Squatters: Get the F*** Out of My House (2026) s01e01 Episode Script

[reporter 1] Homeowners
all across the country run into issues
with squatters.
[person 1] Squatters are ready to make
your house their home.
[person 2] Happening right under
our noses, and nobody knew.
[tense music playing]
[person 3] Get the fuck out of my house.
[journalist] I've been a reporter
for the Los Angeles Times for 11 years,
and this is one of the most bizarre cases
I've worked on.
It's scary, very complex,
definitely a lot of twists and turns.
[reporter 2] Why is it that none of us
knew what was going on up there?
[officer 1] What's upstairs?
[reporter 3] Bodies were
dismembered and disposed of
[journalist] Sherman Oaks,
it's a pretty affluent neighborhood
in Los Angeles.
Multimillion-dollar homes.
But we never really know
what's happening behind closed doors.
[journalist] Kingswood Road
is a one-block street,
small enough that the neighbors,
they're familiar with each other.
A lot of people who lived on that street,
they watched Charles Wilding Jr.
growing up.
He had lived there
since he was born in 1951.
He was a shy boy.
His dad died when he was a teenager.
He was very, very close to his mom.
June Wilding was more friendly,
more outgoing,
chatted more with the neighbors.
Charles really wasn't. He kept to himself.
And then his mom passed away in 2017.
After his mother June died,
the home had fallen into disrepair.
Charles Wilding was living his life
without his mom, without anyone.
The neighbors on that street would see him
walking in his puffy jacket
and his knit cap getting groceries.
I live just down the street and around
the corner from Charles Wilding's house.
We knew he was old and alone.
Um, he became kind of a recluse.
[Mejia] Fall of 2020, during the pandemic,
Charles puts up signs outside his house
and says, "Stay away."
[Dean] Charles boarded up the driveway.
He was afraid of anyone coming near him.
[Mejia] People didn't see him anymore,
and they started wondering,
"Where's Charles Wilding?"
[eerie music playing]
[Mejia] Months passed,
and then all of a sudden,
there started to be activity
that was happening at the house.
They seemed to be doing
construction on the house,
which just didn't fit with him being
the guy who'd put the sign up saying,
"Leave me alone. Don't come near."
[floorboard creaks]
[Dean] There was a woman
that started showing up.
[Mejia] That's when this woman
ended up circulating a letter
and sending it to the neighbors.
You know, the letter was addressed to
all the residents of Kingswood Road.
"I wanted to reach out
and formally introduce myself.
I appreciate everyone's patience
and cooperation
with all the noise and congestion.
Great changes are underway with the goal
of bringing the property to code.
While the property is being restored,
Charles has relocated to
the beach house in Carpinteria,
where he has spent summers
since childhood.
We are happy to provide updates
or answer any questions.
If there ever comes a time
that the noise would interfere,
please don't hesitate to reach out.
Sincerely, Caroline Herrling,
trustee of the Wilding Estate."
Charles never had
any family members who are close
since his mom had passed away years prior.
Who is this Caroline Herrling?
I'm Charles Wilding Jr.'s attorney.
At least I thought I was.
Four, five years ago,
I met a Caroline Herrling.
You know, she's a very all-American girl,
very bubbly, very go-go-go,
and, um, she was dressed in a Chanel suit.
So put together.
She said that she had gone to law school
and she was waiting for her bar results.
And she submitted
a will for Charles's mother,
June Wilding,
that she wanted to have probated.
A probate is the court-supervised
distribution of a decedent's estate.
Caroline said she was power of attorney
acting on behalf of an older person
named Charles Wilding Jr.
And she put him on the phone.
I remember speaking to Charles,
and he said that,
"Caroline kind of
takes care of everything for me."
He said, "I was older."
And she was running stuff for him.
So, that's not unusual.
[Mejia] In December 2020,
renovations were happening
on the property,
but neighbors were questioning,
at that point,
you know, "Charles never left
in all the years he's lived here."
[eerie music playing]
[Mejia] Something seems weird here.
So days before Christmas,
neighbors decided to call the police.
[dispatcher]
[neighbor 1]
-[dispatcher]
-[neighbor 1]
[neighbor 1]
[dispatcher]
[officer 1] Suspect
[Herrling]
[officer 1] No,
I'm looking for a Charles Wilding.
-[officer 2] You live here?
-[Herrling]
I'm a detective supervisor.
December of 2020,
the officers, they met with a woman
named Caroline Herrling.
[Herrling]
Because, uh, a neighbor had called
with their concerns
about Charles's whereabouts.
[officer 1] We just wanna
make sure he's okay
'cause somebody's concerned
about his welfare.
[Herrling]
[officer 2] How long
has he been out there?
[officer 1] We gotta make sure
he's not here.
They were in work outfits,
which wasn't unusual
for properties that are being abated.
[Herrling]
[officer 1] Full respirators?
[Herrling]
[officer 1] Trust me when I tell you
we've dealt with worse.
[Herrling] Okay.
Oh. This one Whose is this-this one?
-[officer 1] It's all right.
-[Herrling]
We'll go this way.
There's Sorry, rotting food everywhere.
It was like a house of someone who
had lived there for years, was a shut-in.
Charles had hoarded basically over time,
and had accumulated all of these items,
all of these things.
[O'Donnell] The officers, uh,
did a search of the property.
It was pretty systematic.
They went into every room,
every closet, every bathroom.
[police radio chatter]
[Herrling]
[officer 1]
There was an odor inside the house,
a musty odor.
Couldn't pinpoint whatever it was,
and it smelled like a musty old house.
It was dingy and it was in disarray.
[Herrling]
[officer 1]
[Herrling]
[police radio chatter]
[Herrling] Look.
[officer 1]
Ultimately, uh,
Mr. Wilding was not at the property.
There was no obvious signs of foul play.
There was no evidence to suggest
that the house itself was a crime scene.
[Herrling speaking indistinctly]
And according to Caroline,
Mr. Wilding was staying at this property
in Carpinteria for the past month or so.
Caroline had all the right answers.
She had all the requisite paperwork
that documented her as the trustee,
and their story seemed to match what
was actually occurring in the property.
[officer 1] So what's the plan
for the house?
[officer 1] Yeah.
-All right, guys.
-[Herrling] Thank you.
[Mejia] After the officers
showed up on the scene,
the LAPD ended up closing the case.
But it's such a small street that,
for neighbors,
it was very clear to them
that something was amiss here.
So they were like,
"We're gonna report every weird thing,
every goings-on that happens."
[phone dialing]
[line rings]
[O'Donnell] In October of 2021,
I received an anonymous call from a woman.
[neighbor 2]
There's no sign of Charles Wilding.
There's no sense of what happened to him.
Neighbors suspected Caroline was squatting
at Charles Wilding's home.
Where is Charles Wilding? Is he in danger?
It's been about a year
since Charles has been missing.
And neighbors on the street
suspected something was wrong.
They were like, "Okay,
we haven't seen Charles. Where is he?
Like, what are we supposed to do?
Or what can we do?"
[cooing, chuckles]
I really had no evidence to support
that she was up to anything nefarious.
I guess you can call it, you know,
30 years of police officer intuition.
There was something nagging at me
that I had to dig a little deeper.
So I obtained Caroline's phone number.
Told Caroline
that I needed to speak with Charles.
Caroline explained to me
that Charles had recently changed
his phone number without her knowledge
and promised to get back to me
the following day.
The day after that,
I received a phone call
and spoke with a man, elderly-sounding,
telling me that he was,
in fact, Charles Wilding.
But assured me that he was alive and well.
[tense music playing]
I wanted to verify
if this was, in fact, Charles.
So I asked
what his social security number was,
or his driver's license.
This individual could not provide either,
uh, of those numbers to me.
That's when the alarm bells
started going off in my head.
I said to myself,
"Uh, this is some sort of impostor."
I needed to find out what was going on.
I was able to obtain the trust documents
that were filed through probate court.
I found it concerning
that Charles Wilding had signed papers
as late as December of 2021.
He had been missing
since at least December of 2020,
yet he's signing court documents
December of 2021.
Something's up. Something's up.
So I contacted the attorney of record,
a man by the name of Rodney Gould.
I was engaged to work
for Charles Wilding Jr.
Everything was was a normal probate,
up until Detective O'Donnell
coming to my door.
And that was stunning beyond belief.
I was in shock.
I thought,
"My gosh, did I miss something?"
And so then I started
looking into the June Wilding estate,
which was Charles's mother's estate.
I looked at the notarized trust
and I recognized the name of the notary.
It was an attorney in the Valley here.
And so I called up the firm and I said,
"Was this woman ever a client?"
And she looks it up and she says,
"No, that woman, June Wilding,
was never a client of this office."
So, uh, this is very strange.
So the more I was looking at things,
the more I realized
that the signatures were forged.
That everything was a fake.
She was creating documents
out of whole cloth,
and all to manipulate the system
and reap millions of dollars.
It's-It's unbelievable.
They weren't schlocky forgeries.
This person knows what they're doing.
I'd never seen anything like this.
[O'Donnell] Caroline didn't
fit the profile of somebody
that is a criminal mastermind.
I did run her criminal history,
and there was none.
But, essentially, she's been squatting
at that property for almost a year,
and likely defrauding, uh, the estate.
But I need evidence.
I wanted to see what's going on
with Caroline's bank accounts.
I needed to follow the money.
Well over a million dollars
had went through Caroline's accounts.
Most of it was, uh,
from the Wilding estate.
I didn't know where Charles Wilding was,
but we had the money.
We could prove the lies.
It was time to arrest Caroline
for wire fraud,
which is a federal offense.
[detective]
-I have no intention to.
-Okay. Very good.
[detective] Mm-hmm.
[detective] Yeah.
And what Caroline Herrling had to tell us
nearly floored me.
[detective]
-[suspenseful music playing]
-[breathes deeply, sighs]
[reporter] Lies and despicable behavior
shadow this secluded home
on Kingswood Road in Sherman Oaks.
Tim Pulliam, ABC 7, Eyewitness News.
Caroline Herrling seemed very intelligent
and polished on the outside,
but she was very dark and evil
with the crimes that she committed.
And this is where the story
takes a darker turn.
[detective]
[eerie music playing]
[Pulliam] She takes
Charles Wilding's body,
and she tries to dissolve it.
[detective]
[Herrling]
-[detective]
-[Herrling] Yeah.
It was crazy to me to think, like,
what she did to Charles Wilding's body.
It was heartbreaking.
He had a chemical explosion.
-[imitates explosion] Of the the gas
-[detective] A reaction?
The gas.
The bones were just not dissolving.
It was a whole disaster.
-Oh, really?
-Yeah.
When that didn't work, she comes up
with this most disturbing plan.
[detective]
[eerie music playing]
[Pulliam] She put his body
in vacuum-sealed bags
and then she goes
to the San Francisco Bay.
She turns dumping his body into,
like, a mini vacation.
She rents a muscle car.
She transports the-the body parts
in this muscle car.
She goes out on a sailboat
in the San Francisco Bay.
And is taking selfies, like, on the boat.
And dumps the body in the bay,
and then takes a private jet back home.
Just treat this like some sort of vacation
or pleasure trip.
I mean, there's no words to describe
that type of person, in my mind.
She treated Charles Wilding
like he was not a person
who was worthy of being buried or mourned.
-[detective] You're
-[Herrling]
-[detective] You're Okay.
-He was already dead.
According to Caroline,
when we conducted the welfare check
back in December of 2020,
Charles was still at the property.
I have no clue
how the police officers didn't know.
-Okay.
-And they did a full walk-through with me.
Body was wrapped up.
It was wrapped up in a tarp
that was then Saran Wrapped.
The house smelled so bad that, um,
I tried to get them
to wear a respirator to go in
to try to mask the smell,
but they refused.
Can I get you a mask?
[officer 1] This mask is good enough.
We're not gonna be there long enough.
[Herrling] It's not good enough, trust me.
You don't wanna go in there.
It's really bad. Like it's dangerous, bad.
[tense music playing]
Yeah, I stood right where he was,
talking to the police.
They stood in front of the body.
You probably could see it on camera
if they have you have their footage.
It seemed like she was charming enough
to throw everyone off the track.
The most disturbing part about this case
is the fact that she's more concerned
about defrauding the estate
than being present with
the decomposing body of Charles Wilding.
It's just It doesn't sit well with me
to this day that, uh,
she was able to do that
in such a cold, callous fashion.
[police radio chatter]
Caroline is very intelligent.
She just happened to
channel that intelligence into crime.
She specifically went out
into rich neighborhoods
and looked for houses
that had fallen into disrepair
and that were vulnerable to a takeover.
So once a squatter gets into a property,
it's very difficult to get them out.
We went up to the Bay.
We actually located the sailboat
that was used.
We processed that sailboat.
Unfortunately,
because the Bay is just so vast,
we could never pinpoint a-a location
where they may or may not
have disposed of the body.
And because of the time that had gone by,
speaking with experts,
that the tides would have taken
whatever remains were disposed of,
and could have potentially moved them
hundreds of miles.
So unfortunately,
we weren't able to charge Caroline, um,
with anything
regarding the death of Charles.
Um, and that's mainly
because we could never prove
in-in a court of law how Charles died.
[Mejia] Had there been a body,
there would have been an autopsy,
and they would have known
how Charles Wilding died.
But because of what Caroline did,
we'll never know.
[tense music playing]
[O'Donnell]
Caroline ultimately pled guilty
to conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
And she was sentenced in federal court
to 20 years in federal prison.
She was also ordered by the judge
to pay restitution
in the amount of 3.9 million,
um, to the estates that she defrauded.
[detective] You can grab
your stuff and then, uh
[Dean] Evil is probably the best word
to describe her and what she did.
I mean, it was worse
than what we imagined.
It's It's true evil.
The old adage, "Trust, but verify,"
rings true in this case.
Someone may look presentable
and put together,
like they have it going on.
But dig a little deeper
to see if they are really
who they say they are.