Editor's note: In Part I of Tristam Korten's article for the Florida Trident, John Santinello's mother was taken. Then came a criminal investigation. Part II follows with a tale about June Hodge's elderly mother disappearing from her Cape Coral home. The trail led to a local political activist. The daughter is still demanding answers.
Part I: Joyce Santinello
Joyce Santinello, 84-years-old and suffering from dementia, disappeared from her Fort Lauderdale apartment on March 5, 2024. Her son and primary caregiver, John Santinello, hasn’t seen her since. He’s turned to the police, the courts, and medical professionals for help only to be met with indifference and suspicion.
Now John Santinello wants answers no one will give him. Only when it was too late did he realize he made a critical mistake in not obtaining official guardianship and power of attorney over his mother and her affairs as her health declined.
The result was that he was locked out of her life in an instant.
“It is so vital to get a power of attorney, and I never gave it a thought,” Santinello said.
But even a power of attorney isn’t fool-proof. Santinello’s story serves as a warning for anyone concerned about protecting vulnerable elderly people in their lives, said Rick Black, executive director of the Center for Estate Administration Reform and board member of Kasem Cares, a non-profit that counsels people fighting fraudulent guardianships and probate exploitation.
Law enforcement doesn’t like to get involved in exploitation cases, said Black, because they’re complex and often involve feuding family members. There is also an element of “ageism,” he added, because people who are in the last years of their lives are just not considered as valuable as younger people.
Many of the victims are in cognitive decline and don’t realize they are being exploited.
“Most of these victims assume Stockholm Syndrome very quickly,” said Black, who added that the law favors whoever has immediate custody. “Control of the body is ten-tenths of the law in elder cases.”
Police may check to make sure the person is alive and not being visibly abused, but more often than not they’ll refer such cases to a state’s adult protective services agency, an often patchwork and overburdened regulatory system that is also often ineffective, according to Black.
For all those reasons, the odds were stacked against Santinello when he began an all-consuming effort to return his mother home. It was a journey that tore his family further apart and at times had him questioning his own sanity — before he finally learned the truth.
A civil matter?
A registered nurse then working at a long-term care facility, Santinello first noticed his mother’s mental decline about ten years ago, when she became lost driving home from her job as a security guard at the Broward Convention Center. Shortly after, she fell and broke her hip. As her condition worsened, Santinello took a leave from his job to care for her.
He stayed in her one-bedroom apartment on the east side of Fort Lauderdale, where he helped with the bills while using his mother’s social security payments to cover the rent and utilities out of a Wells Fargo bank account he and his mother shared. They also shared an American Express card.
By 2024, her short term memory was gone and she had a home health aide visit during the day. Early that year, John’s sister-in-law, Kelly Cabot, visited from Utah and offered to look after his mother for a night so he could take a break from caretaking. John trusted Cabot at the time — she was married to his brother and both were former Golden Beach police officers — and accepted.
The next morning John received a panicked call from his mother’s home health aide, who told him Joyce was gone. The aide also said she’d received a text from Cabot saying John would never see his mother again. Accompanying the text was a photo of his mom in an airplane seat on a Delta flight.
“I was in hysterics,” John recalled.
He phoned his brother, Leo Santinello, over and over before he finally picked up.
“He said I was a fake, a phony, and ‘we’re going to bring felony charges against you’,” John recounted. “I was so scared and upset I was shaking,”
He was also surprised his mother could board a plane because her driver’s license, Medicare card and other IDs were still in the apartment (John shared a photo of those items with the Florida Trident). After not hearing from his brother for three days, he called the Fort Lauderdale Police Department. A detective said it was a civil matter, and “there’s nothing we can do,” John recalled. The detective advised him to get an attorney.
When police called about three weeks later, it wasn’t to follow-up on the disappearance of his mother. Instead Fort Lauderdale police Det. Tristan Reid informed John that he was under investigation for elder exploitation, including allegations he fraudulently took his mother’s Social Security checks. His sister-in-law, Cabot, was the complainant and wanted John — who has no criminal history or complaints on his state nursing record — arrested.
Cabot “alleged John forged Joyce’s signature on a ’23 black Nissan Altima,” and that he’d “taken out 4 cars in Joyce’s name,” Reid wrote in his report. She further claimed John had been “abusing” his mother’s Wells Fargo Bank account holding $337,000; that he’d maxed out the American Express card, and took a home equity loan out in Joyce’s name from Mass Mutual Credit Union.
The detective examined both the Wells Fargo and American Express accounts and, contrary to Cabot’s claims, found “no evidence of fraud.” He reported that an employee of the Nissan dealership “refuted Cabot’s allegations” of forgery and explained that the person signing the lease has to be present. The employee informed Reid that four cars weren’t taken out in Joyce’s name, but that one car was renewed three times.
The bank account never held $337,000 and there was no Mass Mutual home equity loan. The detective cleared John of any crimes, which led to recrimination from his sister-in-law. “Cabot became upset, argumentative, and accused me of being manipulated and not doing my job,” Reid wrote.
When contacted by phone in Utah, Kelly Cabot stuck by her allegations against John Santinello. “They were definitely true,” Cabot said. “It’s just the police thought she was no longer in danger, so they didn’t care to prosecute for fraud. We were kind of taken aback. In the end they were right, she was safe.”
Cabot sent the Trident a video of her interaction with Joyce the day before she took her to Utah that she said showed her during a “rare moment of lucidity.” In the interaction Cabot asks Joyce if she’s ready for the trip to see her son Leo.
“Oh yeah, I want to see Leo,” answers Joyce. “John’s not coming?”
“He has a ticket for tomorrow,” Cabot says. “But if he can’t take off tomorrow, he’ll have to ask work when he can come.”
John said Cabot was being untruthful to his mother in the video — he never had a plane ticket and never knew of the plan to take his mother. “She’s definitely lying to my mother,” he said.
Joyce didn’t have a lot of money — she earned $1,100 a month from Social Security, he said. Because he didn’t have power of attorney, that money was diverted to a Utah bank account. For her part, Cabot sent the Trident photos of improvements, like an ADA compliant bathroom, she made to her house for Joyce.
When John discovered that his sister-in-law and brother were filing a petition to become Joyce’s guardians, he quickly hired a Utah lawyer to fight the petition in court, again at a disadvantage because he’d never secured a power of attorney.
Then he began digging for more information to try to help explain what was happening and why his brother and sister-in-law had turned on him. He found a 2003 story in the Miami New Times documenting Cabot’s tumultuous history. That story begins at a time Kelly Cabot had a different name: Michelle Nogues.
“Masterful at manipulating”
Michelle Nogues, the daughter of two doctors, showed signs of trouble early in life.
When the family resided briefly in Virginia, a teenage Michelle reported that someone had dismembered her pet rabbits and left pieces in her high school locker, according to court records cited in the New Times story. The incident shocked school officials and sparked an investigation by police, who secretly began surveilling the locker.
When Michelle later claimed there were more rabbit parts placed in her locker, police reported seeing only Michelle use the locker. They also determined that a threatening note left in the locker was written on a typewriter used in a typewriting class Michelle was taking. Officers wanted her to take a polygraph test, but her mother refused to let her.
Court documents show the unsettling behavior continued in the Miami area, where she grew up. While babysitting her eight younger siblings, Michelle made numerous calls to Miami-Dade police alleging intruders were lurking outside the family home. Police kept responding but found nothing suspicious, at one point calling her reports “questionable.” When she was taken to a psychiatrist, she alleged her father fondled her. After polygraph tests indicated deception on her part, Michelle recanted the story.
The psychiatrist would later testify that he diagnosed her as a malignant narcissist with a psychopathic personality disorder.
In 1989, Michelle’s 15-year-old sister Aimee allegedly told her their adoptive father had molested her. Michelle called authorities, initiating what at the time would become the longest running custody dispute in Miami-Dade County history. The sister and her siblings were removed from the home while an investigation was launched. But a year later Aimee recanted, saying that Michelle had instructed her to make the allegations in order to win custody of her siblings. Police closed the case as “unfounded.”
A year after that, Aimee held a press conference saying the molestation really did occur, and she had audiotapes to prove it. The father and mother demanded that the tapes be analyzed. Because it’s illegal to record someone without their consent in Florida, the tapes were not admissible in court and were never analyzed.
As the custody battle dragged on, Michelle underwent at least two mental health examinations. In one, a staff therapist for family court wrote, “Casual observation of her interactions with the children gives the impression of a calm, well-organized and attentive style of managing this group of children.” A second examination by court-ordered psychiatrist Diane Schetky found evidence that Michelle showed signs of “narcissistic, histrionic, and antisocial traits.”
“She had a vivid imagination, at times may be delusional, and seems to believe the stories she has woven,” wrote Schetky, a national expert on child sexual abuse. “She is also convincing in what she tells others and is masterful at manipulating.”
After a grueling legal battle, Michelle’s mother and father regained custody of the children. The lead detective investigating Michelle’s claims, Ellen Christopher, told the Trident she remembered the case vividly. “I called it the case from hell,” said the since-retired Christopher.
Cabot made allegations of misconduct against fellow police officers in the wealthy enclave of Golden Beach.
Michelle went on to become a police officer in Florida, first in Davie, where she was quickly fired for being untruthful on her application by not giving her mother’s real name and claiming she had no contact information for her (Michelle later said the omission was to prevent employers from contacting her mother).
She was subsequently hired in tiny and affluent Golden Beach, where she accused several employees of misconduct ranging from sexual harassment to creating a hostile workplace. Two supervisors reprimanded her. She went to the town manager and both supervisors were fired (they later sued the town and won a settlement).
Her mother warned Golden Beach’s town manager about Michelle in a letter.
“This is very difficult to do … yet I feel that others need to be protected,” she wrote. “… Her pathological need for attention is behind the recent accusations leveled at some in the Golden Beach Police Department.”
It was at Golden Beach where Cabot met and married John’s brother Leo, a fellow police officer, but John said his brother never mentioned any of the drama there.
Michelle retired in 2005, claimed a disability, sued her department for backpay, and moved to Utah, where she began going by the name Kelly Cabot.
“She loved John”
As John battled for his mother’s custody in 2024, he called the police in Herriman, Utah, where the couple lived, and asked for an officer to conduct a welfare check on her. Officer Ben Rugebregt visited the home.
“Kelly invited me inside, where she provided me with detailed information about Joyce’s condition and care,” Rugebregt wrote in his report. “Kelly explained that Joyce had been severely neglected by her son, John, in Florida. She described finding Joyce in dirty diapers, tied to a bed, and suffering from malnutrition and various infections.”
When the Trident told John about the report he angrily responded that it was a lie. He submitted photos and videos of his mother shortly before she disappeared and provided medical records, none of which indicated his mother was malnourished or covered with infections.
Greg Paris, whose mother was Joyce’s neighbor in the apartment building, told the Trident he socialized with Joyce and John frequently and never saw evidence of malnutrition or mistreatment.
“I used to go into her unit all the time, she was next to my mom,” Paris said. “I put batteries in the thermostat or whatever she needed. I never saw anything like that. Her bedroom was butting up to my living room, so I could hear them talking and interacting. They were always happy. John was so good to her. She loved John. She was always happy to see him.”
During his investigation, Reid, the Fort Lauderdale detective, interviewed Joyce’s landlords. “They both stated that John was an outstanding individual who they said took the best care of Joyce,” Reid wrote.
Cabot, however, said she first became suspicious after they bought John and Joyce tickets to visit them in Utah nine times, and right before each visit John canceled because Joyce had an accident requiring hospitalization. “You don’t have to be ex-law enforcement to see a pattern here,” she said.
John said Cabot never bought them tickets to go to Utah. He said he bought tickets for them to visit Utah three times and they went each time.
Cabot questioned a painkiller prescription for Joyce. John said his mother was under the care of a physician and took pain medication due to severe spinal pain from a previous car accident and degenerative bone disease that had worn down her shoulders. She also claimed Joyce was “emaciated” and sent a photo of them together in Fort Lauderdale as supposed evidence of it.
To back up her assertion that Joyce’s health improved under her care, Cabot sent pictures of Joyce in Utah, in which she appears smiling, and videos of her putting on her socks and walking down steps unassisted. But a doctor’s note indicated that while in Utah her condition was getting worse.
On April 26, 2024, a Utah doctor supported Cabot and Leo Santinello’s petition for guardianship, writing, “Her Alzheimer’s and dementia have progressed to the point where she cannot dress herself, go to the restroom or take her medications. She has very short term memory and needs constant care. She cannot be left alone at any point as she puts herself at risk for danger.”
Meanwhile, Cabot’s sister Aimee provided the Trident videos showing Cabot and Joyce arguing. In one, Cabot tells Joyce to “stop hitting me,” when there’s no evidence in the video of Joyce hitting her. In another, Joyce is lying face-down on the floor next to a couch while Cabot records her and tells her she’s “faking” it.
Aimee’s teenage daughter, whose name is also Michelle, said she witnessed Cabot coaching Joyce with a script about John that included the lines, “John changed the numbers … John doesn’t want to be bothered with you …John wanted you dead for life insurance.”
“I was just confused, why is she showing this to Joyce?” Michelle told the Trident. “She would make her read it everyday in the morning when nana woke up.”
Cabot admitted she wrote the script and said it was necessary to create “new neural pathways” to rehabilitate Joyce after John had brainwashed her. She said the video of Joyce on the floor was also rehabilitation after John had convinced her she couldn’t move.
The battle ends
This past June, John received notice of a late fee from American Express. He always paid the statement on time, he said, so he called customer service where he was given shocking news.
“We’re sorry to tell you this,” he said a company representative told him, “but Joyce is dead.”
Utah’s Department of Health and Human Services later sent a death certificate showing Joyce had died from “unspecified natural causes” on Feb. 13, 2025. She was cremated a week later. It meant she had died before police did the welfare check, but the officer hadn’t told John, likely because he believed Cabot’s version of events.
The struggle was over.
The reversal of John Santinello’s world was sudden and complete. His mother disappeared forever from his life. His brother, who he was cordial with, if not exactly close, turned on him without warning. And he was accused of the cruelest crime he could imagine — taking advantage of his mother. Throughout, he was alone to navigate his way through the crisis.
Though Fort Lauderdale police cleared him of the allegations, they didn’t help bring back his mother. Neither did police in Utah. Looking back, he said they should have investigated his mother’s mental state to determine whether she had the capacity to consent to being taken away and how she was able to board the plane when her ID was left at home. Cabot’s background should have also been investigated, he said.
He said he went into counseling to help with the anxiety from the ordeal and his therapist told him he might have post traumatic stress disorder. In early October he commissioned a memorial brick with his mother’s name on it to be placed on the Las Olas Riverwalk in Fort Lauderdale. “Just something to remember her by,” he said.
Cabot, meanwhile, said she’s happy she took Joyce away from John.
“She enjoyed the very best year she could have had, getting proper medical care and proper therapy,” she said. “I don’t really much care because we live in Utah and have a happy life.”
Part II: Barbara Hodge
When June Hodge pushed the key into the lock of her elderly mother’s Cape Coral home, the door wouldn’t budge. She felt a chill go down her back. The locks had been changed.
June hurried around back where she noticed dog poop in the yard and, and through a sliding glass door, strange furniture in the house. Her mother, Barbara Hodge, didn’t own a dog. Then June noticed a woman inside the home looking out at her.
“I just freaked out,” June recalled of that fall day in 2010 in a conversation with the Florida Trident. “I go up to the sliding glass door and some lady is walking towards me. I start screaming, ‘Where the f–k is my mother!”
Through the glass door, the woman told June that a “Miss Julia” had given them permission to live there. When police arrived they were no help to June.
“The cop goes inside, comes out, and says ‘I spoke to your mom, she’s with her new friend Miss Julia, who is protecting her,'” June recalled.
She’d never heard of anyone called “Miss Julia.”
Both June and her daughter Jenna said they’d been worried about Barbara before she was taken. She was becoming more forgetful, they said, which was noticeable in a fiercely intelligent woman who’d run a successful glass company with her ex-husband that made them both millionaires.
“She was having what she called ‘foggy moments,'” Jenna recalled.
One of the most shocking, said June, was finding her mother at the dining room table hitting herself in the head because she couldn’t remember something. “She kept saying ‘Come on Barbara, get it together!'” June recalled. Eventually, Barbara recognized she was making mistakes writing checks from the wrong accounts and asked her daughter to secure a power of attorney over her estate so June could handle bills and maintenance. During one visit by her granddaughter, Barbara spoke of self harm.
“The more she talked about it, the more I got scared,” said Jenna, who called her mom for help.
When June arrived, Barbara exploded in anger, hitting her daughter and pulling her hair. June called the police to ask that her mother be taken for psychiatric evaluation under Florida’s Baker Act. Officers calmed the situation, but didn’t take Barbara in. At Barbara’s request, June left the home, along with Jenna, who was 18 at the time. A week later June checked on her with a text and called again after another week with no reply to either. She dropped groceries off, but didn’t hear from her mother.
Finally, she made up her mind to go into the house, and that’s when she found the home had been commandeered by a stranger. Soon she learned that her mom had signed over power of attorney to someone named Julia Ettari.
Now she had a full name. But who was Julia Ettari? June wondered: Had her mother been kidnapped?
A new house in New York
“No she wasn’t kidnapped,” Julia Ettari said during a phone interview with the Trident from her home in Cape Coral, where she runs an alarm company and is a Republican activist serving as vice chair of the “Take Out The Trash of Cape Coral Committee,” which has accrued 20,000 followers on its Facebook page and is deeply involved in local politics.
Ettari said she became a longtime friend of Barbara Hodge after installing an alarm in her home. She explained Barbara had called her two days before June’s visit and told her she was scared of her daughter and didn’t feel safe at home alone.
Ettari and her husband, Joseph Bartlett, were preparing to move to upstate New York at the time, where Bartlett was taking a new job after fallout from the economic recession.
So [Barbara] said, ‘Do you mind if I come with you until I get my own place?'” Ettari said. “So we went to New York in December.”
The reason Barbara felt so unsafe at her house, according to Ettari, was because her daughter was trying to take control of it through her power of attorney. “She tried to kick her mother out of the house,” Ettari claimed.
Ettari said she only reluctantly took on power of attorney to help protect Barbara from losing her home. She and her husband took Barbara with them when they moved to upstate New York and Barbara Hodge bought a five-bedroom home on Briarwood Lane in Manlius, NY on Sept. 9, 2011, for $250,000, according to records at the Onondaga County Real Property Tax Office.
Three days later, on September 12, she deeded the new house to Ettari. This was done solely to help Barbara establish residency in New York Ettari said. (All that is required for proof of residency is a utility bill, bank statement or driver’s license).
“Every single law enforcement agency has looked at this,” she said, listing the Cape Coral Police, the FBI, the Manlius Police Department, and adult protective services. “They’ve all said there is no criminal activity.”
Barbara’s oldest daughter Judy even visited, Ettari said, and thanked her for taking care of her mom. (June said Judy had been estranged from the family for two decades. The Trident’s attempts to reach Judy were unsuccessful.)
No help from authorities
June Hodge said she nearly went mad trying to figure out what was happening with her mother. She pressured Cape Coral police to investigate. Because so much time had passed, records from Barbara’s case have been destroyed, according to the police department. Police Chief Anthony Sizemore declined to be interviewed about this case. But in a 2023 email he told June his department “thoroughly investigated” her concerns in 2010 and would look at any new evidence presented.
In 2010 Cape Coral referred the matter to the police in Manlius, who sent it to New York Adult Protective Services, which reported after a wellness check that Barbara “looked OK” and did not want to come home, June recalled. She also contacted the FBI to no avail.
In the middle of that effort June got a shock. She received a notice of a quit claim deed in 2011, advising her that her mother had ceded her half of the house they co-owned in Cape Coral to Ettari for $10, and that Ettari and Barbara wanted to sell the house.
June said when she blocked them from putting the house on the market, she received threatening calls from Ettari intimating her husband might disappear or her kids could be injured on the way to school. She said she also got at least one threatening call from Barbara.
“My mom said she didn’t know how, but she would somehow come down here and drive her car through the house if she had to,” June recalled.
In 2011 June Hodge took out a protective order against Ettari — and her mother.
“I was scared,” June said. “I didn’t know what was going on.”
In 2013 June received a phone call from a real estate agent (later revealed to have been a friend of Ettari’s) who asked if she was interested in selling the house. June said she explained the situation to her and the agent said she could help. Worn down by the ordeal, June agreed to sell. During the sale Ettari deeded the house back to Barbara. Ettari said she never intended to keep the money from the sale; June countered that the court ordered the deed change because the house couldn’t be sold the way the deeds were worded.
Barbara Hodge grew up in an orphanage and had been abused as a teenager. But with her first husband she helped build a successful company making components for insulated glass and became a millionaire, even after her divorce. In Cape Coral, she was supposed to find peace.
“My mother loved that house,” June said. “She wanted to die in that house.”
June felt like the world was gaslighting her. Then, in 2014, she was contacted by a most unexpected ally in her plight: Julia Ettari’s own daughter, Andria Monahan.
The 30-year-old Monahan reached out to June and told her she’d recently lived with Ettari and Barbara in New York and was troubled by their “tumultuous” relationship.
“When I met Barbara, she [Ettari] portrayed her to be a lonely old woman who couldn’t take care of herself and had no family,” Monahan told the Trident. “My mom always said it was a burden. Barbara was costing her money. She always had to take her to the doctor.”
The two women would fight and argue, she said.
“Barbara and my mom didn’t get along,” said Monahan. “Barbara was in tears one day, saying, ‘I have no place to go.’”
Monahan said she felt so bad for Barbara she offered to take her along when she moved out, but Ettari wouldn’t allow it. “I know my mom was actively manipulating her. Mom had control of her cell phone, emails, finances,” she said. “If Barbara questioned anything, my mother had an answer.”
Then came another unexpected ally for June. Monahan put her in touch with Ettari’s older sister, Jean Salanitro, who said she’d also met Barbara in Ettari’s home and felt something didn’t seem right.
“My sister said she was a longtime friend,” said Salanitro, who works in real estate finance in upstate New York. “All of a sudden this woman is here and you’re lifelong buddies?”
Salanitro wasn’t buying it, she said, because she’d seen it before.
“She preys on the elderly,” Salanitro said bluntly of her sister.
The John Baker story
Salanitro explained that back in the 1990s, their mother worked at the New York Office for the Aging, where she met an elderly man named John Baker. When their mother heard Baker was looking for a tenant, she introduced him to Ettari, who was looking for a place to rent. “It was innocent,” Salanitro said of her mother’s intention.
Julia and her first husband rented Baker’s home in Carmel, NY, and lived there with him. Soon Baker, who was in his late 70s and in failing health, deeded the house to them for one dollar. Monahan, who was a child at the time, said her mother relegated Baker to the basement.
“I would go down and visit him and stuff,” Monahan recalled, adding that Baker was always happy to see her. “He baked my birthday cake for me.”
Baker died when Monahan was in kindergarten. His will left everything to Ettari. Baker’s son, Edward, now in his 70s, said his father was used by Ettari.
“I had become somewhat estranged from my father,” recalled Baker. “She [Ettari] exploited that, telling him, ‘We’re your real family now.’ They got my father to sign [the will] while he was very much compromised in the hospital.”
Edward Baker met Ettari once or twice, he said, while visiting his father in an “attempt to reconcile our estrangement,” adding that Ettari told him his father distrusted him and resented sending him to college only to have him squander his tuition money. “Which was totally false,” Baker said. “I paid my way through college.”
After his father died, Ettari sent Edward a copy of the will bequeathing everything to her. Baker contested it with the original will his father gave him that predated Ettari’s version. When Ettari couldn’t produce the original will, a judge ruled in Baker’s favor.
“I did speak to the local district attorney in Carmel,” Baker said. “He said there was not enough evidence to prove a crime.”
Ettari has been involved in another estate squabble of late — with her own family.
When she spoke to the Trident, Salanitro and her siblings were challenging their sister’s appointment as executor of their recently deceased father’s estate. The siblings alleged Ettari was living in the father’s house and using his money to pay bills. “We don’t trust her,” Salanitro said of her sister.
The judge ruled against the siblings and appointed Ettari as executor as the will stated. Salanitro said the siblings have sent a letter to the court asking that Ettari pay rent or leave their father’s house.
“It’s kind of hard because she is my sister,” Salanitro said. “But she does a lot of crazy f–ed up things. …Since we were kids it’s always been about money.”
Ettari categorically denied any wrongdoing. In the case of Baker, Ettari said she simply honored his request to live in his house and look after him.
“John Baker was a neighbor for 20 years — he needed somebody to look after him,” Ettari explained. “He went to my mother and told her, ‘I can’t stay here alone.'”
Ettari’s embezzlement arrest
Monahan was in the first grade when her family moved from Carmel to Cape Coral, where Ettari was arrested in 2001 on embezzlement charges. A Cape Coral police investigation determined Ettari had in a two and a half year time period deposited checks worth more than $19,000 from her then-employer to either “cash” or a business she registered. Ettari was charged with ten counts of grand theft, a felony.
The arrest made headlines in the Cape Coral Daily Breeze, which ran a story with Julia Ettari’s mugshot on the front page.
But there is no record of the arrest in the Lee County Court database. “I was never convicted of a crime, it was dropped,” Ettari said. “It was sealed.”
In Florida, first-offense, non-violent cases can be sealed when adjudication is withheld (meaning there is no conviction on record). Both Salanitro and Monahan recall Ettari’s mother helping to negotiate a settlement in the case. “I overheard my grandmother say she loaned [Ettari] money to pay restitution,” said Monahan.
Monahan had her own legal battle with her mother, she said, when she sued Ettari to regain custody of her five-year-old son – Ettari’s grandson. In that case, Monahan allowed Ettari to take custody of the boy when she was on deployment after joining the Army, and her mother refused to give up custody of the child after Monahan’s honorable discharge.
The judge was reluctant to disrupt the child’s homelife and sided with Ettari. “We agreed on integrating him back into my life,” Monahan said.
Ettari said Monahan “wanted nothing to do with” the boy when she went into the military and only challenged the custody arrangement for financial reasons. “He’s in college now,” she said of her grandson. “He’s doing wonderful.”
In a brief attempt at reconciliation, Ettari agreed to let her daughter live with her in Manlius until she found a place of her own. That’s when Monahan met Barbara, came to believe her mother was exploiting her, and joined forces with June.
Ettari told the Trident Barbara Hodge was struggling financially and that’s why she needed her help to pay insurance costs and taxes.
“She had $800 a month from Social Security, and she could draw $15,000 a year from her IRA,” said Ettari. “It’s not a lot of money.”
June estimates her mother’s estate was worth more than $2 million when she was taken to New York, including at least two investment accounts at Smith Barney. (The Trident talked to Barbara’s former business accountant who confirmed June’s estimate of Barbara’s wealth at the time of her retirement.)
But after she left Florida with Ettari, Barbara’s credit scores plummeted, according to financial records. A Discover card opened in her name in February of 2011 racked up $6,951 in debt, according to a July-August 2014 statement June supplied the Trident. She also owed on a Direct TV bill she was paying at the Manlius house, at Kohl’s department store, and National Grid, the power company in upstate New York. The Direct TV bill continued to be paid from Barbara’s credit card throughout her stay in hospice, and Barbara’s retirement accounts were quickly depleted, according to June.
Ettari, who introduced herself as Barbara’s niece during doctor’s visits, said Barbara had no mental impairment. But while there was no formal diagnosis, medical professionals in New York were noticing a decline, according to health care records reviewed by the Trident and supplied by both June and Monahan.
Those records show that in the summer of 2013 a healthcare provider examining Barbara noted: “Patient presents [decreased] memory skills, but niece insists patient is 100% cognizant and ‘putting on a show.’”
It was mentioned in other medical reports that Ettari “stated repeatedly that [Barbara] has no cognitive impairment” and claimed doctors “ruled out dementia” even though her cognitive function is “questionable at times.”
In May of 2014 Barbara entered hospice care for pancreatic cancer at Francis House in Syracuse. Barbara Hodge died Aug. 20, 2014. She was 76 years old. June wasn’t notified of her mother’s death until two days later. She said she still feels tremendous guilt she wasn’t able to get her mother back in her Cape Coral house where she belonged.
“My mom was demanding. She was kind of jealous. But I loved my mom,” June said. “She had grown up in an orphanage and had been abused. And I knew no matter what my mom was doing her best.”
“I can’t get my mom back”
Today, Ettari is back in her father’s house in Cape Coral and busy with the often vituperative “Take Out the Trash Committee of Cape Coral.” The group, according to its mission statement, is dedicated to “transparency, integrity, and accountability in our local leadership.”
In that role, Ettari has pushed for a councilwoman to be removed from office for not living in her district and called for police to investigate Cape Coral’s mayor for allegedly not registering his boat in Florida and avoiding taxes. She’s been a strong supporter of Gov. Ron DeSantis and posed with Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier at a dinner party in September.
She insists she’s being unfairly targeted by a vengeful daughter after she tried to do the right thing and take care of a woman she called a friend.
June, meanwhile, has never given up. In 2017, she reached back out to the Cape Coral Police Department and contacted State Attorney Amira Fox, who referred her to economic crimes investigator Robert Nichols. Both June and Monahan participated in a joint call with Nichols, who, according to a transcript of the call, seemed to agree there might be a criminal case, but advised he had to check on the statute of limitations.
June’s heard nothing from the investigator since. Rick Black, executive director of the non-profit Center for Estate Administration Reform, which assists people fighting what he calls “estate trafficking,” said this is the unfortunate reality in the majority of cases he’s seen: law enforcement is not equipped to investigate cases where the victims can’t advocate for themselves and where evidence is complicated.
“Knowing this system does not serve that demographic, loved ones have to be prepared,” he said. “They will need to put evidence on a silver platter with irrefutable proof of criminal activity for law enforcement to get involved.”
June said she feels the need to warn others. She monitors Ettari obsessively and posts about her on her own Justice for Barbara Hodge Facebook page. She continues to contact law enforcement when she gets new information. But none of that will fill the void she feels inside, she said.
“Every morning I wake up like it’s all a bad nightmare that I should be waking up from, but it just goes on and on,” she said. “I’m never going to be able to wrap my head around the fact that I can’t get my mom back. I’m never going to be the same again.”
About the Author: Tristram Korten is a veteran investigative reporter in Florida whose work has appeared in newspapers and public radio across the state. Nationally he has written for magazines and newspapers including Smithsonian, Outside, GQ and The Washington Post. He serves as a contributing editor at the Florida Trident. The Florida Trident is an investigative news outlet focusing on government accountability and transparency across Florida. The Trident was created and first published in 2022 by the Florida Center for Government Accountability, a non-profit organization that facilitates local investigative reporting across the state.
