{"id":367483,"date":"2026-06-19T18:58:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-19T18:58:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/367483\/"},"modified":"2026-06-19T18:58:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T18:58:08","slug":"los-angeles-has-a-professional-squatter-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/367483\/","title":{"rendered":"Los Angeles Has A Professional Squatter Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 <\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

In the fall of 2020, federal prosecutors now say, Herrling \u2014 just one of several\u00a0names the heavily-armed con woman was using \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

Soon Wilding would be dead under suspicious circumstances. <\/p>\n

And Herrling is now serving a twenty-year sentence<\/a> for taking over his property \u201cwhile his body decomposed in his home,\u201d and ransacking his bank accounts.<\/p>\n

She isn\u2019t 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<\/a>. 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 \u201cwithdrew large sums of money from his accounts.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Anthony\"AnthonyAnthony 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<\/p>\n

Flores is serving 15 years in federal prison. <\/a>Moore was sentenced to more than 7 years. <\/p>\n

Then there was Harvard graduate Elizabeth Hirschhorn,<\/a> a former Hollywood writer who spent 575 days in a luxury rental owned by an L.A. dentist without paying rent as \u201cthe tenant from hell.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Scroll to continue reading<\/p>\n

She was never charged, and is now on a long and alarming trend of grifters who have moved into a wealthy person\u2019s home in a coordinated squatting scam. A police official calls it \u201cthe new organized crime.\u201d <\/p>\n

Now a Malibu serial squatter is being exposed in a new Hulu documentary, \u201cSquatters: Get the F*** Out of My House<\/a>,\u201d produced by Mark Consuelos and Kelly Ripa. The British actor and screenwriter Ellie Mae McNulty <\/a>is featured in an episode titled \u201cThe Parasite of Malibu,\u201d in which she is exposed for exploiting California\u2019s tenancy laws to turn casual stays into ugly eviction wars.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There are anti-squatting laws in California that make it illegal for someone to take over a property without the owner\u2019s permission. But, as the Los Angeles Sheriff\u2019s Department points out: <\/a>\u201cThe best way to deal with squatters is to prevent them from moving in.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s 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\u2019s permission. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Malibu serial squatter featured in new Hulu docuseries, but Los Angeles has covered a slew of squatting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":367484,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[28729,21526,93279,48,52,51,12833,47,50,49,93280,8635,61601],"class_list":["post-367483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-documentary","tag-hulu","tag-kelly-ripa","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-lasd","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-mark-consuelos","tag-sherman-oaks","tag-squatters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/367484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}