Helping a friend in need — or so they thought

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Helping a friend in need — or so they thought

Dannille Vanderpool of Napa told people she had cancer. Now she faces criminal charges. Her former supporters explain why they helped, and why they turned her in.

By DAN ROSS
Register Online Editor

They all have close ties to local law enforcement, but those aren’t the ties that bound this group of people together for the past two years. Instead, they came together to help Dannille Vanderpool, a friend and Napa police dispatcher they all believed was soon to lose her life to a virulent form of ovarian cancer.

American Canyon Police officer Wendy Daniels, who is battling breast cancer, and her husband Rick helped care for the garden at Vanderpool’s home on Yajome Street.

Jim and Patty Stephenson, he a Napa Police Department crime analyst and she a records assistant with the department, jumped in to help Vanderpool with issues from childcare to remodeling her house.

Lisa Claudino, a Napa County Sheriff’s Department records supervisor, said there was a sign-up sheet at work for people to help at Vanderpool’s house. Her husband, John Claudino, convinced his employer, North Bay Plywood, to donate doors for Vanderpool’s house.

Lynn Campagna, a Napa nurse who was among the many to offer financial and emotional support to Vanderpool, said, “People in the (police and sheriff’s) department would get off shifts and go straight to Dannille’s house to work on the house. We went to companies and asked them for donations of products that we could use to make Dannille’s house better.”

But as time passed, they all noticed what they saw as inconsistencies with Vanderpool’s behavior. Separately, they began to harbor suspicions about her illness. After months of uncertainty, Lisa Claudino stepped up and brought her friends together.

As they talked, they realized the stories Vanderpool told them were all different — dramatically different.

“We started to figure stuff out as we talked about what she told each of us,” said Jim Stephenson. “Before that, we never compared noted because there was not any reason to.”

Today, none believe Vanderpool had cancer. In fact, their suspicions helped lead police to arrest Vanderpool last month. She now faces more than a dozen felony charges of grand theft and fraud for collecting $50,000 in donations, much of it from police and firefighter benevolent associations. The law enforcement colleagues who wanted to help her in her battle with cancer are the ones, according to the California Attorney General’s office, who got burned the most.

Vanderpool has pleaded not guilty to the charges and is due to appear in court next on May 28.

If the charges are true, Vanderpool did more than take $50,000. She took her friends for their time and their compassion.

Doubts surfacing

In the photograph, Dannille Vanderpool is wearing a blue bandanna to cover her bald head. She is holding her daughter, then 8, in her arms.

“She shaved her head because she said she did not want to wait for her hair to fall out,” said Campagna.

Campagna thought Vanderpool’s decision to shave her head was unusual, but she tried to let go of any questions. “I take care of breast cancer patients and you never question anybody, especially friends, about whether they really have cancer,” she said.

While friends pitched in on nearly every aspect of her day-to-day life, there was one exception: Her medical treatment. No one had been asked to take Vanderpool to the hospital or doctor’s visits or assist in her care.

“If no one would talk to her for a week or so, she’d tell us she spent three days in the hospital being treated for a recurrence of the cancer,” said Patty Stephenson. “Not one person ever visited her in the hospital because she never told anyone about these things until after she was out.”

As a breast cancer survivor, Daniels had bonded with Vanderpool over what was apparently a shared medical burden. Last year, they even walked the Survivors Lap together at the Relay for Life cancer research fundraiser on the track at Donaldson Way Elementary School in American Canyon.

They also spent time together socially, and this gave Daniels pause.

“As soon as I found out I had cancer, I quit drinking (and) started taking all sorts of organic things, but here I am watching her at parties playing beer pong,” said Daniels. “I questioned it long ago but I felt horrible even thinking about questioning it.”

Wondering about the medical process, Claudino asked Vanderpool about her treatments. Vanderpool said that she went to an Oakland hospital for radiation.

So, Claudino said, she called the hospital, only to learn it did not offer radiation. As for Vanderpool’s local medical appointments, “She would not let us go. She told us her mom and sister went, that it was something the family did and I did not want to intrude on that.”

One day, an ex-boyfriend of Vanderpool’s called Claudino. He said he thought Vanderpool should not drive herself to radiation treatment if she is having seizures. He asked Claudino to please go check on her.

“I went to her house to find Dannille’s sister and mom there, but no Dannille,” said Claudino. “They said Dannille went for a drive because she had a fight with her boyfriend.”

Claudino asked about doctor’s visits. Vanderpool’s family members stated they never went, either, that Vanderpool said it was something she needed to do on her own to show she could do it.

Claudino spoke to the ex-boyfriend again, and all the pieces began to fall in place for her. “I was trying to help him at first, and realized the story she was telling him and telling me were not the same ones,” she said.

Another cause for suspicion was the timing of Vanderpool’s cancer revelations.

Jim Stephenson had been best friends with former Napa Police officer Craig McCarthy, who died in October 2007 of a brain tumor. Vanderpool told friends she too had a brain tumor, according to Stephenson.

“She would question us about his symptoms. Here we were thinking we are going to lose him and then we are going to lose her, too. She was just using us to get information about him,” he said.

“Craig had a brain tumor, he died of it, she used that for her brain tumor story,” said an angry Stephenson, almost barking out the words. “Craig has a seizure and they yanked his driver’s license because of it. She told Lisa one of her seizures left her unconscious on her floor, with her waking up to a dog licking her face.”

If McCarthy lost his driver’s license, why was Vanderpool driving herself to treatment and errands all over Napa?

“When I questioned her about the seizures, she said they were not very bad, but I asked if they were bad enough to where she should not drive and she said yes,” said Stephenson. “I challenged her about why hospital staff did not follow through with DMV to make sure she had her license taken away. She couldn’t answer why they never did that. She then went onto the blog she had on her MySpace page” — Vanderpool chronicled events in her life on the Web (see related story) —  “and started talking about her seizures.”

The MySpace page tripped up Vanderpool shortly thereafter. Claudino said she was reading an entry one day in which Vanderpool said she was in treatment and complaining about eating “hospital eggs.”

The entry was only 10 minutes old, so Claudino decided it was time to test out her suspicions.

She jumped in her car and drove to Vanderpool’s house. As she reached the door, she saw Vanderpool peeking out at her through the curtains.

“Dannille said someone must have taken her phone and was pretending to be her by making up those Web site posts,” said Claudino.

It was time for the showdown.

“I confronted her by saying I did not doubt she had cancer ... I see now even that’s not true ... but I asked her why she was lying about different things,” said Claudino.

Vanderpool steadfastly denied everything, Claudino said.

Afterwards, Vanderpool again turned to her Web page. This time, however, it was not to talk about cancer. It was to attack Lisa Claudino.

This pitted friends against friends. Some following Vanderpool’s saga believed she was under attack by a person masquerading as a friend, and made harsh comments on the Web page.

Meanwhile, Claudino and the others had begun to compare notes. “Lisa brought everyone together on the fact stories did not match up, and Dannille turned on her,” said Patty Stephenson.

Toward the end of 2008, Claudino took decisive action. She went to supervisors at Napa dispatch and laid out the concerns that she, the Stephensons, Campagna and Daniels shared. Around the same time, Napa Police officials had begun to question checks Vanderpool had written on an account created in her name and medical documents she had provided to her supervisors.

Napa Police turned over the results of the probe to state prosecutors, since so many people in local law enforcement agencies appeared to be victims of Vanderpool. A few weeks after the investigation concluded, prosecutors and Vanderpool’s defense attorney negotiated for her to make an appearance in court and face formal charges.

According to court documents, Vanderpool admitted to police investigators that she lied about having ovarian cancer. Her attorney said Vanderpool has a mental illness that predates by years all the police and firefighter fundraisers, the MySpace diary or McCarthy’s death from brain cancer.

Generating money was not her motive, said Chazin. “It was because she had a psychiatric condition to cause her to erroneously report she had cancer,” said Chazin last month. “She was mentally ill.”

Lynn Campagna is skeptical.

“People might be thinking Dannille is mentally ill to be able to do something like this, and that is totally untrue,” said Lynn. “She worked hard to pull this off on people in the medical field, law enforcement and people with cancer. She knew what she was doing all along and she used people to get what she wanted.”

Daniels, the American Canyon police officer battling breast cancer, said, “She is making it harder on those who have cancer because they have to work harder to convince people they really are too sick to work sometimes. She made it worse for all of us who are ill.”

In the interview, Lynn Campagna explained why she, Claudino, Daniels and the Stephensons made the effort to examine Vanderpool’s story.

“This is not because we are doing any sort of witch hunt, it is to talk about the fact she pulled the wool over everybody’s eyes,” she said. “This is showing the catastrophic hurt she caused all of us.”

http://www.napavalleyregister.com/articles/2009/05/17/news/local/doc4a0f96a144e91178185964.txt