How O.C. Mother Stole Daughter’s Heart

The diners were oddly cordial at the Coco’s restaurant, each a player in a bizarre Cinderella-like crime story.

Around the same table sat two police detectives, a man whose company was defrauded of as much as $1.4 million and a 22-year-old woman who blew most of the money in Orange County’s toniest malls, art galleries and car dealerships.

Priscilla Butler, her hair flowing down the back of a shirt stamped San Bernardino County Jail, was doing her best to avoid going to prison along with her mother, who is serving five years for stealing money from her employer and spending it on her daughter.

“It must be strange,” she said, looking across the table at her mother’s former boss, “buying dinner for the daughter of a woman who stole so much money from you. . . . I suppose I should have wondered where my mom was getting that kind of money.”

Butler was back in Laguna Niguel with authorities 10 days ago to turn over the last remnants of her lavish lifestyle after pleading guilty last month to charges of receiving stolen property. As part of her plea, she agreed to surrender all rights to $200,000 in luxury cars and about $500,000 in designer clothes and furnishings hauled out of storage garages near her former Laguna Niguel home.

With her sentencing set for today, Butler was doing her best to win probation. A judge told her that her guilty pleas and her assistance in recovering the victims’ losses might help her avoid prison altogether.

The charges stem from a confession by Betty Jo Sutton-Gibson, Butler’s mother, that, as a bookkeeper for a heater company, she embezzled more than $1 million to feed her daughter’s extravagant tastes. Butler, for her part, concedes only that she perhaps should have questioned where her mother was getting all the money.

The sentencing in a San Bernardino County courtroom, which prosecutors say could be postponed, will cap a case riddled with dizzying excess and pathos: A young mother has an unwanted child, divorces her husband and then marries a man who her only child, Butler, dislikes. Consumed by guilt, the mother spends so much on her daughter that she starts to steal, and the daughter spends all the stolen money.

When the police moved in last year, Butler, jobless and only 22, had managed to acquire a Mercedes-Benz, a Porsche, a Saab and a Jeep Cherokee, and was a day away from closing escrow on a $488,500 house. She had closets brimming with designer ball gowns and outfits, $113,000 in decorator furnishings, $1,000 address books and receipts for a $10,000 21st birthday party she threw herself.

“Gluttonous consumption is the only way to describe it,” said Michele Elizalde-Daly, a San Bernardino County deputy district attorney. “It offends my middle-class values.

“This,” she added, “is a girl who would go in and buy four pairs of shoes for $1,200. She was spending thousands of dollars a day. She went into a dealership and plunked down the money for a $70,000 car. A 21-year-old. No trade-in. And she’s driving a Porsche? And nobody thought that was odd? I asked about this and they said, ‘Maybe it’s unusual in San Bernardino, but this is Orange County.”’

The tale of how mother and daughter ended up behind bars starts in a humble West Covina apartment, moves to middle-class Chino Hills and winds up in the wealthier neighborhoods of South Orange County.

What first smacks of a story about a compulsive shopper trying to impress with wealth eventually looks more like the sad tale of two generations of women who, as Sutton-Gibson described herself, “tried to buy love.”

Now serving a five-year sentence for grand theft at the state prison in Frontera, Sutton-Gibson, 42, confessed the first day that Upland Detectives Jeff Mendenhall and Steve Adams confronted her last August at Scheu Manufacturing Co.

“We walked in,” Mendenhall recalled, “and she just looked relieved that it was all over.”

Plainly dressed with long blond hair, Sutton-Gibson was a soft-spoken accounts payable clerk at the heater maker, a “loyal, good employee” and “the last person you would have suspected of doing this,” said Allyn Scheu, president of the 100-employee company founded in 1911 by his grandfather. “Maybe that’s why it worked.”

It all started, authorities believe, with a March, 1988, car crash. Butler, then driving a Volkswagen Rabbit, was struck by a drunk driver. Her mother believed that insurance would not replace that car, and she told investigators that she altered the first of several Scheu Co. checks that she would make payable to herself.

Court documents and interviews with investigators and company officials reveal that what began as a onetime theft escalated into a regular pattern.

Sutton-Gibson would use an erasable typewriter to remove a check recipient’s name and replace it with her own. She would then have Scheu officials sign new checks to the same vendors. She further covered her tracks by volunteering to pick up the company mail, thereby intercepting the returned checks.

Allyn Scheu concedes that the company’s financial system of “checks and balances” eroded with misplaced trust in Sutton-Gibson, who had worked at the company for at least four years. He said she initially was taking about $10,000 a month. Her withdrawals on Scheu accounts skyrocketed in the final months before her arrest, when authorities say Butler was spending furiously on her approaching wedding and professionally decorated house.

“Ten thousand dollars a month is a lot of money,” Scheu admitted, “but in our operation you’re not going to miss it when you don’t have (cross-check) controls. I mean, if she’d kept to a smaller amount, she could’ve maintained the pace” undetected for some time.

With the proceeds from that first $10,000 check, authorities said, Butler bought herself a Saab. By now she had moved out of the family’s Chino Hills home and shared a Laguna Niguel condo with a friend from Don Anthony Lugo High School, where she “twirled baton and flags” and earned Bs and Cs.

After graduation, she enrolled at both Saddleback College and UC Irvine, where she said she majored in environmental analysis and design.

Before she quit working altogether and was supported by her mother, Butler held jobs at a Brea Mall House of Fabrics store, a Nordstrom store and a Velvet Turtle restaurant.

But by 1989 she had no job and lived on what authorities allege was a $5,000 monthly allowance from her mother. She and several roommates lived in a spacious Mediterranean-style cul-de-sac home on Danforth Avenue in Laguna Niguel, originally rented for $1,800 a month. The roommates moved out later, replaced by Butler’s 28-year-old fiance, a mall salesman.

Neighbors recall delivery trucks pulling up to Butler’s curb with regularity. Some of them say they were struck by the number of rugs and other purchases inside the home still bearing price tags. And they still talk about the elegant Christmas party of 1989.

Combined with the house trimmings, Butler’s Christmas ornaments alone cost an estimated $8,000, police said. Catered food and cocktails were served by roaming butlers.

“It was really quite amazing,” said one next-door neighbor. “Here’s this kid with all of this, this spread. You don’t want to just ask, ‘Where did you get all this money?’ But with the things she said, you got the impression her parents were wealthy.”

Butler says her mother claimed that the fortune came from promotions and inheritance. She insisted that she did not know that her mother’s annual salary was only $16,500 until after two Upland detectives arrived with moving vans at her doorstep last Aug. 22. Even then, she told a neighbor that her mother had died and that her stepfather was raiding the place.

A day earlier, Sutton-Gibson attempted to deposit into her account a Scheu check for $45,031.53. A bank officer became suspicious, contacted Scheu and, in the words of Sutton-Gibson’s attorney, the “jig was up.” The check was returned to Scheu.

The next day she was arrested and she confessed. In her purse were two more uncashed Scheu checks payable to her.

In announcing the arrests, Upland Police Chief Gary Hart would call it the biggest embezzlement case in the history of the city, an upscale bedroom community of 66,000.

The arrests “devastated” Mary Stuart, the Brock Classics real estate agent who spent months with Butler and her fiance before escrow was about to close on the 3,800-square-foot home near Nellie Gail Ranch.

Stuart recalled that “she looked like Alice in Wonderland. She was adorable, she was sharp, she had a darling fiance, a great life. She had the Porsche, the Jeep, the dream house.”

Stuart sighed heavy. “I missed a commission check by one day!”

Before Butler’s mother went to prison last month, Sutton-Gibson came clean with investigators mounting a prosecution against her daughter. During a wide-ranging interview with Mendenhall and Elizalde-Daly, she said the car crash started a “problem” she tried to but could not fix. And it was all to compensate for 20 years of botched motherhood.

She told police that she was just 19 when Priscilla was born and that she had never wanted to be a mother. Her daughter grew up knowing that.

“Priscilla . . . to this day, she’s asked me more than 12 times how come I do not give her up for adoption. . . . I guess because I saw what my mother and stepfather did by trying to buy my love, I figure that’s the only way I could try to be a mother to her.”

Authorities said she spent almost none of the embezzled money on herself or her husband, who had a stormy relationship with Butler.

“My child grew up a miserable childhood, and I even knew, say, even a year or two ago, I knew trying to buy her love with this money was not making her a happy person. I was thinking about this the other day. When she was still living in Chino Hills with us and . . . making her own money, she was happy. . . . And she is miserable now. She was the happiest when she was on her own.”

Aside from $220,000 in uncashed cashier’s checks payable to Butler’s escrow company, the remainder of the embezzled money was spent, police said. In piles of sales slips, investigators found receipts for Butler’s donations to a host of charities, mostly benefiting underprivileged or abandoned children.

Two Saturdays ago, police got Butler out of jail for the day to help them inventory the articles in her storage garages that had been bought with embezzled money. Scheu family members were polite throughout 12 hours with Butler that were interrupted only by pizza lunch and the dinner at the Mission Viejo Coco’s, paid for by Curtis Scheu, the company’s financial officer.

Overseeing the inventory and packing of the property April 13, Scheu attorney Mike Young said merchandise still bearing price tags will be returned to stores for possible refunds, the used property perhaps consigned to decorators.

Leland Scheu, another company executive, stood watching the loading of boxes filled with an estimated $8,000 in Christmas decorations, his wife sometimes shaking her head in disbelief nearby. “Julie, go take a look. There’s a damn stuffed reindeer in there!”

Blinking back tears, Butler spent several hours reconstructing the relationship that had brought her to this: sitting cross-legged on an asphalt driveway in jail blues, watching people cart away her zoo of stuffed animals.

Less than a year before she had been sitting in the orchestra watching the Australian ballet at the Performing Arts Center, where she had season tickets and membership in one of the support guilds.

Confident that she will be released on probation, Butler said she intends to return to college, changing her major to art history, and to find a job. “I did it before, so I can do it again,” she said.