My Son-in-Law Put a Tracker on My Car—So I Sent It to Canada and Got Him Arrested
My son-in-law said my car needed maintenance to keep me safe before my weekend trip. The next day, when I picked it up, I dropped my purse and bent down to grab it. That’s when I found a tracker hidden under the vehicle.
Instead of confronting him, I quietly removed it and attached it to a semi-truck heading to Canada. The next day, I got a strange call from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police saying they’d arrested a man with my photo.
I’m Clara Brennan, sixty-three years old, and I’ve been a widow for a little over two years. Not that I’m counting or anything, but when you’ve been married to someone for thirty-eight years, you tend to notice when they’re suddenly not snoring next to you every morning.
My husband Richard died of a heart attack while mowing the lawn, which—knowing Richard—was probably exactly how he would have wanted to go. Quick, efficient, and with a perfectly manicured yard as his final accomplishment.
Now, before you start thinking this is going to be some sob story about a poor little old lady, let me set the record straight. Richard might have been the one who fixed the leaky faucets and programmed the remote control, but I was the one who handled our finances.
And by handled, I mean I turned his modest engineering salary and my teaching income into a portfolio worth approximately eight million dollars. Turns out, while Richard was building bridges, I was building our future. Who knew that all those summers spent listening to my father discuss stock markets over Sunday dinner would actually pay off?
The thing about being a wealthy widow is that people suddenly start caring about your well-being in ways they never did before. They look at you differently in the grocery store line, like you’re a fragile vase someone forgot to wrap in bubble paper.
Take my son-in-law David, for instance. Three years ago, when my daughter Emma first brought him home, he couldn’t have cared less about my car maintenance schedule. Now, suddenly, he was Marcus Aurelius crossed with a service representative, full of wisdom about oil changes and tire rotations.
David Mitchell is what my generation would call easy on the eyes. Thirty-seven years old, works in financial planning, drives a BMW that’s always spotless, and has the kind of smile that makes waitresses give him extra bread rolls without even realizing they’re doing it.
Emma met him at some charity gala where rich people pay five hundred dollars to eat rubber chicken and feel good about themselves. She was smitten from day one, which should have been my first warning sign. Emma’s never been smitten by anything that wasn’t bad for her.
My only child has always had a talent for choosing men the way some people choose lottery numbers—with hope, enthusiasm, and absolutely no logic whatsoever.
There was Marcus the musician who turned out to be married. Brett, the businessman who turned out to be broke. And Kevin, the entrepreneur who turned out to be selling essential oils to his grandmother’s bridge club.
So when Emma walked through my front door three and a half years ago with David in tow, I was prepared for the worst. But David seemed different. He asked thoughtful questions. He remembered details from previous conversations. He actually helped clear the table without being asked.
He brought me flowers on Mother’s Day—not the gas-station variety, but actual arrangements from a real florist. He listened when I talked about Richard’s death and never once suggested I should start dating again. Most importantly, he made Emma happy. Really, genuinely happy.
So when David suggested last Friday that my car needed maintenance before my weekend business trip to Portland, I didn’t question it. I should have.
But grief and loneliness have a way of making you grateful for any sign that someone cares about your safety, even if that someone has only been family for three years and has never shown any previous interest in automotive maintenance.
“Clara,” he’d said, using that concerned son-in-law voice, “when’s the last time you had the oil changed in that Lexus? You’re going to be on the road, and I’d hate for something to happen to you.”
Emma had nodded along enthusiastically from the kitchen counter. “Mom, David knows about cars. You should listen to him.”
And that’s how I found myself handing over my keys to a man who, until that moment, I trusted completely. Trust, as it turns out, is a luxury I could no longer afford.
Saturday morning arrived with the kind of crisp October air that makes you believe in new beginnings, which seems ironic now considering what I was about to discover. The garage door hummed open, revealing my spotless silver Lexus. David had brought it back the previous evening with a pleased smile and a detailed explanation of everything the mechanics had supposedly checked.
The drive to my first appointment should have taken less than half an hour, but traffic had other plans. I found myself crawling along at the speed of continental drift, watching orange cones march like a parade.
Portland Financial Group occupied the top floors of a glass building. I spent two hours discussing numbers and projections with Margaret Henderson about acquiring a commercial real estate portfolio. The second appointment was with Davidson Investment Management, where I was considering moving some aggressive investments.
By the time I finished both meetings, it was nearly three o’clock. As I approached my car in the parking garage, I fumbled with my purse while trying to extract my keys, reading glasses, and parking ticket simultaneously. The purse fell. Tissues scattered. Pens rolled. My reading glasses case bounced twice before coming to rest under my car.
I bent down to retrieve everything, muttering words that would have gotten me detention duty when I was teaching. That’s when I saw it.
Attached to the underside of my car, just behind the front wheel well, was a small black device about the size of a deck of cards. It was magnetic, clearly designed to be hidden. And it definitely hadn’t been there before.
For a moment, I just stared at it, my brain trying to process what I was seeing. Then, very slowly, I reached out and pulled it free. There was no question what it was. A GPS tracker. Someone—and I had a pretty good idea who—wanted to know where I was going.
I sat in my car for a long moment, staring at that tracker like it was a particularly venomous spider. Part of me wanted to march back and confront David directly. But thirty-five years of teaching teenagers had taught me that the direct approach wasn’t always the smartest approach.
Instead, I did what any reasonable woman would do. I researched it, just enough to confirm my instincts. The question was what to do about it.
One advantage of being a wealthy widow is that people tend to underestimate you. They assume that because you’re over sixty and female, you’re automatically helpless and ripe for manipulation.
What they don’t realize is that I’ve spent the last forty years dealing with teenagers, tax auditors, and insurance companies. I know how to spot a con artist. And I know how to outmaneuver them.
I drove to a truck stop on Highway 84 where long-haul truckers grabbed coffee and diesel before heading out on cross-country routes. The plan was simple. I would attach David’s tracker to a truck heading somewhere far, far away, and see what happened when my supposed location started moving in directions I’d never intended to go.
I selected a truck with Canadian plates heading toward Vancouver. I attached the tracker to the underside of the trailer and drove home to see what would happen next.
The drive back gave me time to think about other details that started clicking into place. Like how David had started asking questions about my investment portfolio during family dinners. Nothing obvious. Just casual inquiries about whether I was diversifying properly.
Or how he’d volunteered to help me organize Richard’s papers after the funeral and seemed particularly interested in the life insurance documents. Or how he’d encouraged Emma to move back in with me, suggesting it would be good for both of us.
By the time I pulled into my driveway, I’d worked myself into the kind of cold fury that makes smart women dangerous. But I’d also made a decision. If David was playing games with me, I was going to play them right back. And I was going to win.
Sunday morning, I was sitting at my kitchen table drinking coffee when my phone rang. The caller ID showed a number with a 780 area code.
“Mrs. Brennan,” a man’s voice said, crisp and steady, “this is Sergeant Mitchell Wright with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Alberta, Canada.”
I nearly dropped the mug. “Yes, this is Clara Brennan. Is everything all right, Sergeant?”
“Ma’am, we have a situation here that you might be able to help us with. Early this morning, we arrested a man named Vincent Torres at a truck stop outside Calgary. He was behaving suspiciously around one of the trucks. When we searched him, we found a photograph of you along with some rather detailed personal information.”
My blood turned to ice water. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Mrs. Brennan, this individual had your home address, your daily routine, information about your car, and what appears to be surveillance notes dating back several weeks. When we confronted him about how he’d obtained this information, he became extremely agitated and started demanding to speak with someone named David about a payment he was owed.”
For the next twenty minutes, I told him about the tracker, about David’s suspicious behavior, about my growing suspicion that my son-in-law might not have my best interests at heart.
“Mrs. Brennan,” Sergeant Wright said finally, “based on what you’ve told me and what we found here, I believe you may be the target of a sophisticated scam. This Vincent Torres has a criminal record for robbery, assault, and something we call virtual kidnapping, where criminals track potential victims and then demand ransom from family members by claiming the person has been abducted.”
The implications hit me like a physical blow. “So David was planning to—”
“It appears someone provided Mr. Torres with detailed information about your movements and financial situation. The plan was for him to intercept you during your business trip, contact your family claiming you’d been kidnapped, and demand two hundred thousand dollars for your release.”
I felt sick. Two hundred thousand. The plan was diabolically clever. Emma would have been frantic when I disappeared. She would have called David immediately, and he would have been right there to handle the situation. He probably would have insisted on paying the ransom himself.
After I hung up, I sat in my kitchen for a long time, trying to process what I’d learned. David Mitchell had hired someone to kidnap me. Not just rob me. Actually kidnap me and terrorize my family into paying ransom.
But there was one small problem with David’s perfect plan. I’d found the tracker.
Over the next few days, I hired professionals to investigate David’s background while acting normal around him and Emma. My accountant discovered that someone had been making small withdrawals from my checking account for eighteen months—nothing large enough to trigger alerts, but consistent enough to add up to thirty-seven thousand dollars.
My attorney’s background check revealed that David had been fired from his previous two jobs for manipulating elderly clients. He also had serious gambling debts—close to three hundred thousand owed to some very unpleasant people.
David hadn’t fallen in love with Emma’s personality. He’d fallen in love with my financial statements.
By Thursday, I’d decided to accelerate my timeline. I called Emma at work and asked her to bring David over for dinner Friday night. “I want to discuss the wedding budget,” I told her.
Friday evening, I prepared what I privately called my last supper. After dessert, I poured brandy and said the words that would change everything.
“David, I need to ask you about something, and I’d appreciate an honest answer. I need to know why you put a GPS tracker on my car.”
The silence that followed was complete. David’s face went through surprise, confusion, and calculation before settling on his concerned look.
“Clara, I’m not sure what you mean.”
“A GPS tracker. The one you had attached to my car when you took it for maintenance. The one that I found in the parking garage. The one that’s currently traveling through the Canadian wilderness attached to a semi-truck bound for Vancouver.”
Emma appeared in the doorway, frowning. “Mom? What are you talking about?”
I pulled out my phone and showed them the photos I’d taken of the device. “Because I have pictures. And I have a very interesting police report from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police about a man named Vincent Torres who was arrested carrying my photograph and detailed surveillance notes about my daily routines.”
Emma’s face went white. “Police report? Mom, what’s going on?”
David’s mask was slipping now. “Clara, I think there might be some misunderstanding.”
“The only misunderstanding, David, is the one you made when you assumed I was too old and trusting to notice that you’ve been stealing from me for eighteen months.”
I pulled out a folder containing my accountant’s analysis and slid it across the table to Emma. “Your fiancé has been making unauthorized withdrawals from my accounts totaling thirty-seven thousand dollars. He’s also got gambling debts of nearly three hundred thousand dollars.”
Emma looked at the papers, then at David, then back at me. “This can’t be right. David, tell her this is wrong.”
But David wasn’t denying anything anymore. “How long have you known?” he asked quietly.
“I started putting it together after I found the tracker. The phone call from Canadian police confirmed my suspicions. And the private investigators I hired filled in the rest.”
“Private investigators?” Emma’s voice cracked. “Mom, what is happening?”
“Emma, sweetheart, David isn’t who he claims to be. His real name is Derek Morrison. Over the past ten years, he’s targeted at least three other elderly women, convinced them to trust him, and then systematically stolen their life savings. I’m victim number four—except I caught him before he could finish the job.”
Derek stood up slowly, his eyes never leaving my face. “You don’t understand, Clara. I never wanted to hurt you, but these people I owe money to… They don’t accept excuses. They’ll kill me if I don’t pay them back.”
“So you decided to solve your problems by kidnapping me and demanding ransom from Emma?”
Emma dropped the folder. “Kidnapping? David, please tell me this isn’t true.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be real,” Derek said desperately. “Vincent was just supposed to make some phone calls, demand money, and then let you go. No one was going to get hurt.”
Emma backed away from him. “You were going to fake-kidnap my mother for money.”
“Derek,” I said calmly, “I called the police thirty minutes before you arrived tonight. They’re waiting outside for my signal. You have exactly one chance to do the right thing here.”
His eyes darted. “What’s that?”
“Confess to Emma. Tell her everything. Give her the respect of knowing exactly who she was about to marry.”
Derek looked at Emma, then at me, then down at the evidence scattered across my dining room floor. For a moment, I thought he might actually do it. Instead, he bolted for the back door.
He made it about fifteen feet across my backyard before Detective Chen and two uniformed officers tackled him next to Richard’s prizewinning rose bushes.
Emma stood beside me, tears streaming down her face, watching the man she’d planned to marry being loaded into a police car.
“Mom,” she whispered, “I’m so sorry. I brought him into our lives.”
“Sweetheart, this isn’t your fault. Derek is a professional con artist. Fooling people is what he does for a living.”
Three weeks after Derek’s arrest, I learned that my former son-in-law’s criminal career had been even more extensive than I’d realized. The man I’d known as David Mitchell had actually been Derek Morrison from Buffalo, forty-two years old—five years older than he’d claimed.
The prosecutor showed me files of his other victims. Margaret Wellington from Sarasota, who’d lost $460,000. Helen Rodriguez from Phoenix, who’d lost $320,000. Janet Pierce from Charleston, who’d lost everything and was now working retail at fifty-eight.
Derek was looking at twenty to thirty years in federal prison. But there was a complication. He was claiming that I had been his accomplice, that I’d discovered his criminal activities but agreed to keep quiet in exchange for a cut of his profits.
The strategy was elegant in its desperation. Derek could try to drag me down with him, but doing so would require him to confess to crimes the prosecution hadn’t been able to prove independently.
The trial began on a crisp January morning. Derek’s lawyer argued that his client had been manipulated by a criminal mastermind who used her age as cover for sophisticated fraud schemes. That mastermind was allegedly me.
When Derek took the stand, he testified in detail about his criminal activities. He described how he identified victims, gained their trust, and systematically drained their accounts. He explained his methods for creating false identities and avoiding law enforcement.
Then he tried to implicate me, claiming I’d been his business partner and had helped him target new victims.
During cross-examination, the prosecutor systematically demolished every aspect of Derek’s story. She showed that his supposed partnership with me had produced no victims, no profits, no evidence. Nothing beyond his own desperate claims.
More damaging still, she used Derek’s detailed descriptions of his criminal methods to prove additional charges. By trying to implicate me, Derek had confessed to crimes across multiple states.
The jury deliberated for exactly ninety-seven minutes. Guilty on all counts.
Judge Harrison sentenced Derek Morrison to twenty-eight years in federal prison, without the possibility of parole for fifteen years. As the bailiff led Derek away, I felt Emma squeeze my hand.
“Mom, I’m proud of you.”
Walking out of that courthouse, I realized Derek had given me something unexpected. Proof that I was stronger, smarter, and more resilient than I’d ever imagined.
For two years after Richard’s death, I’d felt like a half person—defined by what I’d lost rather than what I’d retained. Derek Morrison had tried to make me his victim. Instead, he’d reminded me that I was Clara Brennan. Teacher. Investor. Mother. A woman who didn’t back down from a fight.
Six months later, I used part of Derek’s restitution payments to establish the Clara Brennan Foundation for Elder Fraud Prevention. Emma runs the day-to-day operations, and she’s brilliant at it. Turns out, almost marrying a con artist gives you excellent insight into how they operate—and how to stop them.
As for me, I’m sixty-four years old, worth approximately eight and a half million dollars, and I’ve never been happier to be underestimated.
Because the next con artist who thinks I’m an easy target is going to discover exactly what happened to the last one who made that mistake. Some lessons, after all, are worth sharing.
Lila Hart is a dedicated Digital Archivist and Research Specialist with a keen eye for preserving and curating meaningful content. At TheArchivists, she specializes in organizing and managing digital archives, ensuring that valuable stories and historical moments are accessible for generations to come.
Lila earned her degree in History and Archival Studies from the University of Edinburgh, where she cultivated her passion for documenting the past and preserving cultural heritage. Her expertise lies in combining traditional archival techniques with modern digital tools, allowing her to create comprehensive and engaging collections that resonate with audiences worldwide.
At TheArchivists, Lila is known for her meticulous attention to detail and her ability to uncover hidden gems within extensive archives. Her work is praised for its depth, authenticity, and contribution to the preservation of knowledge in the digital age.
Driven by a commitment to preserving stories that matter, Lila is passionate about exploring the intersection of history and technology. Her goal is to ensure that every piece of content she handles reflects the richness of human experiences and remains a source of inspiration for years to come.