CANCER SCAM

CANCER SCAM

As noted at the “My story” page under the “Personal” tab, my then-wife Sherry Major faked having terminal cancer throughout Y2K as part of her elaborate scheme to bilk me of hundreds of thousands of dollars.  It worked.  Quite simply, my employment income that year was $90,000 and I also made about $250,000 on one investment in the stock market (an $0.80 stock that rose to $40.00 in just a few months in what later appeared to be a classic “pump and dump” by stockbrokers).  Upon telling my wife of my good fortune, she concocted her I have “cancer scam”.   Her means, motive and opportunity to do so should be quite apparent but I’ll spell things out here since even my 2002/2003 criminal trial judge was confused.

MEANS, MOTIVE & OPPORTUNITY     (buying time with my $$$)

Sherry had already scammed me for many years, leading me and everyone else she knew to believe she was a doctor that graduated in 1998 with an Rh.D. degree (Doctorate in Rehabilitation) with her “doctor scam”.  I helped fund her supposed four year post-graduate degree at University of Toronto.  Sherry was supposed to eventually repay me in kind by eventually becoming the main breadwinner in our family since she would obviously have a great opportunity to earn a substantial income as a doctor.  She only worked part-time after her “graduation” and I became concerned that she wasn’t contributing.   She simply got pregnant in late 1998, thereby having an automatic excuse not to work full-time in her field.  I didn’t mind since I was thrilled to have a child.  Our son was born in August 1999. 

Early in Y2K Sherry still had not taken strong measures to seek out full-time earnings, despite her continued claims that she would.  I was paying for a nanny for our son, to allow Sherry more time to get her proposed rehab clinic up and running.  Unbeknownst to me, Sherry was NOT a doctor and could never earn a doctor’s income since she didn’t even have an undergrad degree, let alone a post-grad degree, in her chosen field of work.  She would obviously have been scrambling to come up with a believable excuse for why she would never provide the contributions to our family income that she had been promising me for so many years.  Her first pregnancy bought her about 1-1/2 years of time.  My stock market windfall provided the perfect opportunity for Sherry’s dual purpose “cancer scam”. 

She wanted my money and she was going to get it come hell or high water.  Her actions proved this.  She went one gigantic leap beyond her ongoing doctor scam.  Less than two weeks after my windfall announcement, Sherry told me she had been diagnosed with terminal cervical, uterine and lung cancer and had “about one year to live”.  This was in or about late March of 2000.  (Note that this “cancer scam” nicely coincided with yet another “unplanned” pregnancy to me but obviously planned by Sherry since it would once again allow her to not work full-time and contribute as we had intended.)  Sherry claimed she was on a two-month waiting list to get treatments at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto but that a co-worker of hers at St. John’s Rehab Hospital (where she apparently did work part-time for almost two years), “Vincent”, offered to “risk his career” by immediately administering clandestine chemotherapy and radiation treatments at St. John’s as a measure of “professional courtesy” and “respect” for his fellow doctor, Sherry Major.  That explains why I never attended the treatments sessions – they were allegedly not supposed to be happening in the first place, as per Sherry’s story. 

During this same time Sherry had clumps of hair falling out (I don’t know how she pulled that off but other people also witnessed this) and played the pity card HUGE.  I had $400,000 in life insurance on Sherry so any money spent on Sherry would ultimately be recovered when she died, thereby enabling me to financially manage our home while raising our infant son.  Sherry wanted me to help make her “dream” clinic come true.  I did.  Rather than pay $23,500 Sherry owed to my mother (Sherry’s future contribution to a loan used as a partial down payment on our home) Sherry convinced me to give her tens of thousands of dollars to get her proposed clinic up and running, in addition to doing a massive pool and landscaping job at our home.  Since Sherry was “dying” the money spent on the clinic seemed like it would be a total waste.  However, the life insurance money would replace the money “wasted” on a clinic that would never come to fruition.  My money allowed Sherry to pursue her dreams of having her own clinic, with my repayment being two-fold – the intrinsic satisfaction of seeing Sherry’s last months made as comfortable as possible for her, while also being later reimbursed through the life insurance.  Sherry later testified under oath that I paid $98,007 for the landscaping/pool project.  Because she was not the one on trial my lawyer never delved much into the matter of monies she acquired for her clinic, recommending these issues be saved for when she was on trial.  Never did I imagine that day would probably never come. 

The long and the short of it is that for nine months Sherry knew she was pregnant she told everyone else, including her own family, that she was dying of cancer and that the obvious enlarging belly was “excess water retention” as a result of her chemotherapy and radiation treatments.  We were all worried sick for many months until in mid-fall of 2000 Sherry announced, in an elaborately detailed email to friends and family, that her cancer treatments had ended and she was in full remission.  This was great news!

Bear in mind that Sherry’s mental health was always “suspect” but the cancer matter and her inability to breast feed our son due to an inverted nipple seemed to have contributed to her lapse into a prolonged Postpartum Depression in 1999/2000.  This seemed reasonable enough. 

Late on the evening of December 19, 2000 I came home to a large pool of blood on our kitchen floor.  I was panicking but found Sherry calming resting in bed.  She proceeded to tell me that she had suffered some internal hemorrhaging and had therefore gone to the hospital to be checked.  She advised me that she was okay.  Next came the totally confounding part.  Totally lacking any emotion whatsoever Sherry casually mentioned, “Oh yeah – they told me I’m pregnant.” 

I was absolutely dumbfounded!  Then, as yet another in a string of kicks to the teeth, she told me that it was a dead fetus.  I was heartbroken and crying.  Over the next 15 minutes we discussed where our unborn child would be buried, deciding upon a cemetery behind her parents’ home in Hickman’s Harbour, Newfoundland that was situated on a ridge overlooking a tranquil pond.  It was nothing short of torturous mental anguish.  Being a strong believer in God, and also recently having become a Born Again Christian, I said, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.  I’m going to pray to God for a miracle.”  I did.

Two evenings later, at about 1:00 in the morning of December 22^nd, in a surreal situation that happened unbelievably fast I delivered the “dead fetus” in an emergency situation in our home when Sherry went into labour and my 9-1-1 call didn’t get attendants to our home fast enough.  I was expecting a lump of flesh, not a seemingly full-term dead “thing” (as Sherry referred to it – “this thing isn’t going to wait”).  It was blue.  I handed it to Sherry.  She patted it on the back a couple of times and remarkably it cried.  It was alive!!!  I was overwhelmed with joy.  We had a "miracle baby"! 

Two days later the Toronto Star newspaper did a ¾-page feature story on page 3 of their front section after interviewing Sherry in the hospital.  I was not present for any meeting with the Star.  The story of the miracle baby “misdiagnosed” as abdominal swelling for nine months by doctors was probably the feel good story of the year.  It was short-lived.  No doctors’ names were mentioned in the story, but it turned out Sherry knew she was pregnant all along, as did her gynecologist that she had secretly been seeing for many months without my knowledge!  I received a telephone call from a concerned man claiming I was “in on it”.  After determining the caller’s identity as Sherry’s gynecologist and ensuring him I knew nothing about his accusations, I agreed to meet him at his office at Markham-Stouffville Hospital soon thereafter, with Sherry as well since she had a lot of explaining to do.

At the doctor’s office the tension was considerable.  The doctor felt the newspaper story made him look like an idiot amongst his co-workers, who all knew Sherry had been properly diagnosed as being pregnant many months earlier.  He suggested Sherry did not have cancer.  She still claimed she did indeed have cancer, with the following reasonably sensible explanation.  If Sherry told the doctor of the secretive cancer treatments he would surely have recommended an abortion since the pregnancy would have been high risk, with the child likely to experience some unknown birth defects.  Conversely, she told me the other side of the story (cancer but not pregnant vs. pregnant but no cancer) with the same abortion as a solution.  The doctor wanted to admit Sherry to the Psychiatric Ward “just down the hall”.  Sherry was literally on the doctor's office floor, crying and begging that we not admit her to the psychiatric ward, pleading "Please don't take my baby away from me." 

In perhaps the biggest mistake of my life, I softened to Sherry’s pleas and opted to allow her to return home with me, thinking that we could manage to work things out.  It was not to be.  That evening I tried to piece together some loose ends regarding numerous mysterious calls to the house.  I opted to search through our financial files and was horrified to discover that Sherry had put over $100,000 in cash advances on my lines of credit and credit cards!  This included $14,200 that Sherry had taken from my ING Direct accounts with a stolen PIN.  Even worse, the transactions had happened eight months earlier, mostly in April 2000, and that explained the constant telephone calls to house – bill collectors seeking overdue payments!  Only two years later would I discover Sherry had been telling the creditors I was on an extended business trip in China, when in reality I worked less than 10 minutes from our home.  I was incensed! 

As always, Sherry talked her way out of the situation, claiming she had purchased used rehab equipment from her St. John’s workplace that was “only two years old but they replaced it because the money was in the budget and they had to spend it … I got everything for 50 cents on the dollar”.  I asked to physically see the equipment.  Sherry explained that I couldn’t because it was in an off-limits area of the hospital.  I was still ticked off, but the story had some merit to it and what choice did I have since the damage on the accounts was already done?  Sherry assured me the clinic would be up and running within a few months and that she would repay “every penny”.      

Meanwhile, the gynecologist had said he would check out Sherry’s story, including confirming the cancer treatments with her co-worker.  I called him a couple of times and left messages.  He never returned my calls.  I eventually figured that the story must have checked out and I didn’t give it much more thought.  This was another HUGE mistake.

After several months of arguing with Sherry about getting the bills paid, and threatening to go to the police to have her charged with fraud, I was shocked on the afternoon of May 24, 2001 to be confronted by a member of York Regional Police while drawing with chalk on our driveway with our son.  I was arrested, handcuffed and detained on charges of domestic assault reported by Sherry and alleged to have happened in late December 2000.  The police report noted my claims as to Sherry’s means, motive and opportunity to make false claims against me (stealing my money – $150,000 in total on the credit cards and lines of credit – plus her fear of being exposed as the con artist she is).  Unfortunately, my factual claims were never considered in the matter since the “wheels of injustice” had already been set into motion, whereby I would be totally and continually demonized by “the system”, castigated by virtually one and all and continually put on the defensive with the “throw crap at the wall and hope it sticks” methods used against me by Sherry and her co-conspirators.  My life was about to change forever.  I was never considered innocent until proven guilty.  When factual evidence continually showed my story to be true I was either ignored or told, such as by Walter Sienko of the Children’s Aid Society, “We have a higher burden of proof (than a criminal court!)” or “We just weren’t able to prove the charges against you” (as YRP staff claimed).  I was screwed!!

Meanwhile, it wasn’t until early 2003, after another two bogus arrests and my lengthy detainment that I finally hired a private investigator and finally realized Sherry had faked the cancer and had impersonated a doctor for many years.  Even worse, Sherry had intentionally “poisoned” our daughter for eight months after the baby’s birth.  She did so to mislead me and others into believing she did have cancer that had gone into remission.  After the baby’s birth, Sherry predicted in writing that the baby would be sick with the side effects of chemotherapy and radiation in its bloodstream for eight months.  The baby was “sickly” and undersized for exactly eight months.  Whatever Sherry did was enough to make the baby sick, but not enough to kill it.  (Unless Sherry ever confesses, it is highly unlikely to ever be known what exactly she did to make the baby appear sick.)  Then, just as “Dr. Sherry Major” had predicted, the baby made a miraculous recovery and suddenly developed a fiendish appetite and an ability to keep food down.  She put on three pounds in three weeks after only gaining eight pounds in eight months.  Once again, this remarkable set of circumstances only confirmed how brilliant “Dr. Sherry Major” truly was.

When everything about Sherry’s story had begun to unravel for her these accusations were reported to the York Regional Police and York Region Children’s Aid Society.  They both refused to investigate my claims, although they did note the accusations in their files.  My ongoing complaints questioned whether this was an indication of Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy, whereby parents harm their own children, often for unknown reasons.  Regardless, surely this was yet another in a long string of indicators as to Sherry’s mental instability? 

See Toronto Star “miracle baby” story ATTACHMENT!

"Miracle baby" cancer scam story