Woman’s Family Kept Up Vigil for Truth : Crime: Nurse who moved in to care for elderly friend is accused of hiding her, raiding her bank accounts and finally killing her with an overdose in a Rosemead trailer park.

Robert Raymond Matas is in jail today awaiting prosecution for murder because the family of 86-year-old Stella Regina Cain would not give up.

After Cain disappeared more than three years ago from her Baldwin Park mobile home, family members tried to get police and federal authorities to help find her and her roommate, Matas--to no avail, the relatives said.

“She’s 83 years old (at that time) and leaves her trailer with all her possessions behind?” Jennifer Rothman, Cain’s granddaughter, said Friday. “This isn’t normal. But nobody would help us.”

Then Cain was found March 15, dead in a Rosemead trailer park with only a nightgown, her sole possession, covering her body, and the family stepped up its quest for answers.

Investigators at first said the house-bound and incontinent 86-year-old--a retired registered nurse--died of natural causes.

But several family members told a different story--one of physical and financial abuse of the elderly woman stretching back three years. The abuse, they insisted, ended in her murder by Matas, a fellow nurse.

Later, blood tests gave more weight to their suspicions that she did not die naturally: Cain’s body contained potentially fatal doses of Elavil, a prescription tranquilizer, and Marcaine, a spinal block drug.

Matas, 52, is being held without bail in Los Angeles County Jail. He faces murder and 10 other criminal charges--including elder physical abuse, elder financial abuse, grand theft, kidnaping, false imprisonment and practicing medicine without a license, Deputy Dist. Atty. Ardith Javan said.

The charges were filed June 22. But Matas, who disappeared shortly after Cain’s death, was not arrested until Wednesday, after Los Angeles County sheriff’s investigators tracked him to his nursing job at Queen of the Valley Hospital in West Covina. A preliminary hearing is scheduled in Los Angeles Municipal Court on Sept. 9.

“She really didn’t have that much for him to do that,” said Cain’s granddaughter, Cindy Reinhardt. “It’s not like she had hundreds and thousands of dollars.”

“Grandma Jeanie,” as her granddaughters called her, was a hard-working nurse who stayed on the job until age 75. Barely five feet tall, she was fiercely independent and proud of her appearance, Reinhardt said. She insisted on coloring her gray hair auburn and having her nails manicured, often with sparkles in the polish.

“‘I don’t want to be around all those old people,”’ Reinhardt said, relating the words of her grandmother after she left a retirement home and moved, alone, to a Baldwin Park mobile home in 1984.

Concerned for the welfare of the aging woman, family members agreed to let Matas move in in October, 1989. He was Cain’s trusted friend, having worked beside her at a Los Angeles hospital. But the granddaughters said they soon discovered that Matas was using the elderly woman’s credit cards and checking account.

The family forced him out in the summer of 1990, and Reinhardt put her own name on the mobile home trust deed as protection. But unknown to the relatives, authorities said, Matas came back and, without warning, left the area with Cain.

When the granddaughters could not reach Cain by telephone, they made further checks and discovered--to their shock--that the trailer had been sold and a stranger was living in it. They later learned that Reinhardt’s signature had been forged on the sale documents, investigators say.

For the next three years, Matas allegedly moved the elderly woman in and out of homes in the San Fernando Valley, San Francisco, Mexico and other locales, while Cain’s family sought desperately to find her, Javan said.

The relatives filed a missing person’s report. But with no foul play apparent at that time, police did little but tell them that their grandmother might not want to be found, Rothman said.

Baldwin Park police Sgt. Ralph Orantes said he had no details on the Cain case, but noted that investigators typically file a report and send a teletype to other law enforcement agencies on missing persons. But without further leads from the other agencies, the search may be stymied, he said.

In Cain’s case, the family’s search was further frustrated when her $1,275 monthly Social Security checks continued to be cashed, but federal officials would not tell them the address to which they were sent, citing privacy laws, Reinhardt said. Cain’s credit cards were in use, with large balances due, but the family could not find the Van Nuys post office box listed on the cards, she said.

When the family finally learned of Cain’s death, they were immediately suspicious. Matas had tried to cremate the body, but Cain, a devout Roman Catholic, would never have allowed that, they said.

In fact, Matas tried to persuade a crematory that, as a nurse, he could sign the death certificate in place of a doctor, according to Javan. But because state law requires an investigation if no attending physician signs a death certificate, Los Angeles County sheriff’s detectives entered the picture.

“Thank God for (Sheriff’s Detective) Melinda Hearne, because she’s the only one who listened to us in three years,” Reinhardt said.

During a five-month investigation, Hearne and Detective Jack Smith discovered that in the weeks before Cain died, someone called the county Department of Adult Protective Services to report Matas for elder abuse.

In March, on the day Cain died, county officials telephoned Matas. He first denied knowing the elderly woman, then said he had not seen her in five months, according to Javan. Two hours after the phone call, Cain was dead, she said.

Family members, who buried “Grandma Jeanie” at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, now say they wait for the trial with the hope that Matas will be convicted and punished.

“If she was sick and he was tired of taking care of her, why didn’t he drop her off?” Reinhardt asked. “That’s what makes me so mad. We would have found her and taken care of her.”