Caroline Herrling: The Welfare Check That Caught 'The Executor' Lying on Camera

In December 2020, LAPD officers knocked on the door of a house on Kingswood Road in Sherman Oaks. Neighbors hadn't seen the elderly owner, Charles Wilding, in months. The woman who met them was calm, cooperative, and had an answer for everything: Charles was away in Carpinteria, and she was the trustee of his estate.

The body cameras were running. What they recorded, investigators would later conclude, was a performance — delivered by a woman who knew exactly where Charles Wilding was, because by then he had been dead since roughly September.

The woman was Caroline Joanne Herrling, also known as "Carrie Phenix." Netflix's Worst Neighbor Ever calls her episode "The Executor." The federal court file calls it a nearly $3.9 million fraud conspiracy.

The scheme: hunting for empty houses

Federal prosecutors described a method that was chillingly simple. Herrling and her co-conspirators looked for unkempt properties in affluent neighborhoods — the overgrown yard, the piled-up mail — on the theory that behind them they'd find owners who were incapacitated, isolated, or dead, with no one paying attention.

Then came the paperwork. Forged power-of-attorney forms. Stolen identities. Counterfeit documents. When investigators finally executed search warrants in January 2023, news reports said they found not just forged records and Social Security cards but a device for replicating signatures — an assembly line for taking over other people's lives on paper.

Charles Wilding — elderly, wealthy, and living alone — fit the profile.

The death that was never reported

Sometime around September 2020, Wilding died. No one has ever been charged with killing him, and prosecutors say the exact cause of his death was never determined — by the time anyone in authority knew he was gone, it was no longer possible to know.

That last part is the crime. Instead of reporting his death, prosecutors said, the conspiracy left his body inside the house while they looted his assets — drawing on the estate of a man the outside world still believed was alive.

What happened next is the reason this case leads national coverage of the series. Wilding's remains were moved to Herrling's West Los Angeles apartment, where the group attempted to dissolve them in a mix of chemicals. When that failed, the remains were dismembered, sealed in vacuum bags, driven to the Bay Area, and dropped from a sailboat into San Francisco Bay.

They have never been recovered.

The bodycam moment

This is a case built on records — forged ones, and real ones. The forged records were Herrling's tools. The real ones brought her down, and the December 2020 welfare check is the centerpiece.

On the officers' cameras, Herrling isn't evasive. She's helpful. She has the vocabulary of estate law — trustee, power of attorney — and a plausible story about Carpinteria. It's the kind of encounter that ends with officers driving away, because on a doorstep, paperwork talk sounds like authority.

Watch it the way we always suggest on this channel: the footage doesn't show a lie. It shows a claim — one that could be checked. In October 2021, another call came in about Wilding's welfare, and this time the claims got checked. The trust documents, the signatures, the money flows — each one pulled a thread, and by January 2023, federal agents were carrying boxes out of Herrling's residences.

The plea and the sentence

Herrling pleaded guilty in March 2023 to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. In March 2024, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong sentenced her to 240 months — 20 years — in federal prison, and ordered her to pay $3,887,051 in restitution.

At sentencing, the judge distilled the case into one line: Herrling had treated Charles Wilding as a "cash register" rather than "a man and a human being."

Her co-conspirator Matthew Jason Kroth — who prosecutors said first found Wilding's body and alerted Herrling — pleaded guilty to the wire-fraud conspiracy and a methamphetamine charge and was sentenced to 200 months, with nearly $1.95 million in restitution of his own.

Where is Caroline Herrling now?

Herrling is incarcerated at the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas. Bureau of Prisons records cited in news reports project her release in 2039. Kroth is serving his sentence at FCI Victorville in California.

Worst Neighbor Ever — built, like this channel, on body-camera footage and recorded evidence — closes its four-episode run with her case. For the other three cases in the series, see our full series breakdown.

Why this case file matters

Most fraud cases never produce a visual. This one did: a body camera recording the exact moment a stranger claimed legal authority over a missing man's life — politely, fluently, and falsely.

The lesson of the Wilding case isn't that the lie was undetectable. It's that nobody was checking. One neighbor who noticed an absence, one welfare call that got a second look, and the paperwork empire came down. The camera caught the claim in 2020; it just took the system until 2023 to catch up with what it had filmed.

Case status as of this writing: Herrling pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and is serving 240 months in federal prison; no one has been charged in connection with Wilding's death itself, and its cause was never determined. This article is based on federal court records as described by prosecutors and contemporaneous reporting. Photo: broadcast news frame from KTLA 5's March 2024 sentencing coverage.