Gosh, Figment, that's truly one of the nastiest situations I've ever heard of. I'm sorry your girlfriend's folks are such creeps and sorry y'all have been through that. Finding help and collecting the information you need to pursue litigation are going to be tough, so plan on being persistent as heck if you truly want to go through with litigation against these people. I'm not sure how much help I'll be with this advice, but here's what I recommend, and I apologize for how long this post will be:

1. Contact the Legal Aid society in the biggest city near you to hook up with an attorney for free or for minimal costs. They have Legal Aid societies in all big metropolitan areas and even in many mid-sized cities. They're in the yellow pages under lawyers/lLegal Aid.

2. Contact the nearest law school and ask to be pointed in the direction of the school's law clinic, where advanced law students would advise you under the supervision of a bar-admitted professor or instructor and help you pursue any action they recommend you take. Clinics work pro bono (free) or at very low cost, and all law schools have them. I hope you live in an area where there are two or three law schools so you can present your situation to more than one clinic. They're often quite busy, so the more clinics you can talk to, the more likely you are to obtain counsel. Your primary goal in working with a Legal Aid attorney or a law school clinic is to get their advice on what your best course of action is.

3. (This actually needs to be your first step ahead of finding low-cost/no-cost legal help). Round up the necessary paper trail because you won't be able to pursue legal action without it, and it's the first thing any attorney will ask to see before advising you. Get every document, every cleared check, bank record, deposit slip, house title, real estate record, real estate contract, power of attorney document--anything and everything that shows the movement of that $38K from you two to her mom and stepdad and the turning over of her house and its subsequent sale. Make a list of every date and detail you can remember about how the money transaction, POA, and subsequent felony larceny played out. It'd be great if you could find receipts for her parents' new appliances or get copies of their bank statements, but if you do pursue action, their bank records will be subpoenaed, so you'll get those then. The more evidentiary paper you can round up, the better off you'll be. Expect this process to be lengthy, exhausting, and frustrating.

4. If you can round up solid papers/evidence, and assuming your low-cost counsel agrees, talk to the district attorney's office in your county about your case so they can review it for indictable criminal offenses by your GF's parents. I'd love to see them held criminally responsible.

5. Any ethical attorney will advise you to think long and hard about this whole idea before jumping into it and being set up for diappointment. You're going to be going up against people who have more financial resources and powerful connections than you two do. You'll need to plan on devoting at least two to three years of your life to a case like this. Possibly more. You're likely going to find that her parents took that $38K and the money they got from selling her house and liquidated much of it into cash so there'd be little proof of what they did. It'd be marvelous if they'd invested it in CDs and deposited it into bank accounts so it'd still be visible, but if they were sleazy and wily enough to steal it, they were probably wily enough to do it in a way that can't be easily traced.

This is a long way of saying that knowing what they did and proving it may be two very different things. If you end up pursuing them legally, every step along the way will be difficult and ugly. Get ready for every detail of any criminal/drug history you two have to be brought out into the open. Get ready to fight dirtier than you've ever fought in your life. Get ready to do one of four things: win, lose, withdraw your action, or settle.

All that being said, I hope the counsel you obtain will be eager to take on your case and pursue action. I hope you and your girlfriend nail her parents to the wall!!! Good luck, Figment, and let us know how things turn out.
birdgirl73 Reviewed by birdgirl73 on . Nasty Problem...Advice?? Hey Ya'll,Ive got a very nasty personal problem and I could use some REAL advice... Four and a half years ago my GF of 23 years got stopped in her car and arrested for having 151 Lbs of buds in the trunk. In the insuing madness (Cops,Courts,Lawers,Jailtime,parole) we gave her mom and stepdad $38,000 for Laywers fees ect. and signed (power of Attorney) over our house so she might have it when she got home. it turns out that her family kept the money,sold the house,kept THAT money,and bouhgt Rating: 5