PORT ANGELES — The trial of accused embezzler and former Clallam County treasurer’s cashier Catherine Betts began Monday with the questioning of potential jurors.
More juror interrogations continue this morning at 10 a.m. at the county courthouse in the courtroom of Superior Court Judge Brooke Taylor.
The pool of potential jurors for the first-degree theft trial totals 120, “a larger pool than normal, basically because of the publicity,” Superior Court Administrator Lindy Clevenger said.
The trial of Betts, accused of stealing $617,467 in public funds from the county Treasurer’s Office while she served as cashier, was expected to last 10 days but may extend beyond that after numerous jurors said in written jury questionnaires that they had read accounts of the nearly 2½-year-old case in the Peninsula Daily News.
That prompted Judge Taylor to question those jurors individually for most of Monday to determine what they had learned about the case, to whom they had spoken and whether what they knew and believed about the case would prevent them from presuming Betts’ innocence.
“You know, nobody ever got convicted because of what was in the newspaper,” Taylor told one potential juror.
“It has to be here in open court.”
Also questioning the potential jurors was Scott Marlow of the state Attorney General’s Office, which is prosecuting the case, and Loren Oakley of Clallam-Jefferson Public Defenders.
A few potential jurors said they wondered at how the theft went undetected as long as it did.
The thefts occurred from as early as 2004, and Betts was arrested May 19, 2009.
Betts admitted to supervisors on that day — a matter of days before she was fired — that she stole $1,200.
In a June 14 court hearing, she lowered the amount to $866.
“I was believing I took $1,200, but I didn’t,” she said at the June 14 hearing, not providing an explanation for the discrepancy.
Betts, a former Port Angeles resident now living in Shelton, was in court in a wheelchair Monday sitting next to her lawyers.
She allegedly stole real estate excise tax proceeds by exchanging property owners’ checks with money from the office cash drawer and hiding the scheme by manipulating spread sheets and destroying and altering office records.
Betts also is charged with money laundering and 19 counts of filing false or fraudulent tax returns.
Marlow must prove that she stole at least $5,000 to obtain a first-degree theft conviction.
Judge George L. Wood ruled June 14 that Betts’ May 2009 confession to then-Treasurer Judy Scott and accountant Ann Stollard was admissible for her trial.
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Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-417-3536 or at paul.gottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
