Libby woman sentenced for theft from employer
This story is a corrected re-write of a story that appeared on the front page of the Friday, April 19 edition of The Western News. In that story, the dismissed charges were confused with the charges to which Melodee Rose made an Alford plea.
A libby resident was given a three-year deferred sentence in Montana 19th Judicial District Court April 15, after being charged with the theft of money from her employer.
Judge Matt Cuffe sentenced Melodee Nichole Rose to a three-year deferred imposition for the charge of theft by embezzlement, a felony, and set restitution at $3,312.85. Rose pleaded an Alford plea — admitting the evidence would likely lead to a guilty conviction without pleading guilty — to the theft charge on Jan. 31.
The charge stemmed from a call to the Libby Police Department on April 6, 2018, in which Caboose Motel owners Robert Lee and Allan Woods reported they had recently hired Rose as the manager and discovered money missing.
According to an affidavit from then Libby Police Officer Darren Short, Lee and Woods said they had loaned Rose $750 to pay an attorney to represent her husband.
When Rose told Lee and Woods she had not received the money and needed to pay the lawyer, they “told her to write a check to herself and get a money order to pay the attorney and then deposit the original amount when she received it.”
According to the affidavit, a week later, Lee and Woods received a deposit slip made out by Rose for $828.75, but a deposit had not been made.
On April 4, Lee and Woods arranged to meet with Rose in Spokane, but at the meeting, Rose told them she had forgotten the money. They told Rose they would be in Libby on April 5, and would “straighten out the money situation.”
Lee and Woods reported that Rose failed to show up to work or meet with them, and on April 6 they made their first report to Short.
In an April 12, 2018, interview with Short at the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office, Rose told him she had not returned the money or the keys to the motel and lockbox. She told him that she was at a trailer court on April 9 buying drugs, when someone stole the lockbox from her car.
She estimated the total money lost at $3,000.
Rose returned after her interview with keys, and asked they be returned to Lee and Woods.
An itemized list of missing funds and cost for lock replacement from Lee and Woods totaled $4,022.90, according to the affidavit.
In June 2018, Robert Carter, Rose’s great-uncle made a complaint after discovering that money orders from his sister, Patsy Chae, who resided in California, intended for her son, Rose’s father James Rose, were being sent to an address in Libby.
James Rose passed away in February 2015. Carter told Lincoln County Sheriff’s Detective Dave Hall that the family was unaware James Rose was deceased, and his sister had continued to send her son monthly U.S. Postal Service money orders for $850.
Carter said that they only discovered James Rose was deceased after one of the money orders was returned.
Carter alleged that he found someone in Libby had been forging and cashing the checks since 2015.
Carter told Hall that his mother had been sending the checks to James Rose at an address in Fountain Valley, California.
Carter estimated the total money stolen to be $30,600, taken from about 35 forged orders.
When Hall investigated, he found that the Libby address Carter supplied matched that of Melodee Nichole Rose.
He discovered, several months after James Rose died, someone had associated his name with a different Libby address.
Hall found during his investigation that a number of the checks had been forged into Melodee Nichole Rose’s name, as well as some into the name of a boyfriend, Adrian Oropeza.
According to Hall’s report, U.S. Postal Inspector Walt Tubbs was checking the addresses to see how the mail got forwarded from California to Libby.
The Jan. 31 plea agreement between the Lincoln County Attorney’s Office and Rose stipulated that Rose make an Alford plea to the felony theft charge associated with the Caboose Motel and that the theft and forgery charges related to the money orders would be dismissed.
At her sentencing April 15, Cuffe said to Rose “This is your opportunity, over the course of the next three years, to show us you’ve learned from that mistake.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: In the original version of this story by Luke Hollister, it was stated that Rose pleaded to the theft and forgery charges related to the money orders rather than to the theft charge related to the Caboose Motel. This came from a confusion of the two case numbers during review of court documents.
This was Hollister’s first court story, and a very complicated one to parse out the details. As the editor — and given Hollister’s level of experience — the fact that the error was not caught prior to publication falls entirely on my shoulders.