Skip to main content

New · A Marriage on the Record

Part Three: Keep It Open

A widow with no lawyer asked a judge for one thing: keep her husband’s estate open so she could keep going after his records. Thirty-seven minutes after the hearing ended, he signed the judgment she had asked him, in writing, not to sign.

Patty Bingaman’s lawyer, Carol Fredrick, told her on a recorded call, “We can hold it open,” and put it in writing: “This keeps the estate open.” The judgment her office wrote for the judge to sign said something else. Patty fired her and stood before Judge Jared Boyd in Union County Circuit Court alone on September 21, 2026. You hear the real courtroom audio: in 14 minutes he said almost 2,000 words, she got a little over 300, and he cut her off 14 times. The estate is still open. Patty is still Russell’s personal representative.

A podcast by Levi Bakke · 31 min · Narration generated with ElevenLabs, using an AI clone of the author’s voice. The recordings and the documents on screen are real.

A song from Part Three · Parody

Gobbledygook

Judge Boyd called Patty’s filings “gobbledygook” and “gibberish,” and told her she had “a particular agenda.” When she asked what it was, he named Nadine’s Nest, the adult foster home where Russell lived, and Tempie Bartell, who ran it. So it became a song.

Parody. Judge Jared Boyd’s own words from the September 21, 2026 court recording, cut and rearranged into a song. He did not say these sentences in this order, and his voice was not cloned. He did say the name “Levi Bakke” in that hearing; he did not say Levi Bakke was correct. For the real hearing, unedited and in context, watch Part Three above. 3 min.

Previously · A Marriage on the Record

Part Two: Who Speaks for Russell

Russell Bingaman had a court-appointed lawyer whose only job was him. She never called his wife.

Part Two is the courtroom: Emily Cooper’s own words, her own emails, her own bill, Lisa Nice on what she found on Monday mornings, Patty under oath on why she cleaned her husband, and the morning the court cut Patty to thirty minutes a week with Russell’s lawyer not in the room. Russell died on January 29, 2025, the morning Patty’s petition was set to be heard. It never was.

A podcast by Levi Bakke · 19 min · Narration generated with ElevenLabs, using an AI clone of the author’s voice. The recordings and the documents on screen are real.

Start here · A Marriage on the Record

Part One: The Locked Door

His court-appointed lawyer told the court he could no longer make his wishes known. Patty recorded her visits with her husband of 58 years: 389 recordings. Russell asked for her at least 236 times. When she asked who he wanted taking care of him, he answered with one word: “You.” Then they locked the door.

27 min · Narration generated with ElevenLabs, using an AI clone of the author’s voice. The recordings and the documents on screen are real.

Independent public-interest journalism

Valor Investigates

Source-backed investigations, open public-records corpora, and free self-advocacy tools for people confronting elder care, guardianship, health-care, and government accountability failures in Eastern Oregon.

Read InvestigationsSend a Tip

The Day of the Mothers

We need your help to keep helping people like Patty.

Support the WorkRead the Investigations

Know when the next article lands

One free email when a new investigation publishes. No spam, we never sell your address, unsubscribe anytime.

Fundraiser preview

The Union County Transparency Project

I mirrored Union County Board records spanning 2008–2026 and all 79 monthly reports published for January 2020 through July 2026. The local corpus now holds 1,016 evidence files and 17,051 parsed payment lines, supporting 150 machine-verified findings. The District Attorney issued a fee-review order on August 6; this fund supports the next targeted records, publication, and any warranted access enforcement.

Support the fundSee what's already public
Records engineAsk 284 indexed leads anything -- answers cite the supporting lead and expose verification links.Follow the budgetNine fiscal years of county budgets, contracts, and the disclosure gaps.Map the connections20 documented roles across county government, the hospital, its foundation, and legal-service records.
Read investigationsLong-form stories, public-records reporting, and documented case timelines.Use free toolsSelf-advocacy generators for records requests, complaints, and agency filings.Support the workTax-deductible support for records fees, infrastructure, filing costs, and research.
24 months
of records work
442k files
in searchable evidence systems
22 free tools
for public self-advocacy

Featured investigation

Latest public-records reporting

View all investigations
Page 21 of Oregon DHS's redline of OAR 411-020-0030, filed July 28, 2026: the struck-through line reading "Redacted copies of investigations involving APD-licensed facilities may be made available to the general public upon request or by operational procedures," outlined in red
The Records WarLatest

"A Huge Disservice to the Public."

Oregon DHS made every adult protective services report confidential on Oct. 15 and barred itself from confirming that any report exists. The state ombudsman's office objected on video in January. No member of the public commented. The reason staff gave was legal advice that appears in none of the department's filings.

On October 15, Oregon DHS rewrote its Adult Protective Services rules. Every report and record is now confidential, the department must not acknowledge that any report exists, open or closed, and the line that let the public get redacted abuse investigations at licensed care homes is gone. The state Long-Term Care Ombudsman's office called the change "a huge disservice to the public" at the only advisory meeting. Not one public comment addressed it. Oregon's adult foster home statutes still say those complaint files are public.

More to read

Institutional Accountability
Two Baker County court records: the January 19, 2024 court visitor's report for Jayne Colleen Peters marking Yes to whether she objects to a fiduciary, and the February 5, 2024 judgment stating no objections have been made or filed

She Objected. The Judgment Said No One Had.

In five Baker County guardianships, the court's own visitor wrote down an objection. The judgments attorney Darcy Kindschy submitted said no objections had been made or filed. The Oregon State Bar dismissed my complaint as premature.

In January 2024 the court's visitor wrote that Jayne Peters was adamant she did not want a guardian, and marked yes beside the question of whether she objected. Seventeen days later a judgment submitted by attorney Darcy Kindschy said no objections had been made or filed. Jayne died before the court appointed her a lawyer. Hers is one of five Baker County cases in Levi Bakke's complaint to the Oregon State Bar, which dismissed it as premature and later described its own decision differently.

The Records War
Oregon DHS Report of Serious Event form APD 0307: under the heading Abuse type, the check boxes Legislative request and Media, outlined in red

Abuse Type: Media.

Oregon DHS's form for reporting serious events lists "Media" among its abuse types. In February, the agency logged me under it. In October, it billed me $48,150 for records on how it works.

Oregon DHS sent Levi Bakke 71 pages about a La Grande foster home for free. Fifty-two minutes later it billed him $48,150 for records that reach into how DHS itself works: its mail, its staff's phones, its manuals and its backlog numbers. The agency had promised to name any price before starting and to finish by August 14. Two weeks after he sued the manager of its records unit, it shut the requests down, then reopened them under a new date and priced them. On October 15 he asked the Attorney General to step in.

The Bingaman Case · Opinion
AI-generated editorial illustration: a caricature of Judge Boyd addressing a widow beside a probate door, with institutional labels and chains symbolizing the article’s criticism.

A one-way street.

Patricia Bingaman, Judge Boyd, and the fight to preserve her husband’s estate claims

Patricia Bingaman asked the judge for the law. The court records, consent papers, and hearing explain a widow’s fight to keep pursuing potential recoveries for her husband’s estate.

Submit a Tip