INDIANA
A jury today convicted the former chief deputy auditor for LaPorte County, Indiana, of embezzling over $150,000 from the LaPorte County government, tax fraud and defrauding her elderly father-in-law out of at least $400,000, officials announced.
Authorities said Mary Ray used the money to gamble in casinos.
Ray, 67, of La Porte, Indiana, was convicted of two counts each of theft of government monies and making false statements on a tax return, and with seven counts of wire fraud.
Ray will be sentenced on Dec. 22.
From September 2011 through December 2012, while she served as deputy chief auditor for LaPorte County, Ray embezzled over $150,000 from county coffers, and underreported her income on her U.S. Individual Tax Returns for those years by failing to report the embezzled funds, according to authorities.
Evidence at trial also showed that Ray defrauded her 86-year-old father-in-law, a disabled veteran, out of at least $400,000 that he entrusted her to oversee, officials said.
The trial evidence also demonstrated that Ray used the funds that she embezzled from LaPorte County and stole from her father-in-law to gamble at casinos, officials said.