What Are The Odds, Part 3

What are the odds that two classmates of one of my children would suffer gunshot wounds to the abdomen from long-barreled weapons--and both injuries would be ruled self-inflicted? Preston Nelson died, and the girl barely survived. Later, the girl's brother barely survived a fall off a cliff in Australia. He was found semi-conscious and wearing only socks and a T-shirt after spending 19 hours at the bottom of a 230-foot cliff in near-freezing temperatures. He claimed he couldn't remember what had happened.

What Are The Odds, Part 2

What are the odds of a family's house burning down right after their oldest son was found dead (#1)--in the same place someone else had been found dead a little over a year earlier (#2)?

(What are the odds my ex-husband and his wife could know I'd be walking my dog two hours later than usual this evening? They were waiting just around the corner and came speeding by me in a small silver convertible with the top down. They then slowed or stopped in front of our house and may have even pulled into our driveway--I was too far down the street to be able to tell for sure. Eventually, I heard them speed off. My ex- also left 14 new comments in various places in this blog today, and many of these had little or nothing to do with where they were posted.)

What Are The Odds?

What are the odds that the death of a local young man in another county would be investigated by a law enforcement officer with the same name as an officer who used to work here?

Request For Information

A well-known true crime author is close to finishing a book about the Matt Baker case in Kerrville and Waco and would very much like to talk to anyone who knows his family well. She is especially interested in speaking with anyone who was a foster child of the Bakers when they were the houseparents at Buckner Baptist Benevolence.

If you can help her out, please email me ASAP at kamaudocs@gmail.com.

I'm also looking for information on another suspicious death I keep hearing about that was not in any of the newspapers as far as I know. I first began hearing about "an extremely wealthy Kerrville man" who was found dead under a tractor on a ranch in Kerr County about a year or two ago. I would like to know who this man was and any details about the circumstances of his death, if possible. Many people have mentioned this to me, and their accounts have been similar, so I tend to believe this death did occur. I will of course keep any sources of information confidential as I always try to do.

Main Street Live Or Dead

This article was published in the Fredericksburg Standard-Radio Post on May 25, 2005. As discussed in the article, the Main Street Live project was extremely controversial within the community.

Later, a very similar venue opened in a different building just off Main Street. This off-Main building had been owned by the family of a woman who had worked as the office manager at my former father-in-law's and brother-in-law's law firm. A few months after she suddenly left her job with them, she was found dead along the side of a road near Stonewall, reportedly of a broken neck in a U.S. mail delivery vehicle that had little damage.

The Parker Case

This article was published in the San Antonio Express-News on Dec. 10, 2007.

Diagrammed For Understanding

(I was never notified about this work, other than the road closure notice in the newspaper.)

Brown Notices

Continuing my series on property in my neighborhood,...

As documented here, at the same time my land was being rezoned (see "Still Waiting", posted 8/1/10), property bordering mine to the northwest was also suddenly annexed and rezoned. This other property had belonged to one of the Jimmy/James Browns discussed earlier (see "Another Jimmy Brown?", posted 6/21/10) previously. Now in these notices, it was listed as being owned by a partnership whose name was the same as Brown's mother's maiden name.

These notices were all published in the Fredericksburg Standard-Radio Post on July 18, 2007. One of the Jimmy Browns died suddenly on 2/27/08 as discussed in my previous Brown post mentioned above and also in "Chronologic Order", posted 8/2/10.

At this point, you might want to go back and read the posts about Boot Ranch.

Mr. Toskana And His Friends

Note: This post is a continuation of my 8/2/10 post entitled "Chronologic Order".

Almost immediately after private investigator Ed Hodges filed a fraudulent trust document at the county courthouse in January of 2004 that gave him total control of my property without my knowledge, the two notices shown here in #1a were published in the Fredericksburg Standard-Radio Post. I saw them and wondered what land was being rezoned, since the descriptions sounded like my land or land very close to mine. I immediately contacted Hodges and asked him to have the Dallas-area attorney he worked with check into this for me.

Hodges said they'd looked into the matter and it was not my land involved in the rezoning. He explained that if it had been my land being rezoned, someone from the city or county would have contacted me first about a hearing, and he repeated that he was positive it wasn't my property. I told him I was confused because even though I hadn't been contacted and the descriptions of the land were vague, the locations did sound close to my property. I also told him I thought it was odd no notices for the public hearings that always come before these ordinances had ever been published. Hodges only repeated that this wasn't my land and I didn't need to worry about it. At that time I trusted him completely. Much later, however, I discovered Hodges had lied to me and at least one of these tracts (the smaller one) was indeed my land that had been rezoned without my knowledge or approval, without proper notification from public officials, and without even holding or announcing the required public hearings. (I now believe the second tract involved here may have consisted of property formerly belonging to my ex-husband's pilot-friend who had been found shot to death as described in my 8/2/10 post. This second tract has since been developed into a medical office complex.)

One month later, in February of 2004, a notice of public hearings was published in the same newspaper for land to the northeast of mine that was also slated to be rezoned to commercial (2a). This land was listed as being owned by the county judge, a close lifelong friend and classmate of my ex-husband and his brother. This time, not only were there announcements of hearings prior to rezoning and statements regarding ownership of the property involved, but also a detailed description of where the property was located and a general explanation of the type of development being proposed for the property. As soon as I'd read the location information, I realized this was the same property where the car lot run by a young man who'd died suddenly a year earlier and his father had been located (see the 8/2/10 post mentioned above). A month after this, part of the proposed changes was approved by the city and a detailed description of what had been decided was published in the paper (2b).

Then in May of 2004, a notice of public hearings regarding proposed zoning changes for a Planned Unit Development (PUD) were published for a large tract of land just to the southwest of us (3a). This time a detailed location was also included in the notice, and I realized that the land in question had either belonged to the widower of my neighbor who had been found shot to death (see the 8/2/10 post again) or immediate neighbors of theirs. Now the property was listed as being developed by "Toscana, LLC", which I'd never heard of before. In June, the PUD was approved (3b).

No sooner had the PUD just down the street from our house been approved then a close friend of my father's (see "Family Business", 6/29/09) started sending me emails containing the photo shown in #3c here of a sign reading, "Mr. Toskana has had an expensive divorce and now needs the money, so sale now on!" This caused me to suspect my ex-husband had an interest in Toscana, LLC, but Ed Hodges assured me this was not so.

Much later (well after I'd learned Hodges had defrauded me), I discovered that around this same time, someone at the local tax appraisal office illegally changed the ownership addresses for my house and land tracts from my own to that of my ex-husband's office. (The documentation for this is posted at "How To Steal Property In Four Easy Steps", 8/29/09). I also later found there had been huge increases in my property tax appraisals I'd never been notified of.

At the same time, my father and step-mother suddenly insisted on visiting us from out-of-state; this was the visit detailed here earlier in "Family Business" (6/29/09).

About 2 weeks later, Hodges informed me he'd been approached with a cash offer to buy my house and land made by a man Hodges said had no connections to my ex-husband (4). This offer was so low as to be ridiculous, and I told Hodges I wasn't interested in selling. (Much later, I discovered the person making this offer did indeed have connections to my ex-husband and his family; the Dallas-area attorney Hodges was working with at the time even admitted this in a letter a few years later. Also, in 2006 I learned the man making this offer to buy my place was a real estate agent who had formerly shared an office with the Kerrville attorney Hodges used to file his lawsuit. This Kerrville attorney also has known ties to a former Kerr County judge whose son is the current Kerr County Attorney.)

The same friend of my father's continues to periodically embed the Toskana photo in various emails he sends me. (Recently he also started repeatedly sending me copies of an email that states online petitions are worthless and a waste of time. This is probably in response to my previous requests here that readers go to domestic violence victims' advocate Alexis A. Moore's blog, click on the link, and sign the petition asking the government to require domestic violence victims' organizations to he held accountable for how they spend their funds, since their money is not getting to victims. Oh yes, and he also was an active participant in the "Swift Boat Campaign" against Kerry, as was the p.i. who originally sent me to Hodges.)

Mystery Woman/Women

My children have a Hispanic friend whose family seems to struggle financially yet whose family members make lots of seemingly expensive trips, especially to Italy, Mexico (particularly Monterrey), and the Los Angeles area. The vast majority of these trips involve the friend's mother. At one point, my kids' friend said their mother was making so many trips to Italy that she was taking classes to learn to speak Italian.

For a long time, it's been well-known among local school children that I will give rides after school to kids who need them. Several years ago when I drove over to school to pick up my usual assortment of kids one day, this same Hispanic friend came up and asked if I'd give them a ride to meet their mother at a job because she'd called and said she was running late. I'd told them I'd be happy to do this.

My kids' friend said their mother was at "an important meeting at the city attorney's office that was still going on", and they asked to be dropped off there to wait for her to finish. I asked if they knew how late the meeting would go, pointing out that they were welcome to wait at our house instead where they could visit with my kids, have a snack, start their homework, or just hang out. The friend said they'd been told the meeting wouldn't last much longer and that they were expected there, so I headed over to the title company building that also serves as the city attorney's office.

On the way, I mentioned to my kids' friend that I'd thought their mother worked at one of the other schools, and I asked if she'd changed jobs. The student said no but that because their mother spoke both Spanish and English well, she sometimes took translating jobs on the side. They said there was "a very important woman from Mexico" who sometimes came into our town for big meetings that their mother was often asked to serve as a translator for. My children and I had no idea what their friend was talking about and were very curious, but their friend either didn't know any more about the meetings or was reluctant to discuss them further.

When we got to the city attorney's office, the mother of my children's friend was waiting out front. She said her meeting had ended, and she was just getting ready to go pick up her offspring, so I was relieved she hadn't left yet. As I was driving off, I was surprised to see a woman I knew well who lived at Stonewall, near the LBJ ranch, walking out of the same office and going over to her vehicle. I waved at her, and she waved back, but she seemed to be in a hurry. I wondered again who the mysterious woman from Mexico was and whether my friend had also attended the meeting with her or was there on separate business. I then filed the whole incident away in my mind as one more among countless strange local goings-on I'd probably always wonder about and then promptly forgot about it.

Then today the following article appeared in the San Antonio Express-News. Upon reading it, I was struck by the facts that I've run across the name Global Financial Services before and that the Mexican woman in the article has ties to businesses in Switzerland, California, and the Houston area, just as my ex-husband's family and some of their associates, like the "Mystery Man" I've blogged about before (see 12/26/09), do.

Now I'm curious to know if Ms. Gomez might possibly be the Mexican woman who came to our town for meetings at the city attorney's office. If she's not, I confess I'm still curious to know who the woman visiting here was. In any case, I'd really like to know what the meetings here were about, who else attended, and whether they're still taking place.



Copy of comment that had to be removed by me as discussed below.




Copy of comment that was posted and later removed by someone who hacked into this site; I am reposting it here.

Open Box, Insert Card

Yesterday I received a package by regular U.S. mail containing an item I'd ordered online.

When I examined and opened my package, I discovered that someone had illegally opened my package and added this card, then retaped the box closed again.

Nearly all of our personal (i.e., non-junk) mail arrives having clearly been illegally opened by someone, and the contents are often tampered with. Sometimes the outsides are left hanging wide open (meaning the perpetrator/s have no fear of being prosecuted?). Other times, the outsides are crudely taped or glued shut, occasionally with so much glue that the contents are actually glued into the envelope or package!

As stated here previously, I have complained to the USPS REPEATEDLY about the constant illegal tampering and frequent theft of our mail. At one point, an investigator contacted me and had me fax him copies of some of my many receipts for missing/stolen mail, which I did. (I have a stack of these over an inch thick! Many of these are for missing job applications, and some are for missing formal complaints; some are even for certified mail.)

The investigator later called me back and said he was "referring the matter back to my local post office". I tried to explain that the problem WAS my local post office, and he said there was nothing he could do.

Meanwhile, my former mother-in-law, her friends, and other unauthorized persons are seen coming and going frequently from supposedly secure areas of our local U. S. government facility...

The Fireplug Incident

A few months after my divorce was finalized, city workers began installing a new water line across our front yard next to the street. At the time, my property was just outside the city limits, but there had been talk for several years about the city annexing our area, so I assumed the new pipe installation was related to that. (We have our own well and septic system.)

My children and I were surprised when the work began on our property, since we'd never been notified about it by anyone. We were even more surprised when we saw what looked like a large pipe sticking up out of the ground and covered with black plastic that was put in by the street in our front yard almost directly opposite our front door. We assumed this was for hook-ups to city water and sewer, should we ever want them, and I also assumed it would eventually be made more cosmetically acceptable.

Imagine our shock one day when the city workers finally removed the black plastic covering to reveal a bright red fire hydrant in the center of our front yard! Our house has two stories and sits on a hillside below the level of the street, so every view from the front of our house now looked out onto this hydrant. It was an eyesore we'd never been consulted about, and it seriously devalued our house and property. There was only one possible reason for its installation in that way and in that position: harassment. My kids and I were livid.

I immediately fired off the letter to the city shown here. A few days later, I received a reply from the mayor saying the city had notified my ex-husband about the work and asked him to tell us (even though they were well aware my ex- didn't live here anymore and no longer owned the property).

The mayor apologized to us. He said he'd personally driven by our house and agreed the hydrant's placement was offensive. He assured us the city would relocate the hydrant as soon as possible, and within a few days, it was moved a short distance down the street--still on our property, but out-of-sight from the front of our house. However, small protruding pipes and a rectangular metal cover were left behind in the spot where the hydrant had been, and they are still clearly visible in the middle of our front yard today (marking where the hydrant was originally installed).

I am also posting a copy of a letter I received from my ex-husband in 2003 that discusses this incident. In this letter, my ex- agrees that the original location of the hydrant was harassment. The "outlot" he refers to is his property bordering mine which did not have its agricultural exemption questioned when mine did, even though my property was clearly being used for agricultural purposes and his clearly was not.

While I'm posting my ex-husband's letter here to help document "the fireplug incident", it is also important for readers to go back a few posts and consider it along with the documents posted under "Chronologic Order". This letter is a good example of what I meant in the earlier post when I said my ex- would not give me copies of the documentation of agricultural use of our land I knew he had. Here you can see how he skirts the issue in various ways without ever actually providing me with what I'd asked him for (and what he knew I really needed).

Notice also that my ex- is aware I haven't been able to obtain legal representation and that he tries to sent me to one of his father's law partners. Although I didn't know it at the time, the particular family he talks about this lawyer representing just happens to own a large parcel of land near ours and also happens to own the major construction company employing the owner of the property to the west of us, the sme man who also happens to be a civil engineer, a pilot, the husband of a local doctor, and a school board member (as well as a close associate of my ex-husband's).

Strange Notice

The Legal Situation, No. 2

(Remember, the writer of the letter in the previous post insisted I use a Texas attorney.)

What The NNEDV Just Said

Recently I faxed the National Network To End Domestic Violence (NNEDV) an updated request for assistance in dealing with the many very serious issues still facing my children and me related to domestic abuse. Some of the things I requested their help with included: helping us find proper legal representation; obtaining physical and financial protection from my ex-husband, his family, and their associates; pressuring the U.S. Department of Justice to properly locate and remove all illegal surveillance and harassing broadcasting devices from our property and properly investigate and prosecute our case/s; obtaining crime victim compensation we are entitled to; pressuring the USPS to stop the constant illegal tampering with our mail; obtaining proper financial and job counseling; assisting us in dealing with local officials who continue to treat us improperly (see previous post, for example); and advising us on how to stop the severe stalking and harassment we continue being subjected to daily.

I received the card shown here in today's mail in response to my request. Notice that the writer only mentions the FBI, rather than the Justice Department, and says nothing or next to nothing about the most serious parts of my request.

The writer of this letter (whose name I can't make out) then gives me a referral to the Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) Center in Kerrville. This just happens to be the same organization that charged me $175.00 in March of 2007 to host a fake mediation session headed by a retired judge from San Antonio that turned out to be nothing more than over four straight hours of the retired judge and my own lawyer at the time (the one I fired as explained in my 8/1/10 post entitled "Still Waiting") taking turns trying to extort large sums of money from me in order to "make everything go away" and trying to force me to "sign off on" a trust document I knew was fraudulent. This "mediation session" finally ended only when I became upset and angry and threatened to take copies of my documentation down the street to the D.A.'s office. I'm also posting a copy of an email I sent to Diop Kamau shortly after this session that contains additional details about what happened that day.

This response from the NNEDV is absolutely outrageous under the circumstances (and possibly criminal as well, depending on why they referred me to the ADR instead of helping me find an attorney, which they knew we didn't have). It is also an extreme example of what domestic violence expert Alexis A. Moore calls "the domestic violence run-around", where victims are shuttled repeatedly from one agency to another rather than being helped.

Please consider going to Ms. Moore's blog at alexisamoore.blogspot.com, clicking on the link there, and signing her online petition asking the government to require domestic violence aid agencies receiving federal funds to account for how these funds are being spent. It's painfully clear this money isn't being used to help victims.

Finally, I must also mention here that there's a chance this response might be related to illegal interceptions of my faxes. You'll find a detailed discussion and documentation of this posted earlier here under "Illegal Surveillance, Part IV" (posted 11/14/09).

Chronologic Order

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In an earlier post entitled "Guessing Games" (7/25/10), I mentioned what was going on at around the same time as the ads shown there. Now I'm posting a sampling of information and documentation presented in chronologic order that you can plug the ads into and also use to understand some of the events that led up to my hiring private investigator Ed Hodges at the end of June 2003.

As you look at these, keep in mind that we have two title companies here: one run by the city attorney, and the other run by a law partner of my ex-husband's divorce lawyer. You should also be aware that the county judge was a classmate of my former brother-in-law's and that the property to the south of mine consists of a very steep hill that is unsuitable for building on.

By the middle of June 2003, I had a tax appraisal protest hearing coming up and had been unable to force my ex-husband to provide me with the agricultural use documentation from past years I needed or to get him to remove his exotic animals from my property (which I'd been forced to feed because he wouldn't). There had also been numerous serious and frightening incidents that I haven't gone into much here. We'd had CONSTANT problems with people trespassing, partying, leaving trash and drug paraphernalia, etc. on my property, and the police wouldn't do anything--in fact, one of the people blatantly trespassing was the local police chief, my ex-husband's close friend. City employees had cleared out a house the city had bought that bordered both my property and the rent house where my ex-husband had been living and dumped a large amount of trash (including furniture and appliances) on my property; when I called the police, the responding officer just laughed and then started asking me over and over again about what I intended to do with my property. Late one night when I let my dog out, he scared off an athletic-looking Caucasion man who'd been tampering with our phone line at the point where it entered our house.

It was at this point that I discussed my situation with a man in my Bible study class at church who was ex-military and someome I considered a friend. He told me he sometimes worked as a private investigator for a man named Ed Hodges from Arlington, and he suggested I hire Ed to help me with some of my problems. I told him to have Hodges call me, we talked on the phone, and I decided to hire him.

Hodges helped me retain my ag. exemption, but he also immediately began trying to get me to sign a trust document that gave him full control of my property. When I refused to do this, he forged my name on the document he'd been trying to get me to sign. The county clerk's office then filed this document at the courthouse even though it wasn't properly notarized, and they faxed a copy of it to an unknown location.

Still Waiting...

In the summer of 2006, I consulted a professional document examiner about a fraudulent trust document I already knew private investigator Ed Hodges had forged my name on. The document examiner wrote a report stating my initials had been forged on the pages and a page on clearly different paper with my genuine signature on it had been added. (See "She Said", 9/16/09.) This document examiner has close ties to the FBI office in San Antonio.

The document expert gave me referrals to several attorneys she said were "trust lawyers" who could help me deal with the fraud. One of the recommended attorneys stalled and then refused to represent me. Another passed me on to a partner of theirs who was rude to me on the phone and made it clear their practice was actually criminal law. (I later learned that all of these recommended attorneys were actually criminal lawyers.)

The third of these lawyers was a woman who said her husband worked for the CIA. She said his name was David Clark, which I later learned is considered a generic spy name. She also mentioned being an avid horsewoman and owning horses, but she wouldn't say what kind. (She is the same lawyer discussed in "The French Connection" earlier.)

I decided to hire this last lawyer mainly on the basis of the recommendation from the document examiner. I signed a contract with her and paid her a retainer and a fee that was to be put in escrow. A day or so later, before I'd even had time to meet with her again after providing her with copies of my documentation to look over, Ed Hodges filed a lawsuit against me and my children claiming I owed him enormous sums of money for various "trust duties" like the ones shown in my 7/27/10 post entitled "Dating Problems".

The year that followed was one of constant stalling, repeated demands for money from me by various persons involved in the case, a "mediation" session that was more like attempted extortion, and numerous other odd and disturbing events. Eventually I decided I wanted a written summary of this attorney's work in her own words, so I asked her to provide this in a one-page format; the page she provided is shown here.

Two days later, on July 11th, 2007, my lawyer called and said she was faxing me some paperwork she'd just received from Ed Hodges' lawyer. At 4:01 PM she faxed me the paper shown here plus another with a crude map on it.

I started looking at these documents and quickly realized they involved a proposed zoning change on land very close to mine that I knew nothing about. I then looked at the map more carefully to try and figure out whose land was involved. The more I examined the map, the more convinced I became that the land to be rezoned was actually my own, despite the 200' statement on the notice.

I checked the date and time for the hearing and was shocked to discover that it was to start in an hour and that any protests needed to be filed in writing ahead of time. I called my lawyer back and asked her if the hearing was for my land. She said no, it was for land to the west of mine. I told her I was upset about being notified so late, and she claimed she'd only just received the notice herself from Hodges' lawyer--but I could see he's actually faxed it to her several hours earlier. I asked her why the notice had come from Hodges' lawyer instead of the city, and she claimed she didn't know.

By this time so many alarms were going off for me that I ran to my car and raced over to the city offices. The Director of Development Services tried to run past me as I entered, but I stopped him and insisted on speaking to him. He said he was "late for a meeting" and again tried to push past me, but I stood my ground in the doorway and demanded to know if it was my property to be rezoned. Like my attorney, he said no, it was for land west of mine. He was sweating profusely, clearly nervous (shaking), and wouldn't look me in the eye. I demanded he show me a better map.

At that point, he took me down a back hallway and showed me a larger and much more detailed wall map where I could clearly see it was indeed my own land that was up for rezoning. I asked him why he'd lied to me, to which he only replied, "If you want to file a protest, you'll have to give it to the secretary right now, because our office is closing." I then asked him why the city had never notified me of the hearing, but he only repeated his instruction about filing a protest, so I quickly scribbled the few lines shown along the bottom of the page and handed it to the secretary. While she was stamping this and making copies, I told the official I had a conflict with one of my children's activities and would be unable to attend the hearing. (Everyone in town knew I had a child involved in this activity.) I also told him that first thing the next morning, I'd be contacting the Texas OAG and the FBI. At the mention of the FBI, he grabbed his things and fled the building.

As soon as I returned home, I called my lawyer back. I was furious with her for lying to me and wanted an explanation, which of course she wouldn't give me. After consulting with my children, I fired her.

The next morning, I called the city offices and was told that, although my brief and hasty protest had been presented at the hearing, they had gone ahead and recommended my land be rezoned. I immediately prepared a more detailed protest that I faxed to the city. I then prepared a formal complaint plus documentation that I faxed to the Texas OAG with a copy to the city. (Of course I had no response from either.)

I immediately began searching for a new lawyer, and I spent the next few weeks almost non-stop on the phone trying to find one. I quickly discovered that the only ones who were willing to represent my children and me in the lawsuit would only do so if I first deeded over one-third to one-half of my zoned-commercial property to them first, which I would not do. When I realized I had a serious problem finding proper legal representation, I began contacting legal assistance organizations, also without success, as I've blogged about previously.

In the process of talking to so many lawyers (literally hundreds!), I noticed something odd: every time I showed this hearing notice to one of them, they always commented on the fact that the city was listed as the applicant on it--without my even mentioning it first. Even stranger, half of them told me the city's being the applicant for the zoning change wasn't legal, while the other half told me it was! The fact that they all seemed so interested in this one issue yet could not seem to agree on it intrigued me, so I started taking an informal poll of the responses I received. I also started pointing out to attorneys that I'd been given conflicting information about the issue and wanted to find out for certain whether it was legal for the city to be the applicant for a zoning change for land owned by someone else. I received the same response to this every time" "I'll look this up and get back to you."

Of course they never did get back to me, so I'm still waiting... for a definitive answer on whether or not it was legal for the city to be the applicant AND for an attorney to agree to represent us properly, both in the lawsuit and elsewhere.

At this point, you might want to go back and read "The Legal Situation" (6/23/10) again. You should also know that more recently this same lawyer was giving public elder law seminars involving trusts at Democratic Party functions and advertising herself as an "elder law specialist".