At the embittered end, Lisa Bayer-Day showed her true colors:

Black heart. Prison blues.

On the eve of the Memorial Day weekend, the legendary fiduciary was sentenced in Washington County Circuit Court to 48 months in prison.

Her crimes included aggravated theft, money laundering and criminal mistreatment of soldiers who went to war for this country. She was ordered to pay $117,000 in restitution.

Oregon's Department of Justice identified 26 victims, including 21 disabled veterans.

"She told investigators her clients were broken," said Elizabeth Ballard, a senior assistant attorney general in the Medicaid Fraud Unit.

"Instead of taking care of them, she took advantage of them."

And when asked for parting thoughts as her room was readied at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, Bayer-Day snarled at relatives of her victims who appeared in court.

"Not one of them said anything about the good stuff I've done," Bayer-Day said. "There are two sides to every story. You're getting the negative side."

Circuit Judge Charles Bailey Jr. was incredulous.

"I'm hearing zero remorse," Bailey said. He mentioned the war heroes who would be memorialized that weekend: "Other than stealing from your own family, I can't find anything that is so horrible and despicable as stealing from them."

Bayer-Day's audacity has long been world-class, according to an 18-month criminal investigation by Oregon's Department of Justice.

When courts assigned her to be guardian and/or conservator at the request of the Department of Veteran Affairs or Oregon's Department of Human Services, she had total control of her victim's finances.

She took full advantage. State investigators revealed Bayer-Day repeatedly intercepted checks made out to her clients and deposited them in her own Bank of America account.

She paid her husband's company thousands of dollars - $28,000 in one Grant County case alone - to clean out the homes of clients who moved to long-term care facilities.

"No such service was ever provided," the Department of Justice notes.

Ballard said Bayer-Day also hijacked ambulance reimbursement checks for the veterans she pledged to protect, and routinely performed "post-death money grabs," stealing money that should have gone to the vet's survivors.

And on the rare occasion when someone was paying attention - in May 2014, a Grant County judge ordered Bayer-Day to

to the estate of Wilbert Tay - Ballard says she made those payments using the savings of other clients.

The Department of Justice originally charged Bayer-Day with 81 felonies, crimes that date back to 2009. Polly Fisher, a court-appointed visitor in Multnomah County, told me last week she first raised issues about Bayer-Day years before that.

For a daunting amount of time, no one seemed to care but relatives who couldn't afford to challenge her authority in court.

That Bayer-Day profited so mightily off disabled veterans raises familiar questions for me about the oversight of guardians and conservators in Oregon.

When fiduciaries have total control over a client who is disabled or otherwise incapacitated, who makes sure they don't abuse it?

How many complaints are required before the VA or DHS will stop recommending a conservator with a troubling track record?

Are criminal penalties sufficient to deter bad seeds like Lisa Bayer-Day?

"You can wreak havoc in other people's lives, and not necessarily violate any criminal statutes," Ballard reminds us.

Ask Ruth Long. Her 31-year-old granddaughter, Sarah, is a Navy veteran with a variety of mental-health issues. She is not counted among Bayer-Day's victims, but Long says she still struggles with how Bayer-Day treated the family after she was appointed Sarah's guardian in 2013.

"My husband and I lost nearly $10,000 trying to keep up with rent that wasn't paid, car insurance that wasn't paid," Long says. "Every month, there was something, and every month, we heard nothing from Lisa."

At Bayer-Day's sentencing, Ballard invited Long to come forward with other victims and tell her story.

"I had to say something for my granddaughter," Long says. "I had to look her in the face and show her I was not afraid of her, that she was not going to ruin my life."

Long remained in the courtroom afterwards. As Bayer-Day was led off in handcuffs, she passed two feet from the 74-year-old woman and muttered something under her breath.

"You better watch out," Long thought she heard.

"I took it as a threat," she says. "And I believe her."

-- Steve Duin

stephen.b.duin@gmail.com