No Place Like Home (1992)

Two years before Lambert put his father in Hillhaven, Mary Ropp checked her sister Linda Stewart into a nursing home in Charleston, West Virginia. Linda was 32 years old, and disabled by multiple sclerosis. "She was living with me, but I was having a difficult pregnancy," Ropp says. "She decided to go into a nursing home."

Stewart weighed 120 pounds when she checked into Capital City Nursing Home. Within three months she had lost nine pounds. She became dehydrated, her lips cracked and peeling. She developed bedsores, and was hospitalized several times for infections and internal bleeding. Her body contracted painfully. 

Ropp, a janitor, complained repeatedly to the state, but Capital City was never fined. She tried writing U.S. Senator Robert Byrd. "We have reason to believe Linda isn't being fed," she told him. "Due to recent weight loss. One former employee was eating Linda's food instead of feeding her." 

In April 1991, Stewart died of an infection. She weighed 90 pounds.