shortly thereafter, Carolyn signed a loan agreement with David that allowed him to purchase a van worth $40,000. I asked her what would happen if David disappeared and she had to cover the entire cost of the loan. She said she doesn’t care and doesn’t care what her daughters think.
“Yeah, they think they’re protecting me from David, but David is the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Who was David really? I saw him come back to Carolyn’s house after a day of work, prepare dinner and remind her to take her medication. It was moments like these that made me believe he truly loved and cared.
But I also saw him walking around town bragging to his friends that he would soon never have to work again.
I decided to investigate his past. What I discovered was a dark history of domestic violence and child neglect.
A relationship ended when he suspected his partner of infidelity and hit her. In a previous marriage, he had a daughter who almost died due to neglect. This child was sold by David to a couple who legally adopted him.
When I spoke to him, David said that it was all in the past he now goes to church and has made a pact with God to live a better life.
He came to Cayucos with nothing and said his relationship with Carolyn was destined.
“Look what Jesus has blessed me with,” he said. “I can’t leave her because my job is to be here with her.”
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David lives near Cayucos Pier again
But their story would soon reach an exciting and bitter climax.
One of Carolyn’s properties was a single property with two houses in a nearby town. David convinced her to put the houses up for sale, even though one of them had been rented to her own grandson and his family.
Carolyn’s daughters were angry because they believed he was taking advantage of their mother’s mental fragility. They showed me security camera footage of the mother looking perplexed as David showed the property to the real estate agents.
Carolyn had promised to give part of the $600,000 from the sale of the property to David to secure his future.
The sale went through quickly and Carolyn received a check. But at that very moment she was admitted to hospital with Covid.
Carolyn refused to be vaccinated on David’s advice he convinced her that the vaccination program was a government control process.
When she was sent home, Caroline’s poor physical and mental condition allowed her daughters to become her legal guardians, giving them control of her mother’s finances.
Carolyn died shortly afterwards. “It wasn’t Covid that killed her,” says Susan, “but Covid definitely didn’t help because she was already in decline.”
The daughters did not allow David to visit Carolyn in her final days, nor did they call her to tell her she had died. There was also no funeral as the daughters were angered by the local church’s attitude towards the process.
Susan and Sally still feel that their mother was betrayed and that no one doctors, police or social services helped them. “Everyone’s hands were tied,” says the daughter. “They didn’t see what we saw.”
There are one million people with dementia in the UK, a third of whom are undiagnosed. This makes them extremely vulnerable.
After hearing Susan and Sally express their concerns about their mother, I spoke to two geriatric experts about what they had said and about the problem of financial abuse, which is a growing problem in both the UK and the US represents problem.
According to Mark Lachs of Weill Cornell Medicine and his colleague Jason Karlawish of the Penn Memory Center, financial performance may be one of the first things to decline when the brain is damaged by disease or age.
Karlawish says: “Making financial decisions is a huge cognitive challenge. Even if you have mild cognitive impairment, you can make mistakes with your finances, even if you’re otherwise doing well in your daily life.” Doctors told me that half of the patients who come to the memory clinic in New York have fallen for scams.
Back in Cayucos, David is homeless again, despite having the van Carolyn helped him buy. He has parked in the same spot he did when he arrived in town and tries to make a living by selling jewelry and art made from recycled items.
The last time I saw him he was in some kind of trance, turning a lighter on and off and telling himself that he loved Carolyn: “When she called I came, I miss Carolyn, I loved Carolyn,” he said.
“I was on my little mission trying to make you proud.”