Former West Hollywood Man Sentenced in Fraud Scheme That Preyed on the Elderly and Dead

What follows is a disturbing and cautionary tale for anyone with elderly parents or relatives, especially ones you don’t often talk to. It involves a former West Hollywood resident, a scheme to prey on the weak, a body dissolved in acid on a rooftop, and human remains dumped in San Francisco Bay. No body has ever been found.

James Kantor, now living in Cumming, Georgia, was sentenced Thursday to four years and three months in federal prison for his part in a fraud scheme that included forging wills and trust documents so he and his fellow crooks could steal the estates of dead and vulnerable people. He was the third and final member of the conspiracy to be sentenced. 

Kantor, 46, pleaded guilty back in October 2024 to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and was ordered to pay $477,051 in restitution, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. It feels kinda weak when you read the rest.

How It Started

The demented tale began with Matthew Kroth, 52, of Studio City, who described himself to investigators as an “urban explorer.” Whatever the hell that means. Apparently, what that meant in practice was cruising upscale neighborhoods preying on houses that looked neglected, pools gone green, hedges nobody had touched in months, peeling paint on a million-dollar home. Picture Grey Gardens. He’d break in and steal whatever he could carry.

Then in the summer 2020, Kroth hit a house in Sherman Oaks home belonging to Charles Wilding Jr., a recluse neighbors barely knew. Charles was home. Kroth claimed he was doing a welfare check and got out. Right. Months later, he came back. This time, Charles was dead. Instead of calling for help, he helped himself to jewelry and whatever else was lying around, then grabbed Charles’ personal information and mail and handed it all to his two fellow crooks, Caroline Herrling of West Hills and James Kantor, then of West Hollywood.

That’s when it stopped being a burglary and became a ghoulish tale of grift and greed.

The Scheme Expands

Herrling took over. Prosecutors called her the mastermind. Using Charles’ stolen identity, she and her crew forged trust documents and power-of-attorney forms to make it look like he was voluntarily handing over his assets. They looted his bank accounts and took his home.

Kantor’s specific role centered on Charles’ mother, June Wilding, who had died in 2017. He forged trust documents in June’s name, handing control of her property to Herrling, then filed a fraudulent petition to rush the transfer through. He also forged a power of attorney attributed to Charles — pretending a dead son had signed off on his dead mother’s estate. It was forgeries all the way down.

Herrling went even further with a third victim, selling his home without his consent for $1.5 million and using the money to buy herself a house in West Hills. That victim died by suicide after losing his home.

The total loss across all victims came to nearly $4 million. Kantor personally had his sights on $2.6 million. He walked away with at least $64,000 before it all fell apart.

A Body in the House

In October 2021, more than a year after Charles Wilding died, neighbors finally reported him missing. Police started asking questions. That’s when Herrling went into overdrive.

She told officers Charles had moved to Carpinteria. She introduced herself as a close family friend. She even got a new phone and paid someone to pretend to be Charles so there’d be a living person behind the number if anyone checked. Meanwhile, she was listed as a trustee of a family trust she’d forged herself.

But investigators kept digging. So Herrling and her co-conspirators moved Charles’ decomposing body from the Sherman Oaks house to her apartment in West Los Angeles, where they tried to dissolve it in acid and lye on her rooftop balcony. They left it up there for weeks, stirring it periodically with a wooden baseball bat. When that didn’t finish the job, they dismembered what was left, packed the pieces into vacuum-sealed bags, and drove them north. A conspirator with a sailboat took care of the rest. The remains were dumped into San Francisco Bay. They have never been recovered.

During Kroth’s sentencing hearing, his attorney argued that Herrling was the true mastermind and that Kroth had actually wanted to report Charles’s death. Herrling said no. Make of that what you will.

Sentences for All Three

Herrling is serving 20 years after pleading guilty in March 2023. Kroth was sentenced on February 5 to more than 16 years after pleading guilty to wire fraud conspiracy and a methamphetamine charge. Thursday’s sentencing of Kantor closed out the federal prosecution of all three. The conspiracy ran from at least 2020 until January 2023.

Federal prosecutors noted in sentencing papers that Kantor didn’t fit the typical profile of someone who turns to crime out of desperation. His father, Paul Kantor, was a prominent Los Angeles art dealer whose galleries helped define the modern and contemporary art scene in the 1950s and ’60s. The elder Kantor died in 2002.

“A disproportionate number of defendants come from disadvantaged backgrounds,” prosecutors wrote. “That is not this defendant.”