A former town clerk in Danforth who pleaded guilty to embezzling more than $111,000 was sentenced Tuesday to serve a year in state prison.
Leta F. Lee, 64, of Reed Plantation, worked for Danforth as town clerk for four years, from 2012 to 2016, when she quit after town officials confronted her over money that had gone missing. 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 received an overall sentence of 4 years with all but 12 months suspended. She also was ordered to serve three years probation upon her release from prison, and to repay $111,000 to the town.
The Maine Attorney General’s office wanted Lee to serve 18 months in state prison as the unsuspended part of her overall four-year sentence.
Starting around the summer of 2014, Lee stole cash that Danforth residents gave her as part of transactions with the town, and either altered receipts or substituted old checks into the town’s bank deposits to try to hide her thefts, Assistant Attorney General Charles Boyle, said. The amount of money Lee stole, over at least 130 separate thefts, had a significant impact on the town and town officials, some of whom resigned over what happened, he said.
“This began an odyssey that has lasted nearly nine years,” Boyle told Judge Harris Mattson. “Danforth is fighting significant economic headwinds. It cast a pall over the town. ”
The missing $111,000 accounted for nearly half of all the cash that Danforth took in from the summer of 2014 to the summer of 2016, prosecutors said.
Lee’s attorney, Jeffrey Toothaker, recommended to the judge that Lee serve only nine months of her overall sentence behind bars, so that she could serve it at the Washington County Jail in Machias. Lee has “serious medical problems,” Toothaker said without elaborating, and all of her doctors are based in Washington County.
In Maine, criminal defendants who receive incarceration terms of more than 9 months have to serve their time in state-run prisons, while those who serve 9 months or less do so at county jails.
“She’s poor. She had a gambling problem,” Toothaker said.
Maine State Police detectives determined that Lee gambled away more than $27,000 of the stolen cash at Hollywood Slots casino in Bangor, state officials said.
Toothaker added that Lee did not have a criminal record and initially denied the allegations because she was frightened and ashamed. She eventually told state police detectives that she took $60,000 but for a while still resisted pleading guilty because she didn’t want to go to jail.
“‘Scared’ is an understatement,” the lawyer said. “She’s never been in trouble before.”
Mattson agreed, without objection from prosecutors, to delay the start of Lee’s prison term until August 15.
Lee was one of just two full-time employees based at Danforth’s town office when she began stealing cash from the town.
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, according to court documents. 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,” prosecutors wrote in their sentencing recommendation memo.
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. The Houlton Pioneer Times reported in 2021 that the town was able to recover about $40,000 through insurance policies.
