Come to the courthouse to see judicial corruption at work.
The reason you will see it even if I win the case is that it is obvious that the case should never have gotten this far.
Here are the relevant facts.
1. My brother Creighton started stealing money out of his mother's bank accounts in 1984. He set up a account in her name but with him as the sole signing authority at the Republic Bank in Charlotte, North Carolina. He got the post office to forward his mother's pension and social security checks to the North Carolina address even though my mother was living in Lynchburg, Virginia.
2. In August, 1985, my mother set up a Trust Account with Sovran Bank in Lynchburg, Virginia for the purpose of shielding her funds from Creighton. Unfortunately, the Trust Officer with whom she set up the account, Robert MacCallum, resigned almost immediately thereafter and a new trust officer named Massie Ware took over my mother's account. This new trust officer, not realizing that the sole reason my mother had established the account in the first place was to keep Creighton away from her money, gave Creighton access to information about the account.
3. After another year of fighting between my mother and my brother over my mother's money, on August 25, 1986 my mother fled the Commonwealth of Virginia and went to New York. On September 3, 1986, my brother has my mother arrested and held in the police station on Elizabeth Street in New York City. However, after about two hours, the police released my mother because they realized they had no grounds to hold her.
4. Because of this incident, my mother did not feel safe anywhere in the United States and, in September, 1986 fled to Argentina. While in Argentina, my brother blocked all his mother's bank accounts and had her credit cards all cancelled so that she could not pay her hotel bills. She was nearly arrested for staying in a hotel with no money to pay but somehow she came up with the money. She then fled to Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
5. In December, 1986, Creighton filed a lawsuit in Lynchburg Circuit Court entitled Creighton Sloan vs. Sovran Bank. The grounds for this suit was that Sovran Bank was not following Creighton's instructions with regard to his mother's money but instead was following his mother's instructions with regard to her own money. Incredibly, and without any legal basis whatever, and with no notice or opportunity for a hearing, Judge Miller of the Lynchburg Circuit Court immediately agreed to turn over control of all the bank accounts of Dr. Helen Marjorie Sloan to Creighton Sloan, except for the Trust Account, which was frozen. Creighton immediately withdrew all the money from all of the accounts except for the frozen account.
6. These actions left Dr. Helen Marjorie Sloan destitute and without funds in a foreign country, the United Arab Emirates. Nevertheless, Judge Miller refused to advance her any funds at all and also refused to schedule a hearing on this case. As a result, the bulk of her funds remained frozen and are still frozen to this day, 18 years later.
7. In spite of having lost all her funds and being destitute, Dr. Sloan refused to return to Virginia knowing that such a trip would be her last as Creighton was going to lock her up and not let her out again. Creighton was also trying to have her beloved granddaughter, Shamema, kidnapped. Finally, after a long struggle, in May 1987 she was able to get her pension and social security amounting to $5,000 per month sent to the United Arab Emirates.
8. On September 3, 1990, Creighton had his mother kidnapped in Bangkok, Thailand. In order to facilitate this, Creighton hired a professional kidnapper named Boonchoo Yensabai, who was assisted by an American named John L. Sobel. They gave Dr. Sloan knock-out drugs to incapacitate her and put her on an airplane to ship her back to America. In America, she was brought to Silver Spring, Maryland where she was locked up in nursing homes for two months.
9. The nursing homes finally concluded that she was competent and able to conduct her affairs and they could not keep her locked up against her will. My mother repeatedly tried to escape from the nursing homes. For that reason, Creighton brought her to Aiken South Carolina because South Carolina did not have the strong laws protecting the rights of the elderly that Maryland had. My mother was never allowed to return to Virginia where she had a beautiful home and where her bank accounts were frozen.
10. On January 16, 1991, Creighton through his new lawyer requested and obtained an ex parte order from Judge Sue H. Roe of the Aiken County Probate Court temporarily appointing him both guardian and conservator of his mother. Like the 1986 order by Judge Miller, there was no notice or opportunity for a hearing and no service of process whatever. Creighton said that service of process could be dispensed with because it was an emergency situation because he was having trouble getting his mother's pension and social security checks. Had the judge inquired, she would found out that the reason for this trouble was that both the United States Department of Social Security and the Virginia Supplemental Retirement System had red-flagged these accounts with instructions not to give the money to Creighton. By granting this ex-parte court order, Judge Roe essentially overruled the decisions by the Department of Social Security not to follow any instructions from Creighton with regard to his mother's funds.
11. I knew nothing about this although by then I was living in my mother's house in Lynchburg Virginia and was searching for her whereabouts. I had no idea of even what state she was in. She could have been Iowa, where most of her family lived as she was originally from Iowa, for example. The way I found out where she was was that I went to South Carolina looking for her. Creighton, realizing that I was in the area, called the police to try to have me arrested. The police did not arrest me but they showed me the court orders which Creighton had obtained. I immediately went to the courthouse and complained to Judge Roe.
12. Judge Roe scheduled a hearing for April, 1991. My mother was not allowed to attend that hearing although she was brought to the courthouse and held incognito in a side room and I was not allowed to speak to my mother. I produced voluminous documentary records including hand letters by my mother complaining that Creighton had stolen all her money plus I produced copies of the lawsuits Creighton had filed against his mother and her counter suits she had filed against him. All of this evidence was ignored by Judge Roe. However, Judge Roe did remove Creighton as the Conservator and appointed Nations Bank as the conservator instead. Judge Roe also ordered the parties to cooperate with the bank and hand over all assets of Helen Marjorie Sloan to the bank.
13. Even though Creighton through his attorney had obtained this order, he proceeded to ignore it. He did not hand any of his mother's funds over to the bank. Instead, he continued to receive her pension and social security checks. He opened at least two new bank accounts in her name, one at First Citizens Bank in Columbia SC and the other at Sun Trust in Lynchburg. He did not inform either bank of the 1991 Court Order appointing Nations Bank, now Bank of America, as the Conservator. Instead he showed the banks and his own Lynchburg Lawyer the previous ex-parte order appointing him as the temporary conservator. That order was no longer valid, but he never told anybody that. In 1992, Creighton filed a new lawsuit in Lynchburg claiming to be the conservator to sell his mother's house at 917 Old Trent's Ferry Road In Lynchburg. The judge in that was Judge Gamble, the same judge who, as a lawyer, had filed one of the cases against Dr. Marjorie Sloan entitled Sloan vs. Sloan in 1988. Judge Gamble refused to disqualify himself from the case even though he was obviously disqualified. Judge Gamble ordered my mother's brick, split-level house worth at least $150,000 sold to the lawyer's cousin for a paltry $75,000, most of which went to pay legal fees and moving and storage expenses. Creighton had all of his mother's property and my property as well because I had been living in the house deposited in a garbage dump.
14. Meanwhile, Creighton had arranged the kidnapping of three of my children, Shamema, Michael and Jessica, who were kidnapped on October 7, 1990 in Fujairah, United Arab Emirates. I got back Michael only three days later when the kidnappers decided that they did not want him and dumped him in the road 180 miles away and I got Jessica back for the first time about three months later but I spent the next ten years trying to recover my daughter, Shamema, and my mother. I finally got Shamema, who had been kidnapped when she was 8 years old, back when she grew up and joined the US Marines. I never got my mother back as she died at age 92 on May 16, 2002 in the nursing home where Creighton had confined her.
15. In her will, my mother divided all her property equally between me and my brother, and appointed Sovran Bank as Executor of her estate. However, Sovran Bank has declined to serve because Creighton filed a lawsuit against the bank. Obviously, in view of the fact that Creighton has pending suits against his mother and his mother has pending counter suits against Creighton, he is disqualified from serving as her personal representative.
16. In July, 2002 I petitioned the Aiken County Probate Court to be appointed as my mother's personal representative. Creighton never petitioned for anything. Creighton has never even to this day notified the banks that his mother is dead. Judge Roe disqualified herself from the case. To bad she did not disqualify herself earlier when my mother was still alive, as then my mother might have had a chance to get out of the jail she was in.
17. After Judge Roe disqualified herself, the case was transferred to a judge in Columbia. That judge scheduled a hearing to be held on November 20, 2002. I traveled from New York to South Carolina with my wife and infant daughter to attend that hearing. However, on the day before the hearing, the judge announced that she was canceling the hearing because her friend had died and she needed to attend the funeral. She has never provided the name of the friend. Also, she was in court that day hearing other cases, but she never heard this case. She also did not merely postpone the hearing for a day or two. She cancelled it altogether.
18. A few days later the judges clerk announced that the case would not be heard until Creighton filed a competing petition. Up until that time Creighton had filed nothing, not even a death certificate. The judge gave Creighton until the end of January to file. Creighton filed something on January 28, 2003 but it lacked proof of service. It was not served on me until August 15, 2003, seven months later and one year and three months after my mother had died.
19. After this, three South Carolina judges disqualified themselves from this case in succession. It then came to Judge Hocker, who held a hearing. Incongruously, Judge Hocker ruled that my petition, filed in July, 2002 was invalid and Creighton's petition filed in January 2003 and not served until August 2003 was the only valid petition, even though both petitions had been filed on the same form in the same way. I then re-filed my petition, which Judge Hocker accepted. However, in this way, I became the respondent and not the petitioner.
20. In his decision, Judge Hocker ruled in favor of Creighton and appointed him as his mother's personal representative, ignoring the following facts:
A) Creighton and his mother have five lawsuits pending against each other in the courts of Lynchburg Virginia.
B) Creighton has stolen over one million dollars of his mother's money by taking her pension and social security checks amounting to six thousand dollars per month starting in 1984 and continuing until her death in 2002.
C) Although Creighton obtained a freeze on his mother's Sovran Bank account in 1986 and the account is still frozen, Creighton got the bank to give him the $200,000 in that account by falsely claiming that he was the conservator even though the bank itself was the conservator since by that time the bank itself had been taken over by Bank of America.
D) Creighton filed a lawsuit in 1992 falsely claiming to be the conservator which he was not and then sold the house in 1993 and kept the money. Those funds have never been accounted for.
E) In 1995, the Bank of America wrote to the court complaining that they had never opened a conservator account because they had no funds to open the account with. Of course, the reason they had no funds was that Creighton had kept all the money for himself.
F) Creighton filed numerous documents in the Aiken County Probate Court claiming to be the conservator even though he was not the conservator. The clerk of the court should have noticed that there was something wrong with this.
With this background, it is obvious that Judge Hocker ruled the way he did to protect his fellow judges from criminal prosecution. There is no way that Creighton can possibly be made the personal representative of him mother, in view of this background.
I waited for one month after the courts decision to see if Creighton would implement the court's decision and distribute the funds of his mother which he now has under his control. Judge Hocker found that there was $275,000 left and I should get half. After 30 days, when Creighton had not distributed any money and indeed had said that there is no way that I will ever get a dime, I filed a notice of appeal.
I hope that any interested persons will come to the Aiken County Court of Common Pleas at 11:30 AM Tuesday morning, Courtroom 4, and see what will happen next with this appeal.
Sam Sloan