Jury May Decide the $75,000 Question

Did Jennie Barry, now an 82-year-old retiree in Laguna Woods, stock a safety deposit box with $75,000 in cash over a 26-month period only to come in one day and find it empty -- except for a rubber band?

That’s just for starters. If a lawsuit she and her daughter filed continues on schedule and reaches an Orange County courtroom next month, jurors will have to consider many other questions -- including some that may have no answers.

For example, if jurors believe Barry put in the money, who took it? Did Barry remove it and somehow not remember? Did her daughter, who had the only other key to the box, take the money? Did a third party take it during a three-week period when Barry’s attorney says one of the keys had been misplaced?

If a third party got the key, why would a bank employee give them access to the box when only Barry and her daughter were authorized to open it?

Did someone inside the bank somehow get Barry’s key and empty the box?

Or -- and this is where the speculation gets juicier -- did Barry and her daughter set out to scam the bank by never putting any money in the box and then claim that the bank’s security was lax? Or, perhaps, did they put some money in, take it out and then claim it was stolen?

And then, there’s this one: Should a bank have to make good on repaying $75,000 that it can’t be sure ever existed?

I may be leaving out a plot twist or two. The bank’s attorneys contend that the box could be opened only by either of the keys given to Barry and her daughter, in conjunction with a key kept by the bank. Or, as the only other possibility, by a locksmith. The bank’s attorneys say the box showed no indication that a locksmith had opened it, nor do bank records indicate that a locksmith had been hired to open the box or alter the lock.

Lawyers for the bank, California Bank & Trust in Laguna Hills, say customer privacy laws prevent them from discussing the case but have argued in court papers that the case be tossed out.

Even an amateur detective like myself would ask Barry’s daughter, Linda Gonzales Jensen, if she took the money.

Jensen, 52, isn’t at all defensive in denying it. And, as she and her attorney note, she notified the state attorney general, the Better Business Bureau, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, a U.S. senator and a U.S. congressman about the matter. Not to mention little ol’ me.

What I’m suggesting is that not many scam artists I’ve ever heard of alert investigators to draw attention to the situation.

Barry says she was shocked to discover the box empty. The $75,000, she says, wasn’t her entire net worth but was a retirement nest egg. The bulk of the money, she says, came from doing caretaker work for an older woman. So far, Barry has spent several hours giving depositions to bank attorneys. “They want to blame it on everyone but themselves,” she says.

I ask if she’s prepared to testify at a trial. “If I have to,” she says. “I pray the jury will be on my side, because I’m saying the honest-to-goodness truth. Here I am being investigated. Why would I go into court and say the things I said if I took the money? I’m not a crook.”

If it goes to trial, jurors won’t have video cameras to look at or paper records of deposits or withdrawals. No one, including bank personnel, knows what was in Barry’s safety deposit box. So how could Barry and Jensen win? Credibility, says their attorney, Jean Wilcox.

“It’s their word,” she says. Barry can verify her earnings through canceled checks and both mother and daughter can show they tried from the start to alert authorities.

“They’d have to be the most artful, brazen criminals of the 20th century to pull this off,” Wilcox says.

Dana Parsons’ column

appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana .parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.