The first thing the children wanted to do was have the Power of Attorney, Will and Trust tested for authenticity. I agreed because, again, I was sure this would resolve any concerns they had regarding me in the disappearance of their father. Don had disowned them a couple of years prior so they didn’t know anything about our personal relationship except what Anne was feeding them, and that was nothing but lies.

Peter Candler reviewed the documents and said they were all genuine in his written report. Willa Smith, hired by the children, said she questioned the Power and the Will, but gave no written report (to my knowledge) J.J. Berrie examined the documents and agreed that they were Don’s signature. Ray Green reviewed the Trust and said it was genuine.

All of the witnesses and Notary on the documents provided Affidavits stating that they saw Don sign them and that he understood what he signed and that he was competent to do so. Last week I discovered that in all of the Will Contests where forgery was alleged, the judges gave more credence to the unimpeachable witnesses than to expert witness opinion.

I sent the following to Detectives Lingo and Fernandez today:

After speaking with the two of you last week I have had a few other thoughts. It looks suspicious to me that Anne is the beneficiary of such a huge life insurance policy and how she and the kids are all behaving like they are sure Don isn’t going to come back in and blow them all away. I guess the kids feel like they couldn’t be any worse off since they know Don wouldn’t even speak to them, but Anne is taking a terrible risk by acting this way. Even she won’t be able to fast talk her way out of this one.

The children are now trying to say that the Power of Attorney that Don gave me, the Will and the Trust documents were forgeries and therefore their father has died “intestate”, making half of the estate theirs. They are in an awful big hurry to say their dad is dead and are trying to make it look like I have killed him (I guess to free up more of the estate for them) and that I forged the documents. They claim to have hired a handwriting expert who did ink tests and evaluations of the documents to prove that they are forgeries, which I find an amazing feat since I have possession of the originals. I have gathered the witnesses and the notary to the documents and had them prepare affidavits as to the validity of the documents, but this has made me aware of just how far these people are going to destroy what Don & I have worked so hard for all these years.

I had just offered to transfer to them the properties that I had put into their trust (most of the stuff Don owned when we got married) which amounts to about 1,200,000.00 because even if Don comes back, I don’t want to work for them any longer with the way they are behaving and although Don had told me to dissolve their trust, he’ll get over it someday. They know if Don comes back they will get nothing, so they must be pretty sure he isn’t coming back or they don’t care what lies they get caught in since Don disowned them anyway. They have nothing to lose and nine million dollars to gain. More than anyone else though, Anne knows that the Trust, Will and Power of Attorney are valid because she had the old originals from 1992 hidden under her desk. If she thought they were forged, surely she would have asked Don at some point in the last five years, especially since she was the notary on some of them.

Something I guess I should tell you guys is that Gladys Lewis Cross (the kid’s mom) had tried to kill Don on at least three occasions that he told me about. I remember that the first time he said that Gladys had found out about him and Dorothy (Thompson) and she came flying into the lot and tried to run Don down with the new car he had just bought for her. On another occasion, when she found out about Janie (who worked at the post office) she tried to shoot Don and they got in a fist fight over the gun. He was successful in wrestling it away from her, but she clawed up his face pretty badly. He said he had to almost knock her out to get the gun away from her because she was so intent on killing him.

The third time was over a girl (I think it was her niece Tammy that she later divorced him over) and she tried to run him down in a mall parking lot and ran into a light pole, trashing another car, but missing Don. Could she have been so angry over not getting the million dollars more that she thought she would get, that she would kill Don in a last ditch effort to recover the money she felt he owed her for all her suffering? She could have felt she was “protecting” her girls by doing that and insuring that he didn’t waste any more of it on the animals.

Even if she doesn’t have anything to do with Don’s disappearance, I expect that she is behind much of the posturing the kids are doing now. I think her allegiance with Anne has been underestimated for a long time. I believed that Anne had quit backing Gladys over Don after their divorce, but recently when Gladys was suing us for more money, Anne refused to admit in Court that Don told her to find a million dollars of his best assets for Gladys and the children as they all sat around the table at Gladys house that night, prior to their divorce. Anne has always said she knew that to be the truth and that she was there and that Gladys was given access to all the books, until it recently went to Court and then Anne changed her story and said that none of that ever happened. She had no reason to lie to me about that before so I’d have to assume she was lying when she said it didn’t. If her alliance was with Gladys then of course she would not say the words that would blow Gladys out of the water.

In the suit for more money, Gladys was expecting over a million and ended up with $50,000.00 paid to her this year. I expect most of that went to her Attorney. Don has had other women throughout their entire marriage and Gladys knew about most or all of them, so it wasn’t like it was some huge surprise to her on the three occasions she tried to kill him. It apparently didn’t take much to set her off then, so how much of a disappointment over this lawsuit going south it take for her to try again, especially if she could make it look like I did it. The only question then becomes, where is the body and what “evidence” is going to be left in plain sight?

In the same folder is a hand written note to the same detectives and copies but it’s not dated and I think I gave them these documents earlier. It says: The following are copies of Don’s Wills from here and Costa Rica along with the supporting documents. I would like to offer, in writing, to pay for the expenses involved in sending Hillsborough County Detectives to Costa Rica to locate my husband, as I believe you would do a more thorough and honest job than an agency from the phone book. - Carole Lewis