COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A judge is expected on Tuesday to sentence a woman who pleaded guilty to embezzling nearly $500,000 from the South Carolina Hospitality Association, crimes that the group’s director said in a suicide note drove him to take his own life.
Rachel Duncan, 42, has been free on bond since pleading guilty earlier this year to tax evasion and wire fraud. According to her attorney, Duncan stole to support a decades-long gambling addiction, a struggle that began in the 1990s with video poker and later shifted to online gambling.
Duncan faces up to 23 years in prison and $350,000 in fines, but federal guidelines call for a sentence between two and three years, her attorney Greg Harris has said. Duncan will agree to repay $367,500 over her lifetime to the lobbying group, he said.
A native of Auburn, N.Y., Duncan moved from Buffalo to Columbia with her husband in 1995, but they divorced a few years later. She hid her gambling addiction when she married again in 1999.
Federal authorities have said Duncan, who served as accounting director for the group that lobbies on behalf of South Carolina’s multi-billion dollar tourism industry, opened a secret checking account and began funneling the association’s money into it over six years, beginning in 2006.
The U.S. Secret Service’s investigation came to light in February when its founder and executive director went missing. Tom Sponseller was found 10 days later in a storage room in the garage of his office building. He had committed suicide, leaving behind a three-page note describing Duncan’s confession to stealing the money and detailing his despair that her misdeeds happened on his watch.
Two high-ranking Columbia police officers lost their jobs because of the way the search for the missing executive was handled.
In a letter submitted to the court on Tuesday, Sponseller’s widow implored U.S. District Judge Joseph F. Anderson Jr. to remember her husband’s death when he sentences Duncan.
“If she was not a thief — which she is — and not stolen from the Hospitality Assoc., Tom would be alive today and thriving in an Assoc. that he worked so hard to build to what it is today,” Meg Sponseller wrote.
Authorities have found no evidence that Sponseller received any of the $480,000 that Duncan admitted she took, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Winston Holliday. Prosecutors said federal agents found sexually-oriented photos of Duncan on Sponseller’s work computer while investigating the missing money, but they would not detail what they showed.
Agents also found photos showing bruises on Duncan’s face — images Holliday said Sponseller appeared to have been gathering for Duncan to help her build some sort of domestic abuse case, although the prosecutor gave no details against whom.
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Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP
