Texas Embezzler Sentenced for Faking Cancer in Order to Delay Prison Sentence

DALLAS (CN) — A North Texas accounting executive was sentenced Thursday to five more years in federal prison for faking stomach cancer to delay being sent to prison for an earlier 41-month wire fraud sentence.

U.S. District Judge Jane Boyle in Dallas sentenced Kassie Bond Carpenter, 42, for obstruction of justice. Carpenter pleaded guilty in February, admitting she gave the court phony medical records to delay being sent to prison in the earlier 2016 criminal case. 

The sentence will be served consecutively after the 41-month sentence, meaning Carpenter faces a total of eight years and five months behind bars.

“Defendant knowingly caused to be filed at least nine sets of fictitious and forged medical records indicating she had been diagnosed and was being treated for adenocarcinoma, for the purpose of obtaining multiple extensions of the date to report to the Bureau of Prisons to begin serving a sentence of imprisonment,” the three-page indictment states.

Adenocarcinoma is a cancer that forms in glandular structures within epithelial tissue that line hollow structures in the body. It is the most common form of esophageal cancer in the United States and it primarily affects white men, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Carpenter’s second sentence was subject to federal sentencing enhancements due to the offence occurring while she was on pretrial release for the first sentence, according to the indictment.

She was originally ordered to report to federal prison on April 22, 2017. The court relied on the phony medical records to delay her report date at least five times until April 29, 2019.

“Without proper treatment, [Carpenter’s] cancer will turn malignant and metastasize,” one of Carpenter’s motions for delay stated.

Her attorney, Niles Illich, moved to withdraw from the wire fraud case in January 2019, telling U.S. District Judge Sidney Fitzwater in Dallas that he suspects he had been “an unwitting tool in a fraud on this court” due to Carpenter cutting off contact with him. Judge Fitzwater then ordered Carpenter’s arrest and vacated his last reporting date extension.

Carpenter was convicted in 2017 on the wire fraud charge for stealing from commercial real estate firm Property Advisers Realty, her former employer based in Irving.

“She admitted she fraudulently issued at least $133,000 in checks payable to herself, $157,000 in checks payable to a fictitious company she created, and used company money to pay off personal accounts with JC Penny, DirectTV, TXU Energy, and Verizon, resulting in more than $372,000 of losses to the property management company,” prosecutors said in a statement Thursday.

Carpenter used her position as vice president of accounting to approve payment of phony invoices she emailed to the company from fictitious vendors, the November 2016 indictment states.

Property Advisers Realty did not immediately respond to an email message requesting comment Thursday evening. The firm sued Carpenter in Dallas County District Court in 2012 for fraud, theft and conversion and was granted default judgment for over $652,000 later that year.

During a deposition in the civil suit, Carpenter admitted to taking trips to Las Vegas to gamble with the money. She admitted to not disclosing previous criminal cases against her in Dallas, Denton and Tarrant counties for writing bad checks and theft.

“Essentially, it was kind of like I was leading a double life,” she said according to court records. “Like I had this going on at the same time when everybody thought I had my act together.”

Carpenter told her former employer’s attorneys she did not deliberately try to damage the firm, that she “just got in over my head … I didn’t want to hurt anyone on purpose.”