The 82-year-old Sacramento woman was shocked when a bank official called to say she was late paying on a $10,000 cash advance on her credit card. “It wasn’t me,” she cried out.

Her youngest son had moved in with her and used her Social Security number to get credit cards in her name. He had been intercepting the mail to keep her from finding out.

It’s not just millionaires like New York socialite Brooke Astor, 104, who face the possibility of elder abuse. Astor’s grandson has filed papers in a New York court alleging that Astor’s son has mistreated her.

Financial abuse of the elderly is a common and growing problem, “whether you have $50 in your checking account and live month to month or $250,000,” said Sacramento Deputy District Attorney Sheri Greco, who is handling the 82-year-old’s case. “It’s not one class of victims that is targeted. It is across the board.”

A third suspect has been arrested in the Benton County Sheriff’s Office’s sting to catch Internet sexual predators.

Herman Lee Gillum, 38, of Shelby County, Tenn., was arrested Aug. 3 after his alleged Internet communications with BCSO investigator Rob Holly, who poses online as a teenager.

Holly was pretending to be a 14-year-old girl on June 15 in an Arkansas chat room on Yahoo when he made contact with Gillum, said Capt. Mike Sydoriak, head of the BCSO’s Criminal Investigation division.

Accurate information, as everyone knows, is the lifeline to a successful business.

Work with good information and you’re a hero. Work with poor information and you’re shortly out of the business. Being able to sort good information from the bad takes more than just tapping into the internet and clicking your way into someone’s databases. You have to have an insatiable appetite to figure out puzzles, and enough curiosity to keep digging even when there’s one dead end after another.

I had the good fortune to spend a number of years working with national level intelligence agencies. When these agencies first received information it was usually greeted with interest, but also with skepticism. If that information was corroborated by a second, independent source, it took on an air of credibility, and if a third, separate independent source also reported the information it was considered to be reliable, subject to verification.

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Retired publisher, law enforcement officials mesh well

They scratch out theories over coffee, organize scattered case files - even vacation together.

The aging trio that make up El Paso County’s volunteer cold-case squad have grown close during the past five years, the relationship propelled largely by their successful investigation into the alleged serial killings of Robert Charles Browne.

Dubbed by an office secretary as “The Apple Dumpling Gang” after a goofball Disney movie from 1975, the pair of retired law enforcement officers and, oddly enough, a former newspaper publisher all play their role, shaking old trees in a quest to bring peace to families still wondering what happened to dead or vanished loved ones.

Louisiana officials said Wednesday they are closing the center established to find those missing after Hurricane Katrina.

Officials and volunteers received reports of 13,400 missing people after Katrina hit Aug. 29. All but 136 have been located.

The Find Family Assistance Center opened Sept. 7 to help find residents scattered across the country in the chaotic evacuations prompted by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

He’s looking for Buddy’s killer

Police are looking for a person or persons who may enjoy torturing animals.

A Labrador puppy had to be euthanized last month because his eyes, mouth and ears were glued shut with PVC pipe glue. Darren Versiga, a private investigator, has joined in the search for whoever is responsible for torturing the puppy named Buddy.

He believes Buddy came from a litter of seven mixed-breed puppies born at home on Daylily Street on April Fool’s Day. Three of the puppies were poisoned and another was apparently beaten to death with a hammer, Versiga claims to have found through his investigation. One remains with the owner and another is alive and well and living with neighbors, he said.

A cheating wife and her boyfriend were charged with murder Friday in connection with the fatal shooting of her husband.

Authorities say Ingrid Esteves, 21, lured her husband of four years to an isolated area in south Ontario late Tuesday night for a confrontation with her 18-year-old lover, who was waiting with a gun.

“Evidently this is their way of getting a divorce,” Deputy District Attorney Michael Dowd said.

Police found the husband, Angel Esteves, 26, of San Bernardino, in a car suffering from a gunshot wound to the upper body early Wednesday morning. He later died at a hospital.

For years now, attorneys, business people, and courts alike have struggled with the electronic data revolution.

As a result of fundamental changes in the way companies do business, such as the generation of millions of pages of e-mail on a daily basis, as well as the migration of standard business record-keeping to “paperless environments,” companies have tried to reconcile traditional notions of record retention and production obligations with the task of retaining and locating all of the ephem

5 Steps for E-Mail Retention

The first five steps you should take to enact an e-mail archiving and retention plan.

The wrong time to enact an e-mail archiving and retention plan is after your company gets audited or sued. The best way to protect your company, of course, is by developing a plan for managing and legally deleting your data before something happens. For companies just starting to look at their e-mail data retention policies, here are five steps to follow:

1. Catalog your company’s data and create a list of which backup tapes are at which storage site, says Todd Stefan, principal at Setec Investigations, a computer forensics firm in Los Angeles. Knowing where to find archives will save time when discovery deadlines loom, and you’ll be able to tell a judge truthfully that you produced all the relevant data you could.

More than 9,000 service men and women stationed in Illinois may be entitled to monetary relief as part of a multi-state regulatory settlement that will pay as much as $10 million to service personnel across the country, Gov. Rod Blagojevich announced Thursday.

The settlement is a result of an investigation into potential fraud and abuse by three out-of-state insurance companies that targeted active military personnel by aggressively marketing death benefit products that duplicate what the military offers.

Illinois-based service personnel are expected to recover more than $1 million in restitution.

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