Postal boss gets 652 hours with patients
Boyle faked illness after berating worker who had it
Aurora U.S. Postal Service supervisor Caroline Zarete Boyle accused subordinate Lisa Roberts of faking cancer, repeatedly asking Roberts why she didn’t lose her hair and forcing her to work in a frigid basement in winter.
Then something strange happened.
After Roberts lost her job and moved to Texas, Boyle announced she had been diagnosed with cancer — the same type of lymphoma that Roberts has been fighting for years. Boyle claimed she was going to Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers. It was the same place Roberts had gone to for cancer care.
Was it poetic justice? Or something more nefarious?
On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Raymond Moore sentenced Boyle, 60, to serve 652 hours of community service at a cancer treatment center, cancer research center or hospice for fraud for faking cancer.
Boyle also was sentenced to five years of probation and ordered to pay a $10,000 fine and $20,798.38 in restitution to the USPS. Boyle must serve six months of home detention in Highlands Ranch.
“She impersonated me by claiming she had lymphoma,” Roberts said in a telephone interview with The Denver Post. Armed with Roberts’ confidential medical records that Boyle had demanded, Boyle created a new persona — modeled on Roberts’ cancer.
After accusing Roberts of pretending to have cancer so she could take an extended vacation and denying Roberts accommodations to deal with the pain, nausea and fear of dying, Boyle mimicked Roberts’ life by forging medical records.
Boyle then enjoyed all the benefits afforded someone with a life-threatening illness, including “compassionate teleworking privileges,” abbreviated workdays, working at home and taking lengthy medical leave for treatment she never received.
Boyle had been talking to staff about taking a vacation to Hawaii when she misspelled a doctor’s name in a medical report. Her masquerade then collapsed.
Roberts recalls the day in April 2010 when Boyle began bullying her in vivid detail. Boyle called a staff meeting the day Roberts returned to work after a grueling three months of stomach biopsies and radiation treatment. Roberts had “crawled” back to work earlier than she wanted so she could reserve medical leave to have a procedure for an unrelated heart condition.
“Well, Lisa is back,” Roberts recalled Boyle saying as she opened the meeting. “You didn’t even lose your hair. Why didn’t you lose your hair? It looks like you went on vacation.”
It was apparent Boyle expected an explanation. Roberts, then 50, couldn’t breathe. Co-workers looked at her with horror and sympathy.
“I have stomach cancer. I never had chemotherapy,” Roberts recounted saying while shaking. “I had radiation treatment and I didn’t lose my hair.”
When Roberts asked to be moved to an empty cubicle away from the cafeteria because food smells made her nauseous, Boyle refused. In fact, Boyle sometimes approached Roberts’ desk while eating Chinese takeout and snickering. Roberts believes Boyle did that to torment her.
In the winter of 2010, shortly after Roberts’ cancer treatment, when high temperatures were in the teens, Boyle ordered her to work in a cement basement that “felt like a dungeon.” She wore a coat but still shivered. Her heart would race. One day, Roberts approached another supervisor after she climbed stairs and felt faint because of her heart condition.
“I think she’s trying to kill me,” Roberts told the woman.
“I know. I think she is,” the supervisor replied.
Ultimately, Roberts’ position — along with those of several other colleagues — was eliminated in 2012. Boyle helped make the decision. While other employees got new jobs in the same office, Roberts wasn’t offered a position. Instead, she moved to a Postal Service office in Dallas while still undergoing regular cancer treatments.
Five years after she moved, a former co-worker called Roberts at her new home in Tennessee and read a headline from The Denver Post: “Aurora U.S. postal worker indicted after botching doctor’s name on forged sick note about fictitious cancer illness.”
The story said Boyle, a postal employee and supervisor for 25 years, took 112 days of sick leave from USPS’s customer products and fulfillment category management center in Aurora. She faced up to 20 years in prison. Suspicious of Boyle’s professed cancer condition, a supervisor had discovered in June 2016 that she misspelled the name of her supposed cancer doctor.
Postal Service inspectors discovered that the oncologist, as well as nurses and administrators, had never heard of Boyle. She wasn’t their patient. As it turned out, Boyle had manufactured Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers stationery, which didn’t include the doctor’s medical license number.
Roberts was transfixed by Boyle’s criminal case. She began doing her own research and discovered that another of Boyle’s forged medical records was signed by Dr. Ioana Hinshaw. But there were no oncologists in Colorado by that name, she said. She called the U.S. District Attorney’s Office.
On Tuesday, Roberts looked over at Boyle as she sat in the witness chair. Boyle snickered.
Judge Moore later cautioned Boyle to never look at him the way she had looked at Roberts. He called Boyle a heartless woman.
While Roberts thinks Moore was too lenient, she approves of the requirement that Boyle must volunteer at a cancer treatment facility or hospice center. But it’s not enough.
“She had accused me all those years of faking. … One thing she’ll never have to go through is a bone marrow test. That woman has no idea what it’s like to have 14 stomach biopsies. … She’ll never know what it’s like to wonder whether this holiday is their last. The pain and misery I went through I did not fake.”