Caregiver Refuses to Budge in Bank Battle Over Home

The bank foreclosed on her lakeside home five months ago. The terminally ill patients she cared for there have all left.

But Isobel Oxx, the homeowner who enraged neighbors by opening a care facility on the shores of Westlake Lake, isn’t budging.

Oxx has been doing everything legally possible--and sometimes attempting the impossible--to prevent her bank from kicking her out of her Leeward Circle house.

She has sued, counter-sued, even offered to send in another “freeman”-style check to pay off the mortgage. Echoing the freemen’s anti-government bias, she has accused her bank--and the entire banking system--of being built “on the grounds of fraud.”

Texas Commerce Bank is taking Oxx to court today to obtain certain documents and guarantee her presence at a deposition--the latest in a series of efforts to take possession of the house.

Because she continues to occupy the house, Oxx is still licensed to care for the dying, though no patients now live there, said Bill Jennings, district administrator of the local branch of the state Department of Health Services.

Since the Sept. 18 auction when she lost title to her house, Oxx has sued Texas Commerce Bank in federal court, seeking to regain title as well as hoping to halt all proposed bank mergers. She voluntarily withdrew her suit a couple weeks later.

Meanwhile, bank attorneys have filed an unlawful detainer suit to gain possession of the house. To delay those efforts, Oxx is throwing every legal obstacle in front of them. She first tried, unsuccessfully, to quash the suit, then counter-sued. Counter-suits, however, are not allowed in such legal actions.

The bank’s attorneys and Oxx, who is representing herself, will be back in the Simi Valley courthouse today for another motion in what is turning out to be a tedious exercise for the bank.

What typically should take 45 days to resolve has stretched into months of letters, legal briefs and court hearings.

“It’s a complete shame and it causes everyone to go through a lot more time and money,” said Howard Becker, an attorney who handled a similar case for Goleta National Bank but is not directly involved in the Oxx case.

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Oxx’s story is one of dichotomies. On one hand, she is, or has been, viewed by some as a savior, opening her home to the dying after watching her husband die at home. In September 1995, she converted her Westlake Lake home into a congregate care facility.

She evoked the wrath of her neighbors, who unsuccessfully sued to prevent the facility from opening. But Oxx won praise from her patients’ families, who were grateful their loved ones could spend their last days watching the sunshine dance on the lake’s ripples.

On the other hand, Oxx espouses the same rhetoric as the freemen, disparaging the value of paper money and claiming the banking industry is bankrupt. She is a follower of M. Elizabeth Broderick of Palmdale, who was convicted for writing bogus checks and who believes all mortgages to be scams because the only thing being lent is credit, not real money.

At about the same time she opened her home to the dying, Oxx attended one of Broderick’s seminars. In December 1995, she tried paying off her home, which she had refinanced 1 1/2 years earlier, with one of Broderick’s homemade checks.

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That led to the foreclosure proceedings last fall.

Oxx would not comment for this story, but has maintained that her check is valid. It is the banks, she insists in legal papers, that are perpetrating a fraud.

Ten days after her mentor, Broderick, was convicted on 24 charges of fraud and money laundering and a month after she lost title to her home, Oxx notified her original mortgage broker that she was rescinding the loan “on the grounds of fraud, deceit, mistake of law and mistake of law and fact.”

She offered, however, to resubmit the check, called a “comptroller warrant.” It was not honored and was returned.

Although Oxx’s papers are filled with legal jargon, she makes herself most clear in a document sent to the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department. The document is intended to put the department on notice that she “recorded a nonacceptance of recorded deed” on her property.

“This house, which is mine to pay for while misinformed and misled by the lender, is mine free and clear,” Oxx wrote, “now that I have found out about the fraud involved in this particular case regarding the practices involved in the purchase of my home.

“Fraud vitiates all contracts. Any perceived obligation on my part, once I had figured out what happened was and is revoked, rescinded, null and void.”

Officials at Texas Commerce Bank and GE Capital Mortgage had little comment. “We’re moving diligently on this,” GE Capital spokesman Mike Katchell said.

As far as the state Department of Health Services is concerned, Oxx provides good care. Jennings said no complaints have been lodged against her, and as long as she maintains possession of her home, she is allowed to take in as many as four patients.

“It’s kind of in legal never-never land,” Jennings said. “But we see no reason to get caught up in this.”