A 63-year-old woman has been found guilty of embezzling more than $818,000 from a Catholic church in Wisconsin. Deborah Marcellus, who served as the director of development of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Rice Lake, this week pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Madison to wire fraud and filing a false income tax return, according to the Sawyer County Record.
Marcellus generated more than 200 fraudulent checks from church bank accounts for $818,604 from 2011 until April 2017, according to an investigation done by the IRS and the Rice Lake Police Department. St. Joseph’s Church and the Diocese of Superior cooperated in the probe. U.S. District Judge James Peterson has scheduled sentencing for Oct. 2, and she faces up to 20 years in federal prison. READ MORE
