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OUT ON THE STREET

Catherine Kaplan was raised in wealth and privilege, but she lost everything-and even the best lawyers couldn’t help her.
By Glenna Whitley |

EVERYTHING IN CATHERINE KAPLAN’S HOME REFLECTED THE refinement to which she was born. Her house on Walnut Hill Lane, with its 12-car garage, sat on almost two acres of prime North Dallas real estate worth nearly $1 million in the late ’80s. But inside, nothing too ostentatious, nothing too over the top. Just elegant furniture and beautiful fabrics and the carefully chosen silver and china that her mother had always favored.

Cathy seemed the quintessential North Dallas woman: Thin, blonde, always expensively groomed and elegantly dressed. She zipped around town in her Mercedes carting kids to school, shopping at the best stores, planning parties, attending the Cattle Baron’s Ball. But Cathy’s life centered on her home. Her mother, Edna Prichard, had maintained just such a home in fashionable Westover Hills in Fort Worth, down the street from others whose names were in the Social Directory. Her father. Dr. John Prichard, a world-renowned periodontist, had built a gracious life for his family that included travel, membership in the River Crest Country Club, designer clothes for his wife and only child and a large house filled with fine art and antiques. Cathy always knew that her father desired the same things for her. During his life. Dr. Prichard gave generously to his daughter and her husband, attorney Charles Kaplan, making sure she had a nice car to drive, a full-time maid and a charge account at Neiman Marcus for the Chanel suits both she and her mother loved. He wanted to guarantee that his daughter never had to work. By the time he was 80, Dr. Prichard had built up an estate worth several million dollars. After his death, his library would go to the Baylor School of Dentistry, and Cathy could continue to live in the cosseted manner in which she had grown up.

So it would be a shock to the late John Prichard-as it was to many who knew Cathy-to learn that for the last year, the proud well-bred Catherine Kaplan has been virtually homeless, reduced at times to sleeping on a friend’s couch, and at other times to spending the night in her car. Always thin, she now seems frail, with slender arms and legs that look as delicate as a child’s. During an April interview she wore Valentino, but her jacket clearly hadn’t been cleaned in ages and her pantyhose were in shreds. The black roots showed in her shoulder-length blonde hair and her nails were chipped. The home that she loved laid vacant, with debris in the pool and weeds overtaking the lawn.

Those who know Cathy are reluctant to talk about her strange, incomprehensible fall. They’ve heard the stories: that she was pawning her jewelry and going to shady loan sharks. That she borrowed thousands of dollars from people she couldn’t pay back. That, trying desperately to maintain appearances, she ended up in the Highland Park jail for failure to pay a $3,200 bill at the Crestpark Hotel and for writing hot checks.

To those who had been in her home and had attended her parties, the idea of Catherine Prichard Kaplan living hand-to-mouth was so inexplicable they assumed she had gone off the deep end into alcoholism, drug addiction or madness-something that could never happen to them. But what happened to Cathy Kaplan is perhaps even more shocking.

It all started when she filed for divorce from Charles Kaplan, citing years of emotional abuse. “He stood in the driveway and screamed that he’d have me out of a house,” Cathy says. Though she’s now 53, she still has a breathy, little-girl voice and a look of vulnerability. She claims Charles bragged that he and his business partner, a bankruptcy “workout consultant” named Gail Cooper, would use the legal system to strip Cathy of her rightful share of their joint assets. Cathy contends that even though she fought back, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to top Dallas lawyers, Charles succeeded, manipulating the court system to ensure that she lost at every turn.

Then her beloved parents died. As Catherine Kaplan watched her family legacy crumble, she became consumed with getting back the home and the life she had lost. To friends, she seemed obsessed with Charles. She talked about Cooper’s criminal record, about Charles’ intention to see her “collapse,” about how everyone she turned to for help eventually gave up or was corrupted by Gail Cooper, Charles Kaplan and his divorce attorney, Christopher Weil, a Dallas lawyer so well-known for offensive behavior that one opponent calls Weil a “litigation terrorist.”

Her bizarre contentions might be dismissed by many as confused paranoia, the reaction of a woman who lost in court and sees her nemesis as possessing extraordinary power to control her. That is until you talk to some of Cathy’s own attorneys, who support many of her allegations. And until you talk to other Dallas women who say their soon-to-be ex-husbands have turned to Gail Cooper- recently indicted with Dallas City Council member Paul Fielding after a four-year FBI investigation-to hide their assets and punish their spouses.

“Catherine Kaplan is not paranoid about Kaplan, Weil and Cooper,” says Robert Holmes, one of Cathy’s many attorneys in this long, strange saga. “She has been a victim of some evil people. They really are the triple demons … the unholy trinity.”

Another describes what happened to Cathy by paraphrasing the book Catch-22: “Just because you’re paranoid, that doesn’t mean someone’s not out to get you.”

Cathy Kaplan’s story is a disturbing example of the weaknesses in our legal system. Anyone who is determined to hide assets from a spouse can get away with it. The law can protect, but it can also be manipulated by those clever and determined-and knowledgeable enough to use the law for their own ends. And there’s little anyone can do about it.



THE MARRIAGE

THEY MET CUTE. ONE AFTERNOON WHEN SHE WAS LIVING IN Palm Beach, Cathy, then 29, was leaving the parking lot at The Colony Hotel when she saw a cat dash in front of her. She slammed on her brakes to miss it and was struck from behind by another car. A Rolls-Royce.

Flustered a bit because her car was too damaged to drive, Cathy went into the hotel bar looking for help and found a man she had occasionally dated: “The Count,” a stockbroker with a heavy accent and European title. The Count introduced her to a handsome lawyer who also was sitting at the bar: Charles Kaplan.

Charles came to her rescue. When the police arrived, he took over. “I was amazed,” she says. “Everything got taken care of, just like that,” snapping her fingers.

Dark-haired with olive skin. 30-year-old Charles Kaplan seemed so nice, so helpful, a legal knight riding up on a white horse. Charles gallantly offered to drive her home, and they talked about people they knew in Palm Beach and flirted a little.

Cathy had left Texas to get a new start, Her parents had reared Cathy, an only child, like a rare orchid in a conservatory. But though the Prichards indulged her, they weren’t excessively extravagant for their station in life. “She would have eight outfits,” says Sarah Ray Voelker, a close friend from grade school. “They were beautiful, but she would have jus! the eight.”

As a teenager, her girlfriends baby-sat to earn extra money, but Cathy did not. “’She never had a job in her whole life,” says Voelker. “They gave her everything, but they expected a lot.”

Inevitably, perhaps, Cathy let them down. As a boarding student at The Hockaday School, 17-year-old Cathy eloped with Robert Lanter. an SMU student, in April 1960. They were forced to tell her parents when Cathy became pregnant.

“You would have thought the world had ended.’” says Voelker. “She was supposed to make her debut, to go to Europe, to go East to college. It set Fort Worth back on its ear.”

Daughter Missy was born on Valentine’s Day 1961 and Cathy started attending Texas Christian University that summer. Two years later, the marriage ended in divorce and she moved into her awn apartment. Cathy left TCU after more than four years, having never declared a major or a degree plan. As with many women of her generation, there was no expectation that she needed a college degree to work; her parents had continued to support her.

When Missy was 9, Cathy heard that friends of her parents want-ad to sublet their elegant residence on Central Park South. So she moved to New York for a year. Missy attended fourth grade at a prestigious school while Cathy did charity work. Her parents continued to pay all her bills and shower her with presents, such as a lull-length lynx coat.

When the year was up, Cathy came back to Texas. She briefly dated society photographer John Haynsworth. When she complained she couldn’t rind a slot for Missy at aprivate school, Hayns-worth recommended she consider moving to Palm Beach, a resort on the Florida coast popular with wealthy Easterners. He owned condo she could rent. So in January 1973, the height of the season, 29-year-old Cathy moved to Florida. Soon, she was planning balls and selling charity raffle tickets-and looking for a husband.

Kaplan was from Boston; he had graduated from Suffolk University Law School in 1969. Cathy learned much later that he had been a below-average student. He had failed the Massachusetts bar exam three times, but after moving to Florida in 1970. he had passed that state’s bar exam and was mostly doing real estate closings. He seemed serious, capable and very attentive. Soon, they were seeing each other every day for lunch and dinner.

After an intense three-month courtship, she made another impulsive decision she would later regret. On July 26, 1973, Cathy and Charles Kaplan exchanged marriage vows.

Three days after the wedding, her parents sent Cathy a check so that their daughter and new son-in-law could buy a house. Then Cathy did something else she would later second-guess. She sent the check made out to her back to her parents and asked them to send another one made out to Mr. and Mrs. Charles Kaplan. “1 did not want him to feel like he was living in my house,” Cathy says.

They bought a four-bedroom house for $135,000 and the Prichards promptly sent their interior designer, Joe Chastain. to Palm Beach to help Cathy buy furniture and decorate. After three visits, Chastain had transformed the house into a tasteful but elegant resort home with Mexican tile, grass cloth walls and custom draperies. Her parents paid for everything.

Charles was thrilled. “The more they did,” Cathy says, “the more he wanted.” Charles found a used, $7,000 Mercedes sedan he had to have. “I called Daddy and asked him to buy it for Charles,1’ Cathy says. “He did.”

As soon as the decorating was completed. Charles told Cathy that they really needed a pool. Cathy called her father’s attorney and asked him to withdraw $20,000 from a small trust fund in her name. She gave Charles the entire amount, later finding out the pool cost only about $6,000.

In January, Charles came to her with papers to sign. When she asked, he said that they were taking out a loan on the house her parents had given them. ’’It’s better not to have all this money tied up in a house,’” Charles told her. He wanted to take $80,000 and put it into stocks. Cathy signed. “I trusted him,” she says.

Meanwhile, her parents sent them S500 a month toward their bills and continued to do so for the first three or four years of the marriage.

Around February 1974. Charles had yet another request. “He said he needed to be a member of the Palm Beach Country Club,” Cathy says. “It would really help his business.” Charles didn’t even play golf. But he insisted he had to have a full membership, which at the time sold for about $ 18,000. Cathy again went to her father. Dr. Prichard paid for the Kaplans to join.

By this time, however, the honeymoon was long over. Soon after their marriage. Cathy says, Charles’ attitude toward her abruptly changed. “He became very demanding, very controlling, very demeaning,” Cathy says. “It was like his guard was down, like the minute we were married, this other Charles came out.” The smallest thing could send him into a tirade. “You could see this rage come on and suddenly he would he consumed with anger,” Cathy says. He would scream extremely vulgar profanities at her. Shocked, Cathy couldn’t believe he was the same man who had courted her.

Cathy became pregnant in early 1974 and gave birth to Justin Prichard in December. But the baby changed nothing. A Palm Beach neighbor of the Kaplans, who asked that her name not be used, remembers Cathy as a sweet, very passive woman. But the neighbor, who lived across the street from the Kaplans, calls Charles a “disgusting and awful” man. “He had a vicious German shepherd he let roam,” she says. “Everyone was scared of [Charles].”

The neighbors openly talked about Charles’ abusive behavior. about seeing Cathy literally tremble when she knew Charles was on his way home. “She was virtually treated as if she was a slave,” the neighbor says. Friends often wondered why Cathy simply did not go home to her parents. “My impression was she was daddy’s little girl and never had much responsibility,” says the neighbor. “She probably didn’t want her daddy to know what was going on.”

By 1976, Cathy could take Charles’ rages no longer. She went to a Palm Beach divorce attorney and took the children to The Breakers. Charles called, pleading with her not to go through with it, promising to change. Cathy relented. Before her attorney could file the petition, she told him she was going to give the marriage another chance. Over the next decade, this became a pattern.

Charles told Cathy in 1977 he no longer wanted to practice law. He suggested that they move to Texas and that her father help buy them a company to run. Through Dr. Prichard’s contacts, Charles found the Ray C. Clark Company, a Fort Worth manufacturer of felt and stuffing for mattresses and furniture. The company cost about $550,000. In 1978, the Kaplans sold their house: after paying off the mortgage, they put the rest into the company. Her father paid the balance of the initial payment, and Charles arranged for financing over six to eight years. Charles and Cathy were the only stockholders. Charles was the president, and each owned 50 percent.

But though she was co-owner, Cathy knew little about how the company operated and had no signatory power on any of the accounts. Charles gave her $20 a day to run the household. Though Charles complained about her spending, Cathy says Charles came to expect her parents to pay for any personal expenses for herself and the two children.

They bought a house on Inwood Road in Dallas. Her father gave them the down payment of $122,000, but this time had Charles sign a demand note. Missy was enrolled in Hockaday; Justin in preschool at St. Michael’s. And of course Cathy got involved in charity work: the Fort Worth Jewel Ball, TACA, the Opera Association, the Cattle Baron’s Ball and the Beaux Arts Ball.

And she shopped. Cathy collected unique 22-karat gold sculptured jewelry by Jean Mahie and dressed in Ralph Lauren. Chanel, Valentino, Ungaro, Donna Karan, Armani. She loved to give extravagant presents to her family and friends. Every Christmas, Cathy decorated lavishly and had a party for Justin’s friends and their parents with a Dallas Cowboy as entertainment.

And like her mother, Cathy consistently spent several thousand dollars a month at Neiman Marcus on herself, her children and her home: Their balance typically hovered around $20,000. But Cathy wasn’t the only one with expensive tastes. Charles wore Oxxford suits, which cost $ 1,500 to $2,000.

Sarah Ray Voelker had lost touch with Cathy, but the two women resumed their friendship when the Kaplans moved to Dallas. “[Charles) didn’t want her to have friends,” says Voelker. “He treated her like a child, very condescending.” Another friend, a well-known Dallas socialite who asked that her name not be used, says that Cathy was a very kind, self-effacing woman who delighted in doing things for others. But Charles was a gruff, sly. provocative boor who made rude remarks at his wife’s expense in public. “If you believe in evil, Charles is one of those,” the socialite says. “He knew how to push her buttons.”

While the marriage staggered along, the company prospered and so did me Kaplans’ lifestyle. Charles’ salary from Ray C. Clark averaged $ 120.000 a year in the early ’ 80s. They bought a $350,000 house in Greenway Parks. Each drove a Mercedes. In 1984 Cathy and Charles moved into a $610,000 home on Walnut Hi!! Lane. In addition to four bedrooms and five-and-a-half baths, the 5,338-square-foot house had a den, a library, a heated pool, a sauna and a darkroom. By the time Cathy was finished decorating, she had spent another $ 100,000 from her trust fund. The result was an elegant home filled with Steuben crystal, Limoges china. Tiffany silver, English antiques and linens from Neiman Marcus. It looked like the home of a successful, happy North Dallas couple who had it all.

That was the same year Charles came home and told Cathy he had met a fascinating man, a “genius” named Gail Cooper.



THE WORLD ACCORDING TO COOPER

When Cathy came into divorce attorney Robert Holmes’ office in 1986, he saw a tiny, frightened woman who shrank in her chair. She had had a terrible fight with Charles and had taken Justin to a hotel. She asked Holmes to file a motion for a protective order and hire a security guard so she could return home.

Holmes complied and also drew up a divorce petition. A lot was at stake; as much as $7 million in assets-cash, stocks, oil and real estate. At Holmes’ suggestion, Cathy hid a recorder in the sofa cushions and taped Charles ranting in profanity-laced rage at her over trivial things like the pool man leaving the heater on too high.

Cathy told Holmes that Justin was terrified of his father. “For the sake of your child, get Justin out of this situation,” Holmes told her. But Cathy backed off, refusing to follow through with the divorce.just as she had in 1983, 1984 and 1985.

“Charles would mention this guy Gail Cooper to terrify her,” Holmes says. “She was scared of Charles Kaplan before, but when Cooper got involved, that took it to another level.”

In the two years since their introduction, Charles had become enthralled with Gail Cooper, a man with an eighth-grade education and a reputation as a brilliant, if unethical, “workout” consultant for people facing bankruptcy. He often bragged that he had influence with then-Attorney General Jim Mattox. “He’s completely amoral,” says a Dallas executive who once did business with Cooper. “There’s no one he won’t sacrifice for a dollar bill.”

Cathy thought Cooper was just an eccentric cowboy with a Hair for making money. Thin, with a Clark Gable mustache. Cooper always wore Western clothes and lived on the 440 Ranch near Denton. Charles regaled her with stories of Cooper’s illicit exploits. “I thought they were just wild stories.” Cathy says. She later found out he had been convicted of beating a waitress.

Kaplan and Cooper began doing business together. In 1986, the two paid $50,000 for a half interest in struggling Lee Optical, and after a month sold it for a quick 10 percent profit. About that time. Kaplan-who hadn’t practiced law in years-opened his own law firm, sharing a secretary and office space rent-free with Cooper.

The next year, Kaplan formed the law firm Simpson. Dowd & Kaplan (later Simpson. Dowd, Kaplan, Lewis & Moon.) As sole officer and director, Kaplan owned 99 percent of the stock. He rented the 48th floor of Allied Bank Tower and brought in Cooper to design the space and work as a business consultant.

Cathy claims that Charles told her that Cooper hired and fired the lawyers and brought in business for a share of the fees, a practice that is illegal under state law. In a deposition. Kaplan denied he had such an arrangement with Cooper, though he admitted Cooper interviewed attorneys, made recommendations about hiring and acted as a consultant on the firm’s “cash flow.” Cooper actually occupied two-thirds of the space.

As Cooper’s influence permeated their lives, Cathy says, Charles’ verbal abuse intensified. ’Justin was really reacting,” Cathy says. “I felt that staying in it sent a message that I condoned it.” In 1987, she decided to follow through with the divorce.

Holmes indicated to Cathy that she should receive a substantial settlement from the division of the community property. Much of the Kaplans’ estate had originated with her family. Then there was the law firm and the couple’s many other business assets.

Cathy says that in September 1987, not long after Charles moved out. Cooper appeared at her house at 8 or 9 o’clock one night, knocking and ringing the bell until she answered. Cooper tried to talk her into withdrawing the petition. “He told me what a genius he was at hiding assets,” Cathy says, For five nights in a row, she says. Cooper tried to persuade her to reconcile with Charles, even offering her a temporary support agreement to sign. She refused. Cooper scared and intimidated her, but for once, Cathy stuck to her guns.

She says Cooper was furious. “We are going to bleed you dry with fees until you say stop, and cause your lawyers to quit until you cannot get another one,” Cooper said, according to Cathy’s later deposition. (Cooper declined to comment.)

Somewhere, Cathy had found the courage to go through with the divorce. “I thought if I had legitimate lawyers, with my friends and family, I’d be fine.” she says.

When Charles realized that Cathy was insistent on divorce, he was furious. “If you go through with this divorce, I’ll think up things to do to you you’d never think of in your wildest imagination,” he told her. “You will never survive a divorce with me.”



THE SHELL GAME

Charles Kaplan was following the template of one of Cooper’s own divorces: delay, harass and intimidate. “The object is to wear the other side down until they capitulate.” says Holmes. “Eventually, all the lawyers will fall off. They get tired of the case, of the client.” Holmes believes that if Cathy had stayed with him, none of what followed would have happened. But she didn’t.

Charles Kaplan hired attorney Chris Weil, well-known in the Dallas legal community for abusing opponents and using the legal system to inflict as much anguish on the other side as possible.

“You hire Chris Weil to punish someone,” says Holmes, though he admits he’s never opposed Weil in a lawsuit. When a friend recommended that she get a “big gun” law firm, Cathy switched to Bruce Monning at Vial, Hamilton, Koch & Knox.

As he had threatened to do, Charles fi led for bankruptcy. Though their company, home and the law firm were in the U.S. Northern District, Kaplan filed his petition in the U.S. Eastern District, claiming he lived in Collin County. According to conventional wisdom, the federal judge in Tyler was more friendly to debtors and the docket there had a reputation of moving more slowly. And filing for bankruptcy effectively stopped any progress on the divorce. Cooper had done the same thing when his wife Deborah first tried to divorce him in 1984, filing for bankruptcy in the Eastern District, then having the case transferred to the Northern District. (See sidebar on page 57.)

At a hearing inTyler,Monning presented evidence showing that the monthly utility bills were so low, Charles’ Addison house was probably vacant. The bankruptcy case was transferred to the Northern District, where it was eventually dismissed. But the tactic caused more delays, more fees.

Meanwhile, private detective Dave Gillis, a former FBI agent, was hired to trace Kaplan’s assets. But Weil dragged his feet on producing requested documents. In a May 1988 motion to compel production, Monning’s associate pointed out to the court that though Kaplan had access to or signatory authority to at least 20 bank accounts, the statements of only one-fourth of those for 1987 and 1988, and an even smaller percentage for the preceding three years, had been produced. Though there was evidence the Kaplans owned or had an interest in at least 12 business entities, only 21 out of a possible 768 monthly financial statements had been produced.

And finally, though Monning had requested financial statements, tax returns and bank statements for the Ray C. Clark Company since 1983, they had received only six months worth of financial statements, no tax return and 60 out of a total of 252 bank statements. Only one bank statement had been produced for the period from Jan. I, 1987 to May 1988.

“…The response is seriously incomplete.” Cathy’s attorney wrote, “to the point of suggesting that some records have been intentionally concealed.”

From the limited evidence he was able to obtain, Gillis believed that Kaplan may have siphoned money from his companies to limit what Cathy could recover. But Monning says that tracking Kaplan’s assets proved extremely difficult.

“1 remember telling Cathy that she should probably settle that case and be done with this guy,” Monning says, “or we could be looking under every rock in Colorado and the Caribbean to find assets. It would take someone extremely well-capitalized to chase all these rabbit trails they had thrown up. I didn’t see she had a decent chance of success, and it would be financially crippling to pursue it. She had no means of support except her father, and he was not a bottomless source of money.”

But Cathy, with her father’s agreement, switched lawyers, retaining well-known divorce attorney Ike Vanden Eykel, who took up the divorce case and also filed a personal injury lawsuit against Charles for emotional abuse.

Though Charles had been ordered to pay $4,650 a month for the mortgage and $4,000 in maintenance and child support, Vanden Eykel was forced to file repeated motions for contempt, trying to compel Charles to pay Cathy what she was owed. Then Cathy learned that the mortgage company that held the note on her home was filing suit; Charles was behind in the mortgage and had not paid the ad valorem taxes. The bank threatened to foreclose. Because the taxes were not included in the temporary support agreement, Vanden Eykel couldn’t ask the judge to force Charles to pay.

“It was hardball litigation,” says Jimmy Verner Jr.. the lawyer who handled much of Cathy’s case for Vanden Eykel. “You ask for documents, they object, they produce some but not all. The delaying drives the cost up.”

Cooper’s promise to Cathy that they would “bleed her with fees” proved prophetic. Her father was not only paying some of her living expenses, he was paying her legal fees. Kaplan, however, was paying no fees. In a deposition, Charles testified that Weil had not yet billed him. Meanwhile, Vanden Eykel’s firm was digging into the extraordinarily complex business dealings of Charles Kaplan.

“1 had never seen so many bank accounts,” says Verner. “There were several dozen at least, with large sums of money sliding between the accounts.” To Verner, there seemed to be no business reason for the numerous accounts. He found checks going from Kaplan to Cooper or one of his companies and vice versa. (At one point in 1987, Cooper’s accountant had signatory authority on a bank account for Charles Kaplan, P.C.)

Was Kaplan taking his cues from Gail Cooper? Recent federal indictments against Cooper allege that he advised certain clients, owners of an apartment complex, to lie to appraisers, to stop paying taxes on property and to siphon money from corporate property into personal bank accounts, certificates of deposit and other corporate entities created for that purpose before declaring bankruptcy. (When contacted to comment on his ex-wife’s allegations, Charles Kaplan refused to be interviewed. “Everything she says is a lie,” he said, and threatened to sue D Magazine for libel,) If Kaplan was following Cooper’s example, the strategy worked. Vanden Eykel was forced to fight a “multiple front war.”

From the documents that had been produced, Verner could tell that Kaplan, at one time, had access to large sums of money, but it had all been ’’dissipated.” Though Kaplan had claimed a net worth of more than $4.5 million in 1985, by 1988, he was pleading that his liabilities outstripped his assets. Verner and Vanden Eykel came to the same conclusion that Monning had made.

“Her family had been generous with her,” Verner says, “But the financial affairs were so convoluted that it would cost more to get than there was cash on hand. We couldn’t trace, according to required legal standards, that what currently existed came from her parents. She could get a judgment against him, but that is just a hunting license.” Vanden Eykel and Verner recommended that she settle. That was news Cathy didn’t want to hear. She talked to her father’s attorney, who told her the settlement proposed by Vanden Eykel. which called for her to borrow money to buy Charles out of the company, was “preposterous” and “insane.”

In August 1989, Vanden Eykel withdrew from the case. Cathy believes that Cooper, Weil and Kaplan somehow influenced the law firm to resign. Verner denies that but, bound by attorney-client privilege, declines to comment.

Cathy next hired attorney Dennis Olson. But the financial confusion sown by Charles seemed to stymie Olson too. Cathy rejected settlement offers negotiated by Olson and Weil. “’All I wanted was my half.” she says. She pressed Olson to take her case to trial.

By November 1989, when Kaplan v. Kaplan finally went to trial. Dr. Prichard had spent over S350.000 for his daughter’s legal fees. In the middle of the trial, Cathy says, she learned that her mother Edna had become very ill. She left the court to go to her mother’s bedside. Cathy says that when she returned late the next day, she was presented with a settlement Olson and Weil had agreed upon. It called for her to receive a payout of $250,000 for her half of the company-though it was providing Charles an annual salary of over $100,000, plus large bonuses, and an appraisal firm had valued it at between $1.4 million and $2 million. And it ignored the fact that Charles was behind $84,000 in support and mortgage payments and had not paid the taxes on the house in four years. Though Cathy felt the decree was unfair, she felt pressured to sign.

“When you look at the divorce settlement, it’s clear that she got ’gotten,’ ” says one of Cathy’s later lawyers. “Especially when you consider that all their assets came from her father.”

Even with an unfair settlement, when the marriage was dissolved, that should have spelled the end to most of Catherine Kaplan’s troubles. But it was just the beginning.



OBSESSION

CHRISTMAS SHOPPING IN 1993 AT SHARPER IMAGE IN PRESTON Center, Robert Holmes recognized the painfully thin, blonde woman at the cash register. “Oh Robert!” Cathy said. She was trying to buy a present for her son and wanted Holmes to vouch for her. Cathy, who had once been able to charge thousands of dollars worth of clothes and jewelry without blinking an eye. was now asking Holmes to be a character witness.

Holmes had heard periodically about the Kaplan case throughout the ’90s. Whenever a new lawyer took on Cathy’s immensely complex litigation, he or she would call Holmes to ask questions. It also hadn’t been the last time he heard of Cooper.

Since his representation of Cathy. Holmes had another female client who began talking about her husband’s new “business consultant”-Gail Cooper. The woman abruptly got a new attorney, one recommended by Cooper; her ex-husband ended up with the business the woman had started.

“Part of the key to Gail Cooper is getting between the person and their lawyer,” Holmes says. “Every time Cathy got a lawyer, Kaplan and Cooper were able to drive a wedge there.” (Holmes’ former client declined to be identified, saying that she feared for her life. “Cathy is not crazy.” she said. “Cooper terrorizes people. He makes them think he’s going to knock them off.”)

Another board-certified family law attorney (who asked not to be named) also encountered Cooper on a case. Hired by a woman whose husband was threateninc to declare bankruptcy after she filed for divorce, he attended a settlement discussion with his client, her business attorney, the husband and the husband’s divorce attorney at Cooper’s office downtown. Cooper, clearly in charge of the husband’s side of the table, became angry at something said by the wife’s business attorney. Later, in Cooper’s office, “out of nowhere. Cooper virtually came over the corner of the desk,” the attorney says in amazement. “He sprang and he decked this guy.”

In the spring of 1990. shortly after signing divorce papers awarding her the house on Walnut Hill Lane, Cathy put the home up for sale for $950,000. She found a buyer who agreed to a price that would have allowed her to clear more than $100,000 from the sale, but the title was clouded and the bank foreclosed. No sooner had she rented another expensive home in Highland Park, then her beloved father, then 83. suddenly died. Generous, loving Dr. Prichard was no longer there to finance his daughter’s legal battles.

Upset with the divorce decree, she turned to well-known criminal defense and civil trial attorney Steve Sumner, who filed a legal malpractice case against Olson. But the case stalled when Cathy could no longer finance the legal fees. “We hung with Cathy out of empathy for a long time.” says Sumner. “We felt sorry for her. She really has been victimized. She was vulnerable.”

Attorney Bob Jenevein took the lawsuit on a contingency basis, ’The settlement deal [Olson and Weil] reached had some very questionable provisions that seemed unfair, at best, to her,” Jenevein says. In a motion for a new trial, which Olson filed at Cathy’s insistence, Olson admitted that he settled the case without her knowledge or consent. But in a deposition. Olson contended that Cathy “went crazy,” disappearing from the divorce trial, and he was forced to enter the agreement because the judge had declared Cathy in default. Jenevein calls that explanation “disingenuous and incomplete.” (Olson declined to comment.)

Whenever Jenevein saw Cathy, there was no outward sign that her world was in ruins. But one day she called him with a note of panic in her high, soft voice. Sheriff’s deputies were there to evict her from a high-priced Highland Park rental because she was months behind in the rent. Cathy Kaplan was out of another house. She put her furniture in storage and moved into the Park Cities Inn, across the street from SMU. At $47 a day. it wasn’t cheap, but it was in the Park Cities.

As financial ruin loomed. Cathy had started selling off antiques and taking pieces of her jewelry collection to pawn shops for a few cents on the dollar in the hopes that someday she could get them back. Though Jenevein and several other attorneys encouraged her to get a job and either find an apartment or move back to her mother’s home in Fort Worth, Cathy told them she simply couldn’t. Justin had to live in Highland Park with his friends.

“Her big concern was that he have a comfortable, stable environment to study,” says Sumner. And there was all the effort she had to put in on her legal affairs, which had grown even more complicated after her father’s death.

“The only thing she had the energy for was getting back what she had lost, what her parents had left her,” says a legal secretary who befriended Cathy. “I think she feels guilty. In her world, the most heinous family secret is that the money is gone”

But another reason, suggests a friend, was that Cathy simply could not face reality. She wanted the beautiful home not just for Justin, but for herself. Cathy still had Géraldine, her maid, who came every day to help her with cleaning and caring for her sick mother, even at the Park Cities Inn. She was still driving a Mercedes. She clung to the trappings of the life she had known, writing hot checks to maintain appearances, as if tearful that without the house, the clothes, the jewels, there was no Cathy.

“I think that’s what happened to Cathy-her parents loved her to death and never expected her to be anything but pretty and nice,” says one friend. “What kind of a job was she going to get? She always had daddy to take care of her.”

A harsher view: “’She was so spoiled, so unused to dealing with real life and so panicked, she couldn’t do anything,” says one attorney who counseled her to get a job. “She didn’t know any other way to live. She was frozen like a little deer in the headlights.”

Cathy viewed the courts as her salvation, feeling that if she could just get her case in front of a judge and a jury, they would see that she was right and would restore what her father had worked so hard to give her. She grasped as her lifeline the legal malpractice case against Olson. When she won, Cathy knew she could pay the rent, get her belongings out of hock and everything would be back as it was before.

But that didn’t happen. During a jury trial, Jenevein presented testimony that backed Cathy’s story of the circumstances surrounding the divorce settlement. He argued that Cathy had signed the settlement because Olson made her feel she had no choice.

“I thought we had a pretty damn good case,” Jenevein says. “At the very best, Dennis Olson s defense was that he had ’indirect’ authority to negotiate the settlement.” Jenevein was stunned when the judge granted a defense motion for a directed verdict, ruling against Cathy on a technicality involving expert witnesses’ testimony. The jury never deliberated. She had lost again.



DESPERATE MEASURES

THE END OF THE DIVORCE AND M ALPRAC-tice case didn’t stop the bitter dance of abuse that had entwined Cathy and Charles. When she and Justin lived for months in two rooms at the Park Cities Inn in 1992, Kaplan would appear and pound on her door, shrieking at her at the top of his voice, according to Peggy Lucas, former manager of the Park Cities Inn.

As her financial condition deteriorated, Cathy began borrowing from friends, then going to people who she heard made large, discreet loans to the well-to-do trying to keep their heads above water. One Park Cities antiques dealer made Cathy a loan against a cache of belongings, including a David Webb necklace worth S15,000, ruby and sapphire rings, Boehm porcelains, Tiffany silver, baroque pearls and a full-length ranch mink coat. Then there was A.L. Monroe, a North Dallas man convicted of killing his wife, who loaned her $100,000. Monroe had her sign an option that allowed him to buy her mother’s house for $200,000 if she was unable to pay him back. When she couldn’ t pay, he tried to get the house and succeeded in clouding the title. Attorney Ralph Perry-Miller represented Cathy in a lawsuit against Monroe, alleging he committed fraud and usury. The case settled out of court, and Cathy agreed to pay him $100,000 from the sale of the Fort Worth house.

In a way, Cathy’s parents had crippled their precious daughter with their love. She never had to work or live on a budget. When she slipped up. her father was always there to bail her out. Unsophisticated about business, Cathy made some decisions that cost her dearly. After she signed a lease on a house in Highland Park for $5,500 a month and didn’t pay the rent, the landlord obtained a legal judgment against her for S100,000. In 1993, Cathy was charged with writing hot checks; she made restitution and the charge was dismissed.

It took a while for those around her to realize how desperate Cathy’s situation had become. “She always wore the same suit when she came in, but her hair was done, her nails done, her shoes polished and she was driving a Mercedes,” says one lawyer. They didn’t realize the car may have been a loaner from a friend.

In 1994, police officers came to the Crestpark Hotel, where Cathy was living with her very ill mother and Justin, and arrested her for not paying her hotel bill. Mortified, hysterical, she spent the afternoon in a holding room at the Highland Park jail. A friend named Beth McClung tried to bail Cathy out, but first had to post a $750 bond on two hot check charges in Fort Worth. With Cathy’s promise that she would repay Beth from her trust fund, McClung loaned her $3,231.87 to pay off the bill at the Crestpark. She moved Cathy, her mother, an oxygen tank and at least 10 pieces of Louis Vuitton luggage back to the less expensive Park Cities Inn.

Finally realizing that Cathy had no income from a trust fund, McClung. her clinical psychologist husband and several people who had known her father, staged an “intervention.” Several dentists who wanted to help Dr. Prichard’s widow agreed to provide financial help for Edna’s medical care if Edna would sign over her power of attorney and Cathy would get some counseling and a job. Cathy was highly offended and completely ignored them. Beth still is angry and feels that Cathy used her.

The arrest was debasing, but Cathy’s situation got worse. After her mother died in 1994, her ability to hold things together with a semblance of normality disintegrated. Justin graduated from a private high school and moved out on his own. Cathy began a nomadic existence, living in a friend’s guest house, in an empty house a lawyer loaned her or on a friend’s couch. She occasionally would drive to Houston to stay with Missy, now married with a toddler, for a few days. Peggy Lucas, who had moved to Houston, at times paid for a hotel room for Cathy when she couldn’t stay at Missy’s.

In the spring of 1996, Cathy was literally one step away from a homeless shelter. Lucas and several other friends realized she was spending some nights in her car-yet another loaner Mercedes from a sympathetic, wealthy friend.

“I think she was washing up in the La Madeleine lavatory,” says an old friend. “She would sometimes come by at dinnertime. I’d ask her to stay and she would graciously refuse, but when I insisted, she would attack the food like she hadn’t eaten for three days.”



A LIFE ON HOLD

ONE HOT DAY IN JULY, A FRIEND WHO HAD seen a disheveled Cathy only a few months before was astonished to see her at the Highland Park Cafeteria wearing white linen and looking like a million bucks.

Cathy, still proud, denies that she ever actually slept in her car. She gets defensive and rattled when pressed about many of the bad decisions she’s made, like going to Monroe. “It’s terribly embarrassing,” Cathy says, struggling to maintain her composure.

She admits that she was near collapse when she found an unlikely champion: Larry Lott, a tall, 30-year-old fashion designer whose brown hair reaches well past his shoulders. Lott met Cathy at the liquidation sale for the Gazebo boutique and was struck by the fact that she was wearing an Armani jacket but it hadn’t been cleaned in months. After hearing Cathy’s tale, Lott moved her into the East Dallas duplex adjoining his. “Larry absolutely saved my life,” says Cathy. She and Larry started a small interior design business called Staton-Prichard. The two rejoiced in June when they heard Gail Cooper had been indicted.

After Lott took up her cause, Robert Holmes agreed to help Cathy pro bono to recover some funds from her father’s estate. But in September, Holmes resigned after an examination of documents from Chris Weil’s office revealed she had signed off on transactions, making it virtually impossible to recover any assets.

“If I could help her, I’d do it in a heartbeat.” Holmes says. “I think she’s been intimidated and browbeaten. Charles Kaplan is a bad guy and Cooper is a monster, but that’s not all that’s happened here. She’s not able to make good decisions. Her parents were always there to pick her up when she fell down.”

Cathy remains determined to get back the life she once knew. Others wonder if Cathy can ever recover what she has lost. “Every direction she’s gone, she’s been out-maneuvered and there’s no reason to think that’s going to change.” says one friend. “The company is gone, the house in Fort Worth is gone, her father’s business is gone, everything is gone. The legal system isn’t going to make it right.”

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