Fool Me Twice?

ABINGDON, Va. – In June 2007, Anna Howell pleaded guilty to stealing more than $16,000 from the office and personal funds of a circuit court judge – a man she had known since first entering the legal community some 20 years ago.

Three months later, she allegedly embarked on a similar scheme – in spite of the five-year suspended sentence looming over her – by hijacking funds from a law firm, whose partners she had long known, according to a federal indictment and interviews with acquaintances of Howell and sources in the Abingdon legal community.

Between September 2007 and October 2008, Howell diverted more than $31,000 from the law firm’s trust account to cover personal expenses, a recently unveiled federal grand jury indictment alleges.

Howell, 43, did not respond to a request for comment but is “under a doctor’s care,” her husband said.

Those who know Howell describe the charges against her as a sad turn of events that stretch back to 2005. That year, she left the Virginia Department of Social Services child support and enforcement division, where she had worked since 1999, to work as a secretary for Circuit Court Judge C. Randall Lowe.

The move reunited Howell with Lowe, whom she had served as a secretary before moving to the DSS. She first met Lowe while working as the receptionist at the former Abingdon firm of Yeary, Tate, Lowe & Jessee. While there, she became Lowe’s primary secretary, said Emmitt Yeary, a former partner.

“While she was with our law firm, she was a trusted employee,” Yeary said in an interview.
When the firm split up in 1993, Howell followed Lowe to the firm he formed with attorneys Mary Lynn Tate and Fred Rowlett. During the period Howell left to work for DSS, Lowe was appointed to the circuit court, and was four years into his first term when she returned to work for him.

By November 2005, Howell began to forge checks from the judge’s office funds to herself, generally between $1,000 and $1,500 a month, Washington County court records show.

Her guilty plea on June 4, 2007, came as a shock to those who knew her.

“It was totally out of the context of the Anna that I had observed,” Yeary said. “We never had any indication that this would be part of her behavior.”
The Virginia State Bar requires attorneys to conduct an annual review of “all receipts and disbursements and changes in assets” for accounts they hold for client property, under its “safekeeping property” rule.

In February, the Bar issued a public reprimand to a Pennington Gap, Va., attorney for violations associated with safekeeping property. The attorney had delegated bookkeeping responsibilities to her administrative assistant, who is accused of stealing from her employer’s personal and office accounts.

Significantly, it took 13 months in both the Washington County criminal case and the pending federal case to discover irregularities that pointed to Howell.

A turn to the past

With the onset of her legal troubles, Howell turned to attorneys she met early in her career as a legal secretary.
After she left Judge Lowe’s office, she worked for several months at the law firm of prominent Abingdon attorney Mary Lynn Tate, whom Howell met when Tate was a partner with Yeary Tate Lowe & Jessee. Howell had left the Tate Law Firm by the time she pleaded guilty to stealing from Lowe’s office.

Representing her at the June 2007 hearing was Daniel Read, who also coincided with Howell at Yeary Tate Lowe & Jessee in the early 1990s, when he worked as an associate. Read left with partner Charlie Jessee to form their own law firm.

As Howell’s defense attorney, Read brokered a plea agreement with a special prosecutor in which Howell pleaded guilty to 12 counts of forgery, uttering and grand larceny; the remaining 45 counts were dropped. She received a five-year suspended jail sentence and five years of supervised probation, and was required to perform 500 hours of community service within three years.

At the sentencing hearing, Read proffered two checks for restitution : a personal check for $15,000 from a relative of Howell’s, and a $1,500 check from Read’s trust account.

Last month, federal authorities unsealed a grand jury indictment charging Howell with money laundering and wire fraud related to the alleged misappropriation of $31,000 from an unnamed law firm’s trust account.
The firm, according to several sources and acquaintances of Howell, is Jessee & Read, where Daniel Read now works with John Jessee – son of Charlie Jessee of the erstwhile Yeary Tate Lowe & Jessee. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office also confirmed the name of the firm to the Herald Courier.

Between September 2007 and Oct. 2, 2008, Howell issued stop payment orders on checks from the trust account, directing the bank to reissue the checks in the form of money orders, the federal indictment states. She then used those money orders to pay personal expenses, such as a $629 bill to Heritage Propane.

She also added her family members to Jessee & Read’s group insurance, costing the firm more than $2,000 in premiums.

Read, when contacted, would not comment on Howell’s employment or confirm that she worked for his firm. But he needed no prompting to cite the federal case against her. “I don’t want to say anything that could prejudice the government or her,” he said. “I see nothing to be gained to publicize anything right now.”

Jessee did not respond to a request for comment left at his office.