![]() This was on a recent Saturday and he was slightly flushed, having just spent half an hour, at her behest, changing the locks on the ranch house his daughter built for him in 1997. “Oh, yes, it’s ‘too bad’ - that’s always the last paragraph of these letters I get from people since all this started,” said Yeager as his wife nodded at their kitchen table here in Gold Country. And to have this happen to someone who’s like an American hero. “She was like that movie ‘The Bad Seed,’ ” said Michele Leavitt, a Winnetka homemaker whose now-deceased mother, then a 77-year-old with bone cancer, also rented a room in her home to D’Angelo, only to end up seeking a restraining order against her. “I never had any problems with anybody in the 47 years I’ve been alive until I invited her into my house,” said Nansea McDermott, a single mother in the San Fernando Valley who briefly leased Victoria Yeager, then Victoria D’Angelo, a room in 1997 and “had to call the police every day.” It also comes with his new wife’s back story. The man’s man from West Virginia who, as Tom Wolfe so memorably put it, epitomized “The Right Stuff.” In this case, however, the conflict comes juxtaposed against Yeager’s heroic reputation: the flying ace who in 1947 made history in a Bell X-1 rocket aircraft named for his first wife, Glennis. It is, in some respects, a common family trauma - aging father falls for a woman younger than his grown kids. “They just care about having his money for themselves.” “They don’t really care about their father,” she said. Yeager, who, with her husband, contends that the case is just about whether Yeager’s children broke the law in their zeal to thwart his new love. “They’re just trying to make a circus sideshow and use me as a decoy,” said the new Mrs. The children, though, say it’s really about the woman who, as one son, Don Yeager, put it, “has pretty much succeeded in killing our family.” Now, in a private legal proceeding scheduled to begin today, a court-appointed referee here will harvest the fruit of the now 81-year-old Yeager’s romance - a tangle of bitter lawsuits that officially center on two pieces of property, $113,000, a tractor, some lithographs and the rights to Yeager’s life story. Last year, in a ceremony to which his children and friends weren’t invited, Yeager wed D’Angelo. By the following year, the retired brigadier general had fired his accountant, his estate planning lawyer, his longtime personal secretary - and his daughter. Within months, acquaintances and business associates of Yeager contend, D’Angelo began telling them that Susan Yeager, who managed her father’s finances, was stealing from him. What she found - lawsuits, restraining orders, claims of harassment and misrepresentation, an alleged physical attack on an elderly woman - so troubled her that she confronted the couple.ĭ’Angelo denied everything, then blamed her accusers, then claimed to have changed her ways, according to Yeager’s children. Discreetly, Yeager’s daughter Susan looked into her background.
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