A Tale of Two Sisters : Slaying of Elderly Alzheimer’s Victim Leaves County Officials Wondering What Went Wrong

When 86-year-old Mary McBride left home to walk the dog late in the afternoon on Sept. 7, she didn’t come back right away. Not after an hour. Not even when darkness fell.

Her 84-year-old sister and nursemaid, Edna Lamont, became frantic. Lamont had reason to worry: She told the police that McBride had symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and did not know her own address or telephone number.

Two days later, McBride was found--confused and disoriented but safe--after straying into a doughnut shop in Culver City with the little black-and-white mongrel in tow. “Oh my God, it’s wonderful!” a relieved Lamont exclaimed. “I’m going to get her a good, big dinner.”

Six months later, on March 12, McBride’s badly beaten body was found face-up in a puddle of blood on the dining room floor of the West Los Angeles house she shared with her sister. Soon after, Lamont was charged with bludgeoning her sister to death with a sponge mop amid allegations by neighbors that she had physically and mentally abused McBride for years.

Disoriented and Confused

Looking disoriented and confused “and almost like a victim herself,” in the words of one prosecutor, the white-haired, bespectacled Lamont pleaded innocent March 16 in West Los Angeles Municipal Court. She was released into the care of her son, who immediately had her hospitalized for observation until a May 10 hearing.

While public attention quickly focused on the gruesome nature of the case--how a relationship between two elderly sisters could have deteriorated to the point where one would be charged with the other’s murder--deeper, more disturbing questions have arisen since the slaying:

--Why hadn’t an extensive social services system designed specifically to help disabled senior citizens and the people who care for them ever heard about the elderly sisters before?

“When this story broke, we of course were very concerned: Were we involved in this case?” said Carol Matsui, special assistant to the director of the county Department of Public Social Services, which runs a state-of-the-art elder abuse detection and prevention network. “The administrators extensively checked our records, and there is no file related to those sisters.”

--Why hadn’t the sisters’ neighbors, who now say they had seen Lamont slap, push and intimidate her enfeebled sister, ever alerted family members or called the authorities?

“It wouldn’t have occurred to me,” explained one, Don Foltz. “But some of the other neighbors across the street said they (also) had seen her really abusing her. And if she abused her when they were out on the street, who knows what she did when they were in the house?”

--And why hadn’t anyone recognized that the strain of nursing an 86-year-old Alzheimer’s sufferer could be overwhelming even for someone half Lamont’s age?

“There are a lot of elderly people out there in difficult situations, and nobody wants to take responsibility for identifying them--not family, not friends, not neighbors,” said Cathy Bekian, coordinator of the UCLA Geriatric Psychiatry Clinic’s out-patient program. “You don’t want to get involved so you shut your eyes to what’s happening.”

Instead, prosecutors allege, Mary McBride became a victim of what experts say is an alarming rise in violence against some of the weakest members of American society--the 7% of Americans over age 65 who are thought to suffer from Alzheimer’s. Robbed of their minds by the freakish cruelty of the disease, they too often also are robbed of their dignity.

“Assuming for a moment that we don’t find this was a cold-blooded, calculated or tortured kind of murder which would tend toward an entirely different kind of result,” noted Deputy Dist. Atty. Tom Herman, “what we’re dealing with is a human tragedy for everybody.”

Neighbors and police paint a sketchy portrait of the two sisters. (Lamont’s attorney and her family declined requests for interviews.) They were born at the turn of the century into an Irish family of three daughters and one son. Eventually, all of the children would emigrate from Ireland--one sister to Africa, the brother to Canada.

Edna Florence also would live in Canada before moving to Los Angeles. But Mary Violet would come directly to the United States and settle in Portland, Ore. She went to work for the Otis Elevator Co. as a clerk-stenographer and, according to Otis’ files, stayed with the firm for 30 years until her retirement in 1963.

She never married. Lamont, meanwhile, was widowed with two children, both of whom live in the Los Angeles area.

The house at 11922 Tennessee Ave. where the sisters eventually settled belonged to Lamont’s son, Herbert Barry Lamont, a humanities professor at West Los Angeles College. He and his wife inherited the well-kept wood home from her parents and rented it out. In the early 1960s, Lamont moved in.

In May, 1968, McBride leased a West Los Angeles apartment to be closer to Lamont. Though the two sisters lived apart, they saw each other often, neighbors said. From a distance at least, their relationship appeared to be companionable.

“Before they started living together, they seemed to get along well enough,” said next-door neighbor Foltz, 79, a retired life insurance salesman. Several times a week, they would have dinner or go shopping together, with Lamont--who affectionately called her sister Vi--chauffeuring McBride back and forth to her apartment.

When Foltz asked why they didn’t live together, he said Lamont--an avid gardener--replied, “All Mary wants to do is sit and read all the time.”

They probably would have continued living apart had it not been for Alzheimer’s.

Neighbors say McBride started exhibiting symptoms of the disease four years ago. She would forget their names, even though she had known them for decades. Once, a confused McBride referred to Lamont as a “friend.”

Like many Alzheimer’s victims, McBride was never formally diagnosed as having the disease--perhaps because the only sure way to detect it is through a biopsy of brain tissue. “I think they just assumed she had Alzheimer’s,” Foltz said.

One morning Lamont drove to McBride’s apartment. McBride was not there. She apparently had wandered off with a shopping cart and left her apartment door unlocked. An anguished Lamont returned home and enlisted Foltz’s help. “I spent about two hours on the phone calling emergency hospitals and so forth in the area. But we couldn’t find her,” Foltz remembered.

Found Wandering Downtown

Four days later, she was found wandering in downtown Los Angeles. Soon afterward, Barry Lamont told police, his mother took in McBride “to care for her because for the most part she was unable to care for herself.”

Soon, McBride’s health went into a dramatic slide. When neighbors said hello, she would reply, “Who are you?” When she walked the dog, she would go a few blocks and lose her way.

As McBride became almost totally dependent on Lamont for her daily living, the sisters’ relationship deteriorated. “She was constantly wetting the bed,” according to a police report that quoted Barry Lamont, “which caused suspect to be upset because she was constantly cleaning up after decedent.”

According to police records, Lamont “was seen to angrily and unreasonably berate the victim continuously.” She also was seen pushing McBride on many occasions, pulling her by the hair and even spraying her with a hose.

Foltz’s wife, Lillian, told police she had observed Lamont slapping McBride “repeatedly with her open hand” near their trash cans just two months before McBride’s murder. And another neighbor, Toni Nakamura, told police that a week before McBride’s death she heard “someone calling for help during the late evening hours from the Lamont house.”

“I’m sure it was difficult for them to live together,” Don Foltz said. “Edna used to get pretty perturbed at Mary. They would be out in the yard, and Mrs. Lamont would get upset with her, and she would scold her like a mother might scold a child. And she would slap her, like a mother might strike a child who misbehaved.”

‘A Docile Little Thing’

McBride didn’t fight back, Foltz noted. “She was such a docile little thing. She just took it, and that was it.” Neighbor Peter Johnson told reporters after McBride’s death: “I don’t think she understood. She could have been on the planet Mars.”

Lamont’s treatment of her sister was a subject of some discussion among the neighbors, several of whom had had run-ins with what they called her “terrific temper.” Foltz said Lamont blew up at him for trimming the bougainvillea between their houses. And neighbor Jerry Nakamura said he hadn’t talked to Lamont “in 15 years” because of an incident involving his children playing ball.

As McBride grew worse, she required around-the-clock attention, and neighbors said they saw signs of the strain on Lamont.

Recently, she fell down in the front yard, and the paramedics had to be called. When she went out to exercise the dog, she needed McBride for support. Lamont also had wanted to replant the back yard garden, but this year weeds started to grow up and she seemed to have given it up.

“In the last year or so, it appeared that she had kinda gone down,” Foltz said. “She was still doing her own gardening and so forth. But it seemed that she had sort of, I don’t know, she had become old.”

Lamont apparently did not have a support system to lean on as her sister’s condition grew worse. Her children reportedly had tried--and failed--to ease the burden. On the morning that McBride was found dead, Barry Lamont spoke to Foltz about the situation. “He said that he had wanted to get a housekeeper in there for them, and he also had wanted to put McBride in a home. But his mother said no. She said ‘I can take care of her.’ She was a very strong-willed woman.”

Lamont’s position echoed that of most families of Alzheimer’s victims, according to Debra Cherry, chairwoman of the county’s Older Adult Task Force. “Almost every family has tried to take care of the relative at home first, even when lots of physicians have told them, ‘This is Alzheimer’s disease. They must go in a nursing home.’ ”

Assistant Dist. Atty. Herman, who is expected to prosecute the case, said he immediately sympathized with Lamont’s dilemma: His own mother-in-law has Alzheimer’s symptoms. “You feel very guilty and very concerned about the quality of care they might get in a nursing home,” he said. “And you feel an obligation to see if you can do it better.”

But if relatives insist on taking care of the victim themselves, then officials say they also insist that the family get in touch with one of the many social services, community and religious groups which now exist to help them cope with the experience. But, Cherry notes, whether or not these “isolated caregivers” ever connect with a support group is “very random.”

“The type of resources the family gets depends on their ability to look for resources. Otherwise, they’re left to cope on their own.”

Much already is known about the tremendous stress associated with caring for Alzheimer’s victims. “They themselves become an emotional victim,” explained Andrew Scharlach, a senior research associate at the USC-UCLA Gerontology Center.

‘An Unrealistic Situation’

The older the nurse is, the less able he or she is to handle a difficult patient. “For an 84-year-old woman to think she can take care of an 86-year-old woman all alone is an unrealistic situation,” maintained Claire Lucas, clinical coordinator of USC’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.

The county Department of Public Social Services acts as a sort of clearinghouse of information on services, public and private, that are available to elderly caregivers. Matsui said a social worker would have been dispatched to the McBride-Lamont household if someone had alerted them that help was needed. “If she had called and said, ‘I’m having trouble,’ or if someone else had called for her, then, oh, we definitely would have gone out. Definitely .”

And the help could have been considerable. Under the county-administered In-Home Supportive Services program, a worker could have been authorized to perform tasks in the home, ranging from bathing and linen changes to food preparation.

The department says it also would have put Lamont in touch with private and public groups and community agencies that provide companionship and counseling, including the Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Disorders Assn.

In addition, the department administers Adult Protective Services, a federally funded program that mandates the prompt investigation of adults reported to be endangered by abuse, neglect, exploitation, or unsafe or hazardous living conditions. “From what I read in the papers, it sure sounded like there was sufficient evidence for us to get involved,” Matsui said. “The neighbors could have called anonymously, and we would have gone out. But maybe they’re unaware of this service that’s available. And that’s too bad.”

Ironically, two years ago Adult Protective Services launched what it considered an extensive promotional campaign to alert the public that: “Elder Abuse Hurts Everyone.” It consisted of billboards, radio and TV commercials and the establishment of a 24-hour hot line.

A New Phenomenon

Why didn’t it work? Part of the reason, officials suspect, is that elder abuse is a newly recognized phenomenon. “For the last 10 years it was child abuse that was coming out of the closet and becoming more known and more recognized,” said Matsui. “Maybe that’s where elder abuse is now: just trying to come out of the closet.”

The U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Aging has estimated that 4% of the nation’s elderly population, or about 1 million persons, are victims of abuse. Some authorities believe that as many as one-fourth of the elderly who live with their families may suffer from abuse or neglect at some time--making it only slightly less common than child abuse.

Thus far, no studies have specifically examined elder abuse among Alzheimer’s victims. But officials and experts agree that there is a direct correlation between dependence of the victim and incidents of abuse.

“There certainly is some evidence that the problem of elderly abuse increases with the physical and mental impairment of the victims,” said Andrew Scharlach, assistant professor of social work at USC and a senior research associate of gerontology. “In fact, older adults who have the kinds of impairments that interfere with normal behavior--like the mentally disabling symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease--are most likely to be abused.”

When McBride wandered away last September, the Los Angeles Police Department’s Missing Person Detail entered her name into the FBI’s National Crime Information Center computer as required by law. But police weren’t required to alert the county social services agency.

The police are required to report physical abuse, but McBride’s wandering “probably didn’t qualify as physical abuse in their estimation,” said Susan Kerr, program specialist for Adult Protective Services. “It does count as neglect, but the mandate of the law is that they report physical abuse.”

What Could Have Been Done

Had McBride wandered away from a board-and-care facility, the situation might have been different. In that case, “we’d be more likely to ask someone to look into this,” acknowledged Det. John Sack of the Missing Person Detail.

Even now, weeks later, officials anguish over what they could have done to help the deteriorating McBride and her overtaxed sister.

“We need to make everyone aware,” Kerr said, “of what they could do and what they should do.”

Agreed Matsui: “If only one of the neighbors would have called the police. . . .”