An Aroostook County woman has pleaded guilty and is expected to be sentenced Tuesday for stealing $111,000 from the town of Danforth, which is in Washington County.
Leta F. Lee, 64, of Reed Plantation, worked for Danforth as town clerk for four years, from 2012 to 2016. She was indicted in 2022 on a felony theft charge and pleaded guilty to that charge in May of this year, according to the state attorney general’s office.
Lee is expected to be sentenced at 2 p.m. Tuesday, July 1, in Calais. State prosecutors are recommending that Lee be ordered to serve 18 months in prison as part of an overall four-year sentence. They also want her to serve three years of probation upon her release and to repay $111,000 to the town.
Information about whether Lee may be represented by a defense attorney was not available Monday.
Lee was one of just two full-time employees based at Danforth’s town office when she regularly diverted payments meant for the town into her personal accounts, according to a sentencing memorandum prepared by the attorney general’s office.
Deborah Theriault, Danforth’s full-time town manager at the time, grew suspicious in 2014 that Lee was “misappropriating small amounts of cash” that she handled at the town office, the document indicates. When Theriault and a member of the town’s Select Board confronted Lee about it in August 2016, Lee “became defensive and angry and quit on the spot,” the memo said.
Twice after Lee quit, town officials asked Matthew Foster, who at the time was Washington County District Attorney, to investigate the matter, but twice Foster declined, according to the memo.
In December 2019, Foster said in a letter to Danforth officials that there was a shortage of available officers with the Washington County Sheriff’s Office to investigate the allegations, which was something his office was not equipped to do. Plus, it was unlikely that, even with a conviction, Lee would be able to reimburse the town for the funds not covered by its insurance policies.
He suggested that the town contact the state attorney general’s office for help.
“I am sorry that we cannot be of assistance, since I know that the loss of revenue to the town has a long lasting effect on your ability to provide services to Danforth’s citizens,” Foster wrote.
A subsequent audit of the town’s finances that was approved by town voters revealed that cash for 126 deposits had gone missing from July 2014 to when Lee quit, according to the sentencing memo. The missing $111,000 accounted for nearly half of all the cash that Danforth took in during those two years, it said.
Maine State Police detectives later determined that Lee gambled away more than $27,000 of the stolen cash at Hollywood Slots casino in Bangor, state officials said.
“Lee sometimes stole more than $5,000 in a single week,” prosecutors wrote in the document. “Her actions destroyed the town of Danforth’s modest finances for years afterward and shook residents’ trust in their public officials.”
The Houlton Pioneer Times reported in 2021 that the town was able to recover about $40,000 through insurance policies.
