Article content

Tom Curran calls the case “obscene,” and he’s a lawyer who’s pretty much seen it all.

He’s wrapping up the estate of a 90-year-old woman who died in December 2016. Vulnerable? She was a widow, living alone, mentally incompetent and getting by on $300 to $400 a month after she paid for two mortgages on a modest west-end home.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Egan: Forgetful widows dinged for $72K by door-to-door salesmen Back to video

“She told me she was eating bread and margarine as her three meals a day.”

And here is the absolutely infuriating aspect of her plight: In the course of six years, she was sold three new furnaces and two new air conditioners by door-to-door salesmen. When Curran went to settle the estate, the ledger held a harrowing secret: the woman’s only daughter, who is disabled and awaiting a new set of teeth, had lost her entire inheritance to these wasteful appliance “payouts.”

Curran said there were liens totalling $24,755.45 against the title of the house — to be paid not to the appliance suppliers, but to a financial institution that had assumed the repayment plan — some of them years long.