San Francisco Examiner SAN FRANCISCO - The Rev. Dan Rawls of Love's Lake Tahoe Wedding Chapel had a gut feeling something was wrong Sunday when he declared William von Weiland and Catherine Doliani husband and wife.
He was 48. She was 93."In fact, I've been thinking about it ever since," Rawls said in a telephone interview. "Of all the thousands of weddings I've ever done, I did not want to do that one more than any of the rest. They had to prop the little old lady up, hold her up almost."
Rawls is not the only one who has his suspicions about the relationship between von Weiland and Doliani.
The San Francisco district attorney's office is investigating von Weiland and an alleged cohort on allegations that they have looted as much as $2 million from Doliani over the past three years as trustees overseeing her San Francisco real estate holdings estimated to have a value ranging from $10 million to $20 million.
"There is an investigation," said Assistant District Attorney Dennis Morris, who is handling the probe. "We're just trying to gather all the evidence we can. I'm sure there are all kinds of violations, up and down. To determine them is going to be our job."
Sunday's exchange of vows between Doliani - a one-time bookkeeper who shocked San Francisco society 39 years ago when she bought a landmark mansion on Russian Hill - and von Weiland came a day before a court hearing in which attorneys for Doliani's niece were seeking to dump von Weiland and an accountant as her trustees.
The U.S. Attorney's Office and the FBI are investigating the case along with the San Francisco D.A.
Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service