Mother's Keeper

The more time she spent "shopping," the more complex her schemes became. She learned the value of a copy machine. Some days, she would buy items -- say a coffee maker -- at a chain store. She'd then xerox the receipt and drive to the same store at a different location. There, she'd brazenly remove a new coffee maker from the shelf, approach the cashier with the xeroxed receipt, and hand over the coffee maker, expecting a refund. It worked -- so she did it over and over again, using multiple copies of the same receipt.

In her most advanced and lucrative endeavors, Joan would purchase two similar-looking items -- a $1,000 gold bracelet, for instance, and a $100 gold knockoff. Then she'd go home and switch the tags. Months later, she'd return with a receipt and the knockoff bracelet, reattached to a $1,000 price tag. Sales clerks, she correctly figured, weren't jewelry appraisers: They'd accept the returns without question. Joan would leave $1,000 richer -- and with a $1,000 bracelet waiting for her at home.

What began as stacking boxes had evolved into an elaborate buy-and-return scheme that, in the end, would cross 28 states and leave law-enforcement officials shaking their heads at its brilliance. And it would provide Joan with millions of dollars in assets. Yet through it all, she lived like a poor person. She wore thrift-store clothes, drove a beat-up 1970s Oldsmobile, and went dumpster-diving behind Panera Bread for food. And when it came time for the neighborhood garage sale, she told neighbors she didn't have the $5 community fee to participate -- although she did have some nice things to sell. The neighbors let her put some stuff out anyway. Only later did they discover that the perfumes Joan sold had been diluted with water.

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Like most loss-prevention officers, Keith Thompson was tired of his stores getting ripped off. Tired of people returning stuff they'd already used, of little shits manipulating the system. But his stores were on an uneven playing field, with technology decades old. So in the fall of 2005, Thompson, head of security for Sears, installed a new software system in the Richmond Heights store that would instantly flag suspicious refund transactions. He figured it would give him the upper hand in the fight against pants-stuffing teenagers. But his new purchase was worth much more.

That October, Joan, then 64, walked into the Richmond Heights Sears to return a recently "purchased" vacuum. The customer service rep credited Joan's credit card the price of the vacuum, and she calmly walked out of the store. But upstairs, in the security office, the new software went to work: Sears had reimbursed Joan $6,000 in the last year, it showed. Either Joan Hall was one mighty picky shopper, or she was up to something.

Thompson called Richmond Heights Detective Chuck Duffy and asked him to investigate. Duffy, a big man with coal eyes and a snide smile, agreed. He took his time heading out; mild-mannered retirees aren't the most interesting perps. But a few days later, the detective meandered over to Joan's Westlake house. The treelined suburban street was quiet that afternoon. When the detective knocked on the door of Joan's split-level, nobody answered. So he went around back and poked his head inside. In the house, he saw stacks of boxes, piled toward the ceiling. It looked like a department-store stockroom.

"It just didn't look normal," he says.

Back at his office, Duffy worked the phones, investigating Joan's credit-card transactions. And he found the strangest thing: The card had $56,000 in credit on it. And most of the credit came from giant retail stores around Cleveland. Duffy's adrenaline surged. The case of the return-happy retiree had just taken a turn toward interesting.

He studied Joan's credit history: The biggest refunds, he saw, came from TJ Maxx, so he dialed the head of the corporation's loss-prevention department, William Dammerall. The name "Joan Hall" stung Dammerall's ears. She'd twice been arrested at their stores for shoplifting. "We've been looking into Joan for years," he said.

Duffy now had the evidence he needed to arrest Joan. He headed back to Westlake and found her sitting in her backyard garden. He quietly handcuffed her. As they rode to the station, Joan acted like the two were best friends. "She was just the nicest person there was," Duffy says. She told him she was "sick," and that she only "did this because I don't have any money." And, she said, because she was dying of cancer.

As Joan was being booked into jail, Duffy obtained a search warrant, drove back to her home, and pounded down the door. Inside, the place was "like a retail factory." You couldn't move through the house without stumbling into boxes. The closets were overstuffed with clothes. The garage had enough canned goods to feed a city of homeless people.

In a locked box, Duffy found $51,000 in cash, numerous legal documents, and the keys to five different safety-deposit boxes. He piled what he could into the back of his car and headed to the banks. "That's where we found the mother lode," he says.