A Missouri woman has been ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in restitution for swindling an ailing Wayzata woman while serving as her longtime personal secretary.
Cynthia Lou Carley, 64, was sentenced Wednesday in Hennepin County District Court to incarceration for a year after she pleaded guilty to five counts of theft by swindle in connection with a scheme that ran from mid-2016 until a few months before the woman died in September 2019 at age 66 after struggling with myotonic dystrophy and other medical conditions.
Prosecutors alleged at the time Carley was charged that she cheated the woman out of $1.46 million. However, her sentence calls for her to pay $472,492 in installments in restitution.
She'll serve the first 30 days of her incarceration in the workhouse and the remainder on electronic home monitoring. A five-year prison sentence was set aside, and she will be on probation for that period of time.
Portions of the $1.46 million were spent at casinos in the Branson, Mo., area, retail establishments and many credit cards in her name and for accounts belonging to her husband and other family members, according to the charges.
Carley told police that the woman "just didn't care about anything" and told her to "just take care of it" regarding her financial matters, the criminal complaint quoted her as saying. The charges did not identify the victim.
She added that she made personal purchases with the woman's "significant personal assets" in lieu of a paycheck for her $5,000 monthly salary.
According to the complaint: A nephew of the woman went to police in June 2019 soon after discovering the thefts while going over her financial records after her son's death.
