Some background:

My grandparents lived on the East Coast, in Connecticut. I lived on the West Coast, in California. This created problems for my grandparents.

In the 1990s I began to visit my grandparents more frequently than had previously been the case. It was a major undertaking ... but my grandfather said he needed me.

My grandfather was crippled and my grandmother was forgetful and they lived in a dangerous, decaying neighborhood, in a dangerous, decaying city - Bridgeport, Silicon Valley of the East - sixty miles outside of New York.

In 1999 my grandparents managed to lock themselves out of their house on New Year's Eve and I flew all the way to the East Coast, taxied up to Bridgeport, broke into their house, ransacked it to find the car keys, called a locksmith and got the front door lock changed (my grandmother used a skeleton key to lock the front door and I had been unable to convince her to do otherwise), drove to the hospital where the city was keeping them alive, and brought them home.

After this I flew home and spent the next six months pressuring my mother to fly East with me and help me resolve some of the problems my grandparents were having, living alone.

Unbeknownst to me my mother was playing a complicated game whereby she was waiting for some sort of crisis to occur that would allow her to seize power of attorney so that she would no longer have to negotiate with her parents and could do as she pleased.

This may well have had something to do with my mother's finances, some stocks she might have invested in that went south instead of north, and some money that she might have borrowed to buy the stocks. My mother was eager to inherit.

I know that my mother was eager to inherit because while we were visiting Bridgeport, my mother and my grandmother had a loud and emotionally intense argument - in Hungarian, which was my grandmother's native language. I asked my grandfather what they were arguing about and he said, "Your grandmother's will".

At that point, my grandmother switched into English and said, "But he has so little and you have so much!" Then the argument petered out.

Perhaps a day or so later, my mother persuaded me to distract my grandmother upstairs for fifteen minutes.

In retrospect, that must have been when my mother burgled the safe.

In retrospect, it is obvious that my grandmother had shared the combination to the safe with her only daughter when she had first gotten the safe, in the 1980s.

In retrospect, it is obvious that my mother brought the safe combination with her when she flew East with me and that I was used to distract her mother while her real intention all along was to steal her mother's will.

This is a painful conclusion to reach but it all fits: means, motive, opportunity, it's all there.

Who was the "he" my grandmother referred to? At first, I thought that it was my grandmother's first child, a son she had been forced to abandon, in Hungary, during the Cold War, and had only reestablisged contact with a few years before.

But after much thought I have accepted the truth - that my grandmother intended to leave her house to I, her grandson, who had a baby daughter, less than a year old, and no place to live ... and that my own mother robbed HER own mother of her home, stripped her death of signity, and also robbed me of my inheritance, and robbed my children of a home to grow up in.

It seems likely that my mother had guidance and perhaps assistance.

It seems to me that this should be a criminal investigation.

There is evidence missing from the file.

Did my mother bribe someone working on the case?

The detective's notes would tell us much.

Food for thought, citizens ... food for thought.

Next: A letter to the Bridgeport police department