Cross said Wright bought him the vehicles in a failed effort to woo him away from his wife and children. "She wanted to spend money on me to try to get me, so I just went with the program," he said.

Wright declined to say where she obtained the money to buy the vehicles. And Cross said he never knew where the money came from.

"I don't know, she just goes to the bank and gets it," he said.

Ethel Hill, daughter of a farmer, worked as a nurse her entire adult life, lived independently and saved diligently for her old age.

"She was a very highly intelligent person, very proud," said her cousin, John Stockton, 64. "She wasn't a spender. She was very conservative. I guess that was how she accumulated what she had."

In July 1990, when Wright applied to be her guardian, Hill was alertand needed minimal assistance, according to some court records.

At the time, Hill insisted that she was not incapacitated and did not need a guardian. She told the court, through an attorney, that if she had to have a guardian, she didn't want it to be Wright, court records show.

But Wright prevailed. Circuit Judge Raymond J. Hare, since retired, declared Hill incapacitated and placed her under Wright's control.

The last time Hill's cousin Stockton saw her, she was hungry.

Wright had moved Hill from Smiling Acres, the substandard boarding home, to a private home in Pompano Beach, Stockton said.

"She complained a couple of times that she wasn't being fed properly," Stockton said. "She kind of indicated that they didn't feed her often enough.

"I told her there wasn't anything I could do about it. The court had appointed this lady, and I didn't want to get involved."

That was more than a year ago.

Today, Hill barely speaks.

She spends much of her time curled up on a bed in a Plantation nursing home, a feeding tube inserted in her navel. After Wright tried to pay Hill's nursing home bill with a check that bounced, nursing home officials applied to get Hill eligible for Medicaid and alerted state elderly-abuse investigators, the administrator said.

"I'm so sick," Hill said in a hoarse whisper earlier this month, extending a spindly arm as evidence.

Asked if she remembered working her way through nursing school in Tennessee as a young woman, Hill smiled and nodded yes.

She nodded at the mention of her late father's farm.

But it was unclear how much she really understood. What she knew. How much she had endured.

Asked about her guardian, she stared.

And then she whispered.

"Help me."

Herald Staff Writer Dan Keating contributed to this report.