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The courtroom looks like the stage for a Houghtaling family reunion. On trial are brothers Frank and Joseph Houghtaling, their twin sister wives Renee and Rhonda Houghtaling, the mother Donna Houghtaling, and her daughter, Brenda Warner.. The family is accused of staging 23 crashes to collect insurance money.
Willie Cook (no relation to John Cooke, we promise), the key prosecution witness, testified that there was a scam to crash a rental truck into one of the houses. The intent was to get enough insurance money to renovate the kitchen. He said they’d planned it for months, in fact even before Donna had closed on the Colonie house, and once the crash happened, he’d be given a 1994 Chrysler New Yorker for his assistance.
Willie told the jury that Donna didn’t like the kitchen, and Joe wanted to make a healthy profit, so they’d come up with the plan to crash the van into the garage. To have enough damaged goods to bring in some serious insurance money, Donna allegedly took things from Salvation Army drop off sites on Sunday nights and brought them to the garage, and he and Warner and Joe added to the growing pile. Bags of clothes, furniture, toys, appliances and more … all sitting there waiting to be so much destroyed debris.
On the day of the big event, Willie said, he crashed the truck into one side of the attached garage, but Joe then took over and crashed it into the other side to cause even more damage. After he was satisfied, Joe reported the claim and used hiso wn maintenance company, JMS Services, to bid for the repair job on his relatives property. He got it.
Defense lawyers are crying foul. They claim that Willie is not a credible witness because he was exchanging testimony for a reduced sentence. The beat … and the trial … goes on.
© Copyright 2007 The John Cooke Fraud Report