New York Family Affair

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.