In the beginning, she fooled everyone.
When Dina Perouty-Leone began telling friends and acquaintances that she had terminal stomach cancer and that she needed help paying for treatment because she had no health insurance, there was little reason to doubt her word.
"She was very kind, sweet and pleasant," Jennifer Lasek, a former classmate in Dundalk who donated thousands of dollars, recalled on Tuesday. "She kept saying, 'I love you. No one helps me like that.' "
But Lasek and others in Perouty-Leone's circle were deceived, according to Baltimore County prosecutors, who charged the former real estate agent with four theft counts. She never had cancer, Assistant State's Attorney Adam Lippe said, and had created an "elaborate scheme to obtain money from her friends to fund her lifestyle and not because of an illness."
On Tuesday, Perouty-Leone, 37, pleaded guilty to a single count of felony theft. A 1990 graduate of Dundalk High School and the mother of two teenagers, she faces a maximum of 15 years in prison. Baltimore County Circuit Judge John G. Turnbull II ordered her jailed until she is sentenced Aug. 31.
"I'm sorry," the tearful defendant said as she turned toward Lasek and another woman she admitted deceiving, Jennifer Lynch, and both avoided her gaze. Perouty-Leone, looking tanned, removed her jewelry and handed it to a bailiff before being led from the courtroom. As she left, she looked at her sister, who was crying, and called out, "Take care of my kids."
Lasek and Lynch, each of whom has lost a parent to cancer, estimate that they gave Perouty-Leone about $12,000 apiece before realizing that her claims to be dying of cancer were a hoax. "We had suspicions," Lasek said after Tuesday's hearing. "We knew something wasn't right."
Lasek was not impressed by the defendant's apology. "I don't want it," she said. "She should apologize to the people fighting cancer."
Lynch said much the same: "It was never about the money. I just wanted her to stop hurting others."
Moved by her plight, Lasek and her husband, the nationally ranked skateboarder Bucky Lasek, who was also in court, treated Perouty-Leone and her family to a visit last summer to the Laseks' home in Encinitas, Calif., the San Diego Zoo and Disneyland, the latter apparently one of the defendant's expressed "dying wishes," according to Lippe. In photographs taken during that trip, Perouty-Leone looks healthy, a baseball hat covering her bald head — a result, as it turned out, not of chemotherapy treatments but of a close shave.
Perouty-Leone's cancer claims go back to at least 2004, when she wrote a Web posting indicating her solidarity with fellow sufferers. On Oct. 22 that year, on the Susan G. Komen for the Cure site, she wrote, "No one other than us know what we went through to get where we are. We are strong fighters with a new hope for a cure of something so much greater then life itself."
In January, she told reporters that she had perpetrated the cancer scam because her husband, Patrick Leone, also 37, had abused her and "made" her do it, yet pictures of the family taken in the last few years show a happy group. She filed a domestic-abuse case against her husband earlier this year, but failed to show up in court and the matter was dismissed.
Perouty-Leone's real estate license was revoked in 2007, and she was convicted in four previous cases in Carroll County. In the most notable example, prosecutors said, she pretended to be a lawyer and defrauded homeowners into paying her their monthly mortgage payments, ostensibly so that she could help them avoid foreclosure. One case netted her $11,500 from a Sykesville woman, prosecutors said. Perouty-Leone also was charged with repeatedly writing checks on empty or closed accounts, on one occasion for $297, to her daughter's school.
In the Sykesville case, a judge imposed a sentence of 10 years, suspending all but the 49 days Perouty-Leone had already spent in jail, and placed her on probation until May 2012. Her guilty plea Tuesday in the Baltimore County case automatically triggers a parole violation in Carroll County, which means that in addition to any new jail term she could be ordered to serve what is left of her 10-year sentence there.
Also in court Tuesday was Vicky Squires, another former friend of the defendant and a cancer survivor. She said her own struggle with the disease initially made her empathetic. Squires said she was stunned when they turned out to be lies.
"I don't know if any punishment is strong enough for what she's done," Squires said. "I just never thought someone could lie like that. Lying to your own kids, telling them you have cancer — that's horrible."