Executives at Washington Mutual made a fateful decision as a white-hot mortgage market turned ice cold in the fall of 2003.

WaMu's chief executive, Kerry Killinger, decided to reignite profits by aggressively pushing the lender’s riskiest but most profitable loans, including the Option ARM and subprime mortgages.

This week, the Investigative Fund published a two-part series on the subprime collapse. In one of the pieces, I offered insider accounts of how lax lending practices and lavish commissions became an invitation for fraudulent loans at WaMu’s subprime unit, Long Beach Mortgage. Consequently, the lenders’ foreclosure rate became the worst in the business.

Earlier this year, while working as an investigative reporter at the Seattle Times, I told the stories of confused borrowers who were misled into signing up for WaMu’s Option ARM loans. The loans offered a teaser interest rate of a mere 1 percent and extremely low minimum monthly payments. But in reality, these extremely complex loans charged high interest rates and pushed borrowers deeper into debt, setting the stage for foreclosures when the bubble burst.

Among the victims was 90-year-old Barbara Simonson, who was persuaded to refinance her loans six times in six years, costing her tens of thousands in fees and stripping away most of her equity. Ultimately, Simonson was forced to sell her million-dollar home, where she’d lived since 1953.

Washington Mutual once enjoyed a conservative reputation for scrutinizing loans. Its motto was “Friend of the Family.” But I described the new WaMu as one of the nation's biggest predatory lenders.

Because so many of the risky loans went into default, the 2003 strategy helped make Washington Mutual the biggest bank ever to fail.