Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- A former accountant at the University of Utah will spend 10 days in jail and pay more than $120,000 in restitution after pleading guilty to criminal charges for having stolen from the school's theater department.
Third District Judge Williams Barrett also ordered 33-year-old Jara Jane Wimmer earlier this week to serve 200 hours of community service.
Wimmer pleaded guilty in May to one count each of theft and forgery for stealing more than $100,000 over her eight years working for the university.
I never meant to hurt the department.
–Jara Jane Wimmer
An audit found she used the money for vacations to Mexico, jewelry, a swimsuit and 32 pink purses.
The audit found Wimmer stole roughly $2,300 monthly from the theater department, partly by cutting department checks to her husband, Jason Koerbler, who since has died.
Wimmer's lawyer, Tara Isaacson, could not be reached for comment on Thursday.
Wimmer's misconduct was uncovered during a 2009 audit conducted after Gage Williams, a professor of set design, was named the department chairman.
Auditors investigating Wimmer's use of a department credit card found questionable charges totaling $52,000.
Williams confronted Wimmer with the findings in April 2009.
"At that time we didn't know that it had all been stolen. It coincided with university budget cuts," Williams said. "It was a bad time to have someone making it look like we can't manage our ledgers. In reality, we can pay for ourselves."
Further investigation revealed Wimmer's credit card charges were just the tip of a quarter-million-dollar iceberg that included some $113,000 in checks written to Koerbler. He never provided goods or services to the department. Even if he had, department policy would have prevented Wimmer from writing a check to a family member.
In a written statement, Wimmer claimed she began embezzling in the fall of 2008 because Koerbler had lost his job. She said he had no knowledge of the theft.
"I never meant to hurt the department," she wrote.
The day after she was caught, Wimmer and Koerbler checked into a casino hotel in West Wendover, Nev. Police say when they found her, Wimmer's husband was dead and she had several self-inflicted nonlife-threatening injuries. They have declined to divulge how he died or how she was injured.
------
Information from: The Salt Lake Tribune
(Copyright 2010 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
