A pickup circled the Chicago city block Monday where Paul and Helen LaBounty held picket signs in protest of elder abuse.

The driver finally got someone’s attention and handed a note out of his window. It read: “Hi, I’m David. I’m in the fight of my life over my parents. I need help in the courts. We really need to talk to you.”

The LaBountys sympathize.

With support from advocates across the country, the Greeley couple will push a walker from Morris, Ill., to Bloomington today in protest of how Paul LaBounty thinks his parents were pushed around in their last days as wards of the state.

Murder charges were filed Monday against two women accused in the hit-and-run deaths of two homeless men they befriended, allegedly to cash in on life insurance policies they took out on the victims.

The capital murder charges include the special circumstance allegations of murder for financial gain and multiple murder, which could make Helen Louise Golay, 75, of Santa Monica, and Olga Rutterschmidt, 73, of Hollywood, eligible for the death penalty.

They are accused of the Nov. 8, 1999, deaths of 73-year-old Paul Vados, who was run over by a car in an alley in the 300 block of North La Brea Avenue in Hollywood, and the June 21, 2005, slaying of 50-year-old Kenneth McDavid, who was killed in an alley in the 1200 block of Westwood Boulevard in Westwood.

Surprise - police investigators may not be able to give your case the attention you need, which is why a private criminal investigator may be your best bet.

We read about it all the time: television viewers see plenty of violence and criminal behavior on programs, and some groups even link television viewing to actual crime rates. Whether you believe that television viewing makes you more likely to commit a crime or not, though, there is no doubt that the world of crime and crime investigation on television does not reflect the actuality of criminal investigations.

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Family and friends of missing people nationwide have been calling authorities after hearing about Robert Charles Browne’s claims that he killed 49 people, including two in California.

Authorities say families want to know if missing loved ones could have been Browne’s victims.

Colorado authorities announced this week that Browne claimed to have committed scores of killings between 1970 and his arrest in 1995.

Browne pleaded guilty to two slayings and is serving a life sentence for murdering a Colorado girl in 1991.

Browne claims that in 1986 he shot a man and woman on a California beach north of San Francisco. But Mendocino County authorities say they don’t have a case that matches Browne’s description.

What’s in a name?

Just ask a New York couple who found themselves in hot water for offering fake designer handbags and wallets for sale at Zern’s Farmers Market.

Hai Dong Yu, 35, and his wife, Xu Cai Chen, 34, of Bayside, N.Y., have been sentenced to six to 23 months in the Montgomery County Correctional Facility after each pleaded guilty to a felony charge of trademark counterfeiting.

Judge William T. Nicholas, who accepted a plea agreement in the case, also ordered the couple to complete two years’ probation after they’re paroled from jail.

How You Can Help to Remedy This

One of the target groups of property scammers has been the seniors who live in homeowner associations.

Seniors have lost their life savings and homes, even though some reported the crimes to their government representatives and law enforcement agencies. Some have died.

AHRC has published some of these stories. Recently some consumer and class action attorneys who receive the AHRC newsletters, have expressed an interest in representing seniors involved in homeowner association senior abuse cases on a contingency basis.

The city’s routine background check wouldn’t have uncovered the sex-crime conviction of a man hired as a maintenance worker and who is now accused of molesting a boy he met on the job.

The temporary city job for which Jermaine Vaden, 29, was hired did not require a background check because it did not involve direct contact with children or the handling of money.

Even if the city had done a check, it would have turned up only crimes committed in Colorado.

Although Vaden served nine years in an Oklahoma prison for sodomizing two children, because he had no criminal record in Colorado, a statewide background check wouldn’t have alerted the city to his past.

Prior to a change in policy this week, the city did nationwide background checks only on people hired to be firefighters, police or for positions in which they would have direct contact with children, said Aurora Human Resources Director Kin Shuman. Employees in less sensitive jobs were subjected only to statewide checks.

The city imposed a new policy in the wake of Vaden’s arrest Tuesday that requires all potential employees to undergo nationwide background checks.

The theft of a laptop from a financial services company containing thousands of personal files has clients asking how it could have happened.

The laptop of an MD Management employee, containing information on 8,000 clients, was stolen from a parked car in an Edmonton shopping mall parking lot on June 19.

Mehadi Sayed, a computer security specialist at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, said the incident shows that consumers have to ask how their confidential information will be stored and protected.

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