LE SUEUR — Scott Rodning and his wife, Rael, were sitting next to their busted backyard pool about three years ago when he offered her a way out of the financial mess that was threatening their marriage.

He proposed the possibility of working out a “strategic divorce.” He would take the house and all the debt it was creating. She would take the children and start over.

“Most people would have taken the offer and ran,” Scott Rodning said. “She didn’t. She said she was going to see this through.”

Seeing it through has meant unraveling the complicated background of Delroy Sand, the man the Rodnings’ children once knew as their grandfather.

During their conversation by the pool, the Rodnings already knew their house wasn’t what it appeared to be when they bought it from Sand in 2005. That was shortly after Scott Rodning’s mother, 65-year-old Judy Fischer, died. She had lived in the house for years with Sand, who everyone knew as her husband since 1982.

The Rodnings had visited often, bringing their four children to see their grandparents. They had no idea mold and water were hidden behind the basement’s inner walls, eating away at the foundation. So they agreed to buy the house and about 21 acres of land just east of Le Sueur for $690,000.

They were dealing with a family member, so the deal moved quickly. Sand told them he was too distraught to stay in the house where he had so many happy memories of his wife of 23 years.

“Scott and I did things to help with his grief,” Rael Rodning said. “He said he built this house with Judy and he couldn’t be here anymore because of the pain.

“We trusted what he said and we also trusted what he attested to in his documents. We had no reason to think he would just walk out of our lives.”

As the Rodnings dug deeper into the causes of their financial mess and questions about Sand, they slowly learned their house wasn’t the only thing existing behind a fancy facade.

Those discoveries are now measured in “holy crap moments” by Scott Rodning, the biggest being when he learned Sand had never married his mother. Sand had actually been married to a woman in St. Cloud since 1969.

That didn’t keep Sand, 62, from taking control of Fischer’s estate after she died on May 3, 2005. He signed off on the legal paperwork for the estate as her surviving spouse on Aug. 17, 2005, giving himself nearly $230,000 and about $23,400 each to Scott Rodning and Rodning’s two brothers. All of that cash came from the sale of the house after about $415,000 was used to pay off a mortgage.

There were other problems with the estate, the Rodnings found, including more mortgages that Sand hadn’t revealed and about $7,000 in credit-card debt that was never settled. Retirement savings and an interest in Hecla, the group home business Sand and Fischer had started, were missing.

After spending dozens of hours gathering information, the Rodnings went to the FBI first. The amount of money missing wasn’t enough to get the federal agency interested. The investigation was then turned over to the Le Sueur County Sheriff’s Department, and Sand was eventually charged with felony theft by swindle and perjury.

Sand, who has not returned calls or answered requests to be interviewed for this story, has since pleaded guilty to felony perjury. He will be sentenced Tuesday. The plea agreement, which dropped the theft charge, says he will receive a stayed sentence and have a chance to challenge restitution.

The Rodnings say they have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result of Sand’s charade, and they don’t expect to see much of it paid back in restitution.

Scam unfolds

Scott Rodning was still a teenager living in St. Peter when his mother left his father in 1978 and moved in with Sand. He was told Sand and his mother were married in 1982, but he didn’t attend the wedding.

“I was extremely angry at the time,” he said.

Sand and Fischer met while both working at the Regional Treatment Center in St. Peter. In 1983, they started a group home business called Hecla Inc. The business provided transitional housing for people leaving treatment at the hospital.

It’s one of many businesses in the state that can be directly connected to Sand. He also has owned assisted-living facilities, nursing homes and stables that develop race horses. Until Thursday, he was president of the Minnesota Thoroughbred Association, a group of horse owners that races and sells horses at Canterbury Park in Shakopee.

When Scott Rodning started attending college at Minnesota State University, he went to work for his mother and Sand. He worked at a facility in New Ulm and, during that time, the relationship between the three of them improved, Rodning said.

“All of the people in the office, all of the people in the whole company, thought they were married. No one had any reason to think otherwise.”

There are stacks of bank documents, including loans for real estate and the business, where the couple claimed to be married. When Sand took care of Fischer’s obituary, he described himself as her husband. Sand signed several legal documents identifying himself as Fischer’s surviving spouse while acting as the personal representative for the estate.

Scott Rodning has a background in fraud investigations for a major Minnesota corporation. He still didn’t realize Sand wasn’t being completely honest with him until it was too late. That realization came after he and Rael bought the house.

“My plan was to come down here, ride my horses and be a full-time mom,” Rael Rodning said. “Scott and I worked very hard to put ourselves in that position.”

Instead, they’ve spent the last several years making repairs to the house and figuring out ways to pay for them. They’ve also discovered Sand had mortgages against the house, totaling thousands of dollars, that he didn’t disclose.

When everything is added up, the Rodnings estimate they are owed about $600,000.

“The financial stuff really hurts,” Rael Rodning said. “But the worst part is trying to explain to your children that this person they thought was their grandpa really isn’t their grandpa, and he’s also the one doing so much damage to this family.”

‘Holy crap moments’

Even after discovering the extra mortgages, the Rodnings didn’t realize the full extent of Sand’s deceptions. They were still under the impression Sand had been married to Fischer.

The first “holy crap” moment came about a month after the Rodnings bought the house. They learned Sand had bought another house in New Prague with another woman, who also wasn’t his real wife. That woman happened to be the person who served as a notary on one of the undisclosed mortgages for the Rodning house.

The problem with that mortgage was it had allegedly been signed by Fischer, but the date and location of where Fischer’s signature allegedly took place didn’t make sense to the Rodnings. It had been signed April 13, 2005, in Nicollet County, according to the notary. At that time Fischer was deathly ill with cancer at St. Marys Hospital in Rochester, where she died just three weeks later.

Another revelation came when the Rodnings had their house and property assessed. One assessor informed them, after looking at land records, that they hadn’t bought 21 acres of land with their house. About 10 acres of land had been split off and sold long before Sand had sold the property to them.

Scott Rodning also happened to talk to an attorney who knew Sand. During that conversation, the attorney implied Sand had known about the water and mold damage in the house months before it was sold.

The biggest shock came after Rodning, while surfing the Internet, happened to discover that a couple named Del and Linda Sand owned a membership at a resort on the Horseshoe Chain of Lakes near Cold Spring in Stearns County. He knew Sand had businesses in that area, so he went to St. Cloud, the county seat, to find the divorce papers.

To Rodning’s surprise, Del Sand, who was the same Del Sand, had just filed for divorce from Linda Sand a couple of days earlier. That was July 2007. And, according to the divorce paperwork, the Sands had been married since Dec. 20, 1969.

Linda Sand told Rodning she planned to hire a private investigator to look into the matter. She declined to comment for this story when she was contacted at her home in Cold Spring last week.

“It all came in degrees, like one degree at a time,” Rodning said. “It took a long time to understand what he did and why he did it, and the anger has just built. If 10 is ballistic, then I’ve gone five times past that.

“There’s a lot of layers to this onion.”

Another generation

One of those layers is the question about Fischer’s role in everything that has happened.

Although no evidence has been found that Fischer was ever married to Sand, there is some evidence she helped divert some of her mother’s money to the Hecla business.

Long before Fischer and Sand worked together at the treatment center in St. Peter, Fischer’s parents, Hubert and Gladys Fischer, were employees at the facility. They spent years setting aside money so their savings and pensions would provide all they needed for the rest of their lives.

Janice Egersdorf, Fischer’s sister, said much of that money was likely lost when Fischer took over as their mother’s power of attorney. Egersdorf also said she happened to find dozens of old check stubs that show her sister was writing checks out of her mother’s account to Sand and Hecla.

A short time before she died, Gladys Fischer asked Egersdorf where all her money had gone.

Egersdorf had traveled to St. Peter from her home in Bemidji for a care conference with her mother and her sister. During that conference, Gladys Fischer was told she couldn’t afford nursing home costs, so she would be under county care.

“That’s when I knew something had happened to mom’s money,” Egersdorf said. “Between the sale of her house and all of her (certificates of deposit), it would have easily kept her in a nursing home for several years.

“It was soon after that when my mom went down hill.”

Fischer died a short time after her mother. So Egersdorf said she never had a chance to confront her sister about the missing money. Egersdorf also said Fischer always told her she was married to Sand.

“I always assumed they were married, but my husband didn’t.” Egersdorf said. “It was just the circumstances. We felt an unease about Del. There was just something that wasn’t right.

“It took a couple years for us to figure this all out. My sister died about six months after my mother, so we were all swirling with emotion. That’s why it took time for all of this to get sorted out.”