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A retired 80-year-old nun from California has pleaded guilty to stealing around $835 000 (almost R13 million) from a Roman Catholic elementary school where she was the principal.
Mary Margaret Kreuper admitted to wire fraud and money laundering during a hearing last year, which she committed in order to fund her gambling problem.
She also spent the money on a few fancy holidays to ritzy resorts in places like Lake Tahoe, where moneyed folk cruise in the summer and ski in the winter.
She explained to the court that she would funnel money sent to the school to pay for tuition and charitable donations into secret accounts that she controlled for her taking.
When the scheme started coming to light, Kreuper apparently asked employees at the school to destroy any evidence, reported Gulf News.
After being confronted, it is said that she argued that priests were better paid than nuns and that she thought she deserved a raise:
The Los Angeles Times says that during her sentencing this week, she asked the judge to show her mercy and spare her from prison:
“I have sinned, I have broken the law, and I have no excuses,” Sister Mary Margaret Kreuper, the former principal of St. James Catholic School, told the judge.
She called her crimes “a violation of my vows, the commandments, the law, and above all the sacred trust that so many had placed in me.”
US District Judge Otis D. Wright II struggled to think of punishment to fit the crime, eventually settling on one year and a day in prison:
Wright told Kreuper she’d been “one heck of a teacher” during her 62 years as a nun.
“You can be proud of that,” he said.
“But somewhere along the line, you just ran completely off the road, and I think you understand that. At least I hope you do.”
While Judge Wright found it difficult to sentence Kreuper to a harsher jail term because he had a connection to a nun during his childhood, a former St. James student was less forgiving.
Here’s Julija Garunkstis, who attended the school between 2005 to 2014:
“To know that she had been taking money from my parents and my peers’ parents the whole time I was there is extremely shocking, and it sways me away from the Catholic Church,” she said.
“Trust shouldn’t be broken like that.”
The money she stole could have covered a decade of tuition for 14 students at a school that lacked money for field trips or new books and classroom supplies, prosecutors said.
Others were keener to forgive and forget, but even so, Kreuper will remain unemployable for quite some time.
It will perhaps be an opportunity for her to really test the vows she took six decades ago, to swear to a life of poverty.
