Missouri woman arrested in alleged scheme to defraud Elvis Presley’s family through Graceland sale
Brad Vest/Getty Images
(KIMBERLING CITY, MO) — A Missouri woman was arrested Friday morning in connection with an alleged scheme to defraud Elvis Presley’s family out of millions of dollars and the ownership of Graceland, the Justice Department announced.
Lisa Findley is alleged to have orchestrated the scheme to conduct the sale of Graceland by falsely claiming that Presley’s daughter, prior to her death, had pledged the estate as collateral for a loan she hadn’t repaid, prosecutors said.
“As part of the brazen scheme, we allege that the defendant created numerous false documents and sought to extort a settlement from the Presley family,” the head of DOJ’s criminal division, Nicole Argentieri, said in a statement announcing the arrest.
Findley, 53, of Kimberling City, Missouri, was charged with mail fraud and aggravated identity theft, the DOJ said. She is scheduled to make her first appearance later Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri. She does not yet have any attorney listed as representing her in online court records.
The criminal complaint, which was unsealed Friday, outlined the alleged scheme, which prosecutors said involved a fake private lender, forged documents and signatures and a fraudulent foreclosure notice for the Graceland estate in Memphis in an attempt to get millions from the Presley family.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(BOSTON) — The family of a Boston police officer whose death is at the center of the Karen Read murder case has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against her and two Massachusetts bars they went to before his death.
John O’Keefe III, 46, was found dead the morning of Jan. 29, 2022, outside a home in Canton, Massachusetts, police said. The civil lawsuit, filed Monday, alleged that his girlfriend, Read, struck him with her car while intoxicated and left him for dead.
The lawsuit, which includes O’Keefe’s brother, parents and niece as plaintiffs, is suing Read and two bars — C.F. McCarthy’s and Waterfall Bar and Grille — for unspecified damages, alleging wrongful death and negligent infliction of emotional distress.
Read’s attorney told ABC News her defense team is not commenting on the lawsuit at this time.
A representative for C.F. McCarthy’s had no comment when contacted by ABC News. ABC News was unable to reach the owner of Waterfall Bar and Grille.
The lawsuit comes after a judge declared a mistrial last month in the case against Read, who was charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating a motor vehicle under the influence and leaving the scene of a fatal accident. She had pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutors alleged she hit O’Keefe with her car and left him to die in the middle of a snowstorm after the two got into an argument earlier in the day.
Judge Beverly Cannone declared a mistrial in the case on July 1 after the jury said it was unable to reach a unanimous consensus on the fifth day of deliberations. The Norfolk District Attorney’s Office said they planned to retry the case, and the new trial has been scheduled to start on Jan. 27, 2025.
Cannone last week denied a request to dismiss two of Read’s charges — second-degree murder and leaving the scene of a fatal accident — in the retrial. Read’s attorneys had argued in court filings that retrying her on the charges would violate double jeopardy protections because, based on subsequent statements from four jurors, the jury had reached a unanimous decision to acquit Read on the charges.
In her ruling released on Friday, Cannone concluded that double jeopardy was not at issue “because the defendant was not acquitted of any charges and defense counsel consented to the court’s declaration of a mistrial.”
Read has strenuously denied the allegations, and her lawyers alleged that a fellow police officer was involved in O’Keefe’s death and colluded with others in a cover-up.
The lawsuit alleges Read and O’Keefe’s relationship had been “deteriorating” in the months leading up to his death, during which time Read “picked fights, experienced jealousy and had delusions of unfaithfulness.”
Read was served seven alcoholic drinks over roughly an hour and a half while at C.F. McCarthy’s with O’Keefe on the night of Jan. 28, 2022, and “showed signs of intoxication,” the lawsuit alleges. The lawsuit then alleges she carried out her drink and went to Waterfall, where she was served one shot and one mixed alcoholic drink, before leaving with O’Keefe shortly after midnight and driving him to a residence in Canton.
The lawsuit alleges the two had an argument and she “drove her SUV and hit” O’Keefe, then fled the scene and went to O’Keefe’s home. The lawsuit claims Read returned to the residence later that morning and observed him “laying on the ground, buried in the snow, where she had earlier left him to die.” O’Keefe suffered trauma injuries before becoming hypothermic, the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit alleges the two bars negligently service alcohol to an intoxicated person, and that Read “intended the reckless conduct that resulted in [O’Keefe’s] injuries/death.”
The lawsuit also alleges Read “intentionally and/or recklessly inflicted severe emotional distress” on O’Keefe’s then-14-year-old niece, who was under his care. Read allegedly returned to his home, woke the teen up and told her something had happened to her uncle, that “she hit her uncle or a snow plow hit her uncle,” according to the lawsuit.
(NEW YORK) — The NASA astronauts who flew Boeing’s Starliner to the International Space Station (ISS) and will now remain there until next year say they don’t feel let down by the mission.
Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams. who performed the first crewed test flight of Starliner, have been in space since early June. When they launched, they were only supposed to be on the ISS for about a week.
NASA and Boeing officials decided to send Starliner back to Earth earlier this month after several issues and keep Wilmore and Williams onboard until February. They will be sent home on a SpaceX Crew-9 Dragon spacecraft.
When asked if they felt let down by the way the mission turned out, Wilmore said they didn’t.
“Let down? Absolutely not,” Wilmore said during a press conference on Friday. “It’s never entered my mind. It’s a fair question I can tell you, I thought a lot about this press conference … and what I wanted to say and convey.”
He added, “NASA do a great job of making a lot of things look easy. …. That’s just the way it goes. sometimes because we are pushing the edges of the envelope in everything that we do.”
Williams said she and Wilmore are very knowledgeable about Starliner so the problems with the spacecraft were “obvious” to both of them, but she was happy to see it return to Earth.
“I was so happy it got home with no problems,” she said, “We saw it fly away, and then we all got up. The whole crew got up at three in the morning, and we had it up on our iPads, watching it land.”
Starliner landed at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in the early hours of Sept. 7.
Despite Starliner’s issues, NASA officials said Wilmore and Williams would have been safe onboard Starliner if they returned with the spacecraft.
“If we’d have had a crew on board the spacecraft, we would have followed the same back away sequence from the space station, the same de-orbit burn and executed the same entry and so it would have been a safe, successful landing with the crew on board,” Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said at a post-landing press conference.
Stich told reporters last month that NASA will send Dragon to the ISS in September, with only two of the four astronauts assigned to it.
The spacecraft would carry extra spacesuits for Wilmore and Williams. However, the two would remain on the ISS until February 2025, when Crew-9 is set to return to Earth.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(SALIDA, Colo.) — An insurance underwriter who was rescued on a central Colorado mountain after allegedly being left behind by his co-workers was hiking to raise money for World Central Kitchen, according to his company.
The hiker, 46-year-old Steve Stephanides, was rescued on Saturday after enduring a night stuck on 14,230-foot Mt. Shavano during a freezing rain storm, officials said.
Contacted by ABC News on Wednesday, Stephanides said his company, the Beazley global insurance firm, was still gathering facts about the expedition and referred all questions to his company’s spokesperson.
Breazley CEO Adrian Cox, who is based in London, released a statement Thursday morning to ABC News, praising the Chaffee County Search and Rescue — South, an all volunteer rescue team in Colorado, for saving his employee’s life.
“We are very grateful to the Chaffee County Search and Rescue South who came to the aid of one of our employees after he encountered difficulties during a charity hike. Chaffee County SAR’s swift response and brave actions, during adverse weather conditions, ensured that our colleague was rescued and returned safely,” Cox said.
A spokesperson for Beazely confirmed to ABC News that company employees were on Mt. Shavano as a part of an annual charity hiking trip to raise money for World Central Kitchen, the nonprofit humanitarian organization founded in 2010 by celebrity chef José Andrés to deliver meals in disaster areas around the globe, including war zones in Ukraine and Gaza.
“This charity hike has been running for over a decade and many individuals have participated on multiple occasions,” Cox said. “We are proud of their commitment to their fundraising efforts and will continue to work with those involved to ensure they fully recover from this incident and get the support they need.”
Cox did not provide additional details on how the near-tragedy occurred on the annual office charity hike.
“In what might cause some awkward encounters at the office in the coming days and weeks, one member of their party was left to complete his final summit push alone,” Chaffee County Search and Rescue — South said in a statement.
Previous online posts and photos from Beazely colleagues indicate that this was at least the second year in a row Stephanides has participated in the charity hike.
The office outing gone wrong unfolded Friday on Mt. Shavano in central Colorado’s San Isabel National Forest, according to Danny Andres, president of the volunteer rescue group.
“Our subject was getting close to the summit and took a break, and some of the people who were in his group were starting to head down,” Danny Andres told ABC’s “Good Morning America” Thursday. “He decided to carry on up the summit.”
While 14 employees made it down the mountain safely, rescue officials said one was left to complete the summit solo. Andres said the worker made it to the summit at 11:30 a.m., but when he tried to descend, he became “disoriented as to where the trail was.”
The hiker used his cellphone to pin-drop his location to his co-workers, who informed him that he was on the wrong route and instructed him to hike back up to the summit to get to the correct trail down, rescue officials said in a statement.
“In his initial attempts to descend, he found himself in the steep boulder and scree field on the northeast slopes toward Shavano Lake,” according to officials.
Just before 4 p.m. local time on Friday, Stephanides sent another location pin-drop to his colleagues that he was near the correct trail. Shortly after that message, a strong storm passed through the area with freezing rain and high winds, rescue officials said in a statement.
“Being in those kind of cold, freezing rain, winds it takes a toll on you,” Andres said.
At least seven different rescue teams from across Colorado were involved in the search for Stephanides.
Stephanides also lost his cellphone reception on the way down the mountain, and following his rescue, told lifesavers he had fallen at least 20 times on the steep slopes and was unable to get up the last time he fell.
Making matters worse, Stephanides’ colleagues had inexplicably collected belongings left in a boulder field to mark the path down, officials said.
When his colleagues didn’t hear from him, they reported Stephanides missing at 9 p.m., some eight-and-a-half hours after he started his descent, officials said.
Rescue teams found Stephanides in a gully near a drainage creek and carried him down the mountain on a gurney, officials said. He was and taken to a hospital in stable condition, officials said.
Rescuers said Stephanides was “phenomenally lucky” that the weather cleared on Saturday and he regained enough cellphone service to call 911.
“All of the teams that were involved are all volunteer rescuers,” Andres said. “It’s tiring, but it’s rewarding when we go out and find people and are able to reunite them with their loved ones. It’s fantastic.”
ABC News’ Laryssa Demkiw and Emme Marchese contributed to this report.
