Real estate fraud victims two of a kind, kin say

Widow: 'I was too honest' in dealings with realty owner

By GARTH STAPLEY
gstapley@modbee.com

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Hardworking. Unsophisticated. Widowed. A bit confused.

Two women shared those qualities, relatives say, before they were taken in by a smooth-talking Modesto real estate professional.

A fair-haired Trellis Pyle decades ago asked a young man to marry her so she could escape her Oklahoma upbringing, she said in a recent interview at her south Modesto home. She had six children with him and a seventh at age 40 with second husband Leonard Pyle, the owner of Leonard's Used Cars on Crows Landing Road who died 13 years ago.

"I'm just an honest woman, and I love to work. I work like a beaver," Pyle said, smiling as she shuffled among apple and plum trees in her well cared for back yard despite stifling August heat.

"I was too honest," she added as partial explanation for trusting a man now charged with swindling the heir of another widow, Jewel Young. Jim Lankford, owner of Century 21 Apollo, faces five felony charges in that case and has denied wrongdoing.

Pyle's daughter, Rema Robertson, said her mother "gets mixed up." Robertson now has power of attorney over her mother's affairs.

Jewel Young suffered from the onset of Alzheimer's before dying in 1995 at age 79, said her nephew, Steve Harris.

She was born in Louisiana and married a Navy cook from Arkansas before they moved to Santa Clara, Harris said. She worked 35 years on a production line making binder paper for Mead Paper Co., according to her obituary.

The couple had no children, but took in Harris after his mother died when he was 4. After growing up and moving away, Harris returned about every other weekend to fish with his uncle and visit his aunt at their place off Crows Landing Road, he said.

"Their house was their treasure," Harris said. "Everything they had, they dumped into that house."

Harris said he couldn't prove Lankford did his aunt wrong -- and him -- until this year, 13 years after her death, when he ran across loan documents stashed in his son's barn along with old Christmas decorations. Payments on the loan had stopped coming in the mail 12 years ago, according to court documents.

He said he was surprised when an investigator later found a document erasing money owed to him, as his aunt's heir, allegedly signed by her, four years after her death.

"My aunt is buried over here in the Scenic Drive Cemetery," Harris said. "If she signed it, she didn't come by to say hi."

Bee staff writer Garth Stapley can be reached at gstapley@modbee.com or 578-2390.