A Malibu serial squatter featured in new Hulu docuseries, but Los Angeles has covered a slew of squatting cons, including some that led to murder
For months, con artist Caroline Herrling drove through affluent neighborhoods scouting for her next mark. Did a pool have the green tint of algae? Was the lawn overgrown, landscaping long abandoned? Most importantly, were there slight signs of life inside the house: the mail being picked up or the flicker of a TV behind a curtain?
In the fall of 2020, federal prosecutors now say, Herrling — just one of several names the heavily-armed con woman was using — found exactly what she was looking for: a two-bedroom, two-bathroom home at 3860 Kingswood Road in Sherman Oaks. An elderly man named Charles Wilding had grown up in the house as a single child, never married, and stayed in his childhood home when first his father died, and then soon after, his mother.
Soon Wilding would be dead under suspicious circumstances.
And Herrling is now serving a twenty-year sentence for taking over his property “while his body decomposed in his home,” and ransacking his bank accounts.
She isn’t the only murderous squatter covered by Los Angeles in recent years. Last year, a Fresno hairstylist and his yoga instructor girlfriend were convicted on multiple federal charges connected to bilking a mentally ill doctor out of his Malibu oceanfront home. The couple, Anthony Flores and Anna Moore, were convicted of moving into the home of ophthalmologist Mark Sawusch, where they then drugged him with LSD as part of a scheme to take ownership of his mansion. Federal prosecutors say when the 57-year-old victim died in his Malibu home in May of 2018, Flores and Moore “withdrew large sums of money from his accounts.”
Anthony David Flores and Anna Moore are serving federal sentences for bilking a mentally ill doctor out of his oceanfront Malibu mansion by dosing him with LSDCredit: Vivien Killilea/Getty Images
Flores is serving 15 years in federal prison. Moore was sentenced to more than 7 years.
Then there was Harvard graduate Elizabeth Hirschhorn, a former Hollywood writer who spent 575 days in a luxury rental owned by an L.A. dentist without paying rent as “the tenant from hell.” That scheme came just two months after Hirschhorn had a similar legal battle with the owner of a posh $2.6 million home in Oakland when she refused to pay her portion of the shared rent with another tenant. She also stayed in that home rent-free for more than a year and used COVID regulations and health concerns as justification against eviction, according to court records.
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She was never charged, and is now on a long and alarming trend of grifters who have moved into a wealthy person’s home in a coordinated squatting scam. A police official calls it “the new organized crime.”
Now a Malibu serial squatter is being exposed in a new Hulu documentary, “Squatters: Get the F*** Out of My House,” produced by Mark Consuelos and Kelly Ripa. The British actor and screenwriter Ellie Mae McNulty is featured in an episode titled “The Parasite of Malibu,” in which she is exposed for exploiting California’s tenancy laws to turn casual stays into ugly eviction wars.
There are anti-squatting laws in California that make it illegal for someone to take over a property without the owner’s permission. But, as the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department points out: “The best way to deal with squatters is to prevent them from moving in.”
That’s where the law gets tricky. Under California Civil Code section 1007, a squatter can establish legal possession of a property by occupying it openly and continuously for a period of five years without the owner’s permission.