The Ultimate Material Girl : In One Heck of a Spree, Priscilla Butler Spent the Million Her Mom Had Embezzled

The diners had been oddly cordial at the Coco’s in Mission Viejo, each a player in a bizarre crime story.

Around the table sat the financial officer for an Upland heater company defrauded of as much as $1.4 million; the 23-year-old woman who blew most of it in Orange County’s toniest malls, art galleries and car dealerships, and her escorts for the day, two police detectives.

Priscilla Butler had spent the day surrendering the last remnants of her lavish lifestyle.

Her blond hair flowing down the back of a shirt stamped San Bernardino County Jail, Butler was sweetly doing her best to avoid her mother’s fate: five years in the slammer for stealing the fortune her daughter had spent during a 30-month shopping bender.

“It must be strange,” Butler says, 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.”

Then, in her closest stab at apology, she adds: “I suppose I should have wondered where my mom was getting that kind of money.”

When police moved in last summer, Butler, jobless and only 22, had managed to acquire a Mercedes, a Porsche, a Saab and a Jeep Cherokee; she also was only a day from closing escrow on a $488,500 house in Laguna Hills with limestone flooring and its own library. She had closets brimming with designer ball gowns and outfits, $1,000 address books, receipts for a $10,000 party she threw for her 21st birthday, and $113,000 in decorator services and furnishings. Less than a month before her Aug. 22 arrest, Butler’s art-filled home in Laguna Niguel had been featured in a Times story on interior decorating.

“Gluttonous consumption is the only way to describe it,” says Michele Elizalde-Daly, the San Bernardino County deputy district attorney who has handled Butler’s case. “It offends my middle-class values.

“This 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.’ ”

Throughout her spree, Butler says, she never wondered how her mother, an accounts-payable clerk, was able to give her so much money. Although she admits only that perhaps she should have asked where all the dough came from, Butler pleaded guilty last month to charges of receiving stolen property.

“My attorney said that only means I should have known it was stolen,” Butler stresses, “not that I did know. I don’t know why my mom did this. She must have really low self-esteem.”

Hoping for leniency at her sentencing today, Butler has relinquished all rights to $200,000 in luxury cars and about $500,000 in designer clothes and furnishings.

A San Bernardino County judge, seeking some incentive for Butler to return the stuff, said her guilty plea and help in recovering some of the victim’s losses might win her probation instead of hard time.

Concerned about the message that might send--it’s OK to steal if, once caught, you give back the loot--prosecutor Elizalde-Daly says she’ll seek a prison term.

“I haven’t seen a bit of remorse, nor has she taken any responsibility for this,” Elizalde-Daly says. “We are just expected to believe that she never wondered where a million and a half bucks came from, like it wasn’t strange to have designer sheets and then go get them tailored. Or spend $3,000 on your desk-top set. She spent $52,000 in one month and her mom answers the phone at work, accounts payable? Right.”

Riddled with dizzying excess and pathos, 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 Butler’s mom, Betty Jo Sutton-Gibson, says of herself, “tried to buy love.”

Now imprisoned for grand theft at the state prison in Frontera, Sutton-Gibson, 42, confessed the first day Upland detectives Jeff Mendenhall and Steve Adams confronted her last August at Scheu Manufacturing Co.

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

Other than her long blond hair, Sutton-Gibson had little in common with her only child. She dressed plainly and was a reserved and soft-spoken accounts-payable clerk at the heater maker--a “loyal, good employee” and “the last person you would of suspected of doing this,” says Allyn Scheu, vice president of the 100-employee company founded in 1911 by his grandfather. “Maybe that’s why it worked.”

It all started in March, 1988, authorities believe, after a drunken driver hit Butler’s Volkswagen Rabbit. Sutton-Gibson believed insurance would not replace the car; she told investigators that’s when she altered the first of several Scheu Co. checks.

What began as a one-time theft escalated into a regular pattern: Butler asked her mom for money and usually got it.

Using an erasable typewriter ribbon, Sutton-Gibson removed a check recipient’s name and replaced it with her own. At a later date, she would 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 canceled altered checks.

Scheu concedes the company’s financial “checks and balances” eroded with misplaced trust in Sutton-Gibson, who had worked several years for the family-run company. She initially took about $10,000 a month. Her thefts skyrocketed in the months before her arrest, when authorities say Butler spent furiously on her upcoming wedding and professionally decorated house.

“Ten thousand dollars a month is a lot of money,” Scheu admits, “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, Butler bought a Saab. By 1989, after working as a waitress and fabric sales clerk, she lived solely on what authorities allege was a $5,000 monthly allowance from her mother.

She and several roommates shared a spacious, Mediterranean-style cul-de-sac home in Laguna Niguel, rented for $1,800 a month. The roommates later moved out, replaced by Butler’s 28-year-old fiance, a salesman at a South Coast Plaza store; he declines comment. Authorities say Butler spent at least $100,000 at that shop, on everything from sofas and clothes to sheets and leather coasters. She dropped a wad on luggage alone--mainly Louis Vuitton and Michael Cromer, whose address books go for $1,000.

The spending, prosecutor Elizalde-Daly says, was so feverish, the purchases sometimes so seemingly thoughtless, that it could only be called a job in itself.

Investigators found closets stuffed with Size 4 outfits dripping with price tags. Butler seemed to favor Adrianne Vittadini, Ellen Tracy, Anne Klein and Donna Karan, although she left a Chanel suit worth several thousand dollars at a dry cleaner.

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

The tree ornaments and house trimmings cost an estimated $8,000, police say. Roaming butlers served catered food and cocktails. Guests included Butler’s Laguna Beach interior decorator and sales people who waited on her at Orange County’s pricier boutiques and art galleries.

“It was really quite amazing,” says 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.”

Friends and acquaintances say Butler used a host of slightly different stories to explain her seemingly endless stream of cash. She told one that she was an heir to the Doheny family, one of California’s oil pioneers.

“I told people what my mom told me,” Butler says, refusing to elaborate on the advice of her attorney.

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

A day earlier, Sutton-Gibson had 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 drove to work in the white Jeep Cherokee her daughter no longer wanted, the soundtrack to “Pretty Woman” on the stereo. When police arrived, she confessed. In her purse were two more uncashed Scheu checks, payable to her.

In announcing the arrests, Upland Police Chief Gary Hart called it the biggest embezzlement case in the city’s history.

It also sent a buzz through South Coast Plaza, where Butler often dropped thousands of dollars a trip. Many bridesmaids for her now-canceled wedding were saleswomen she’d met while shopping.

The arrests “devastated” the real estate agent who had spent months getting to know Butler and her fiance. Escrow was about to close on a 3,800-square-foot home near Nellie Gail Ranch.

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

She sighs heavily: “I missed a commission check by one day!”

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

She was 19 when Priscilla was born. She told police she had never wanted to be a mother. And, Sutton-Gibson says, her daughter knew it.

“Priscilla . . . to this day she’s asked me more than 12 times how come I (did) 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.”

Sutton-Gibson spent little of the embezzled money on herself or husband, with whom she lived in a modest Ontario tract home. Monte Gibson, who was neither charged nor implicated, told police of his stormy relationship with Butler. He said she demanded her mother buy her only top-drawer goods--and she usually got them.

“Priscilla’s typical day would be to go to school or whatever ‘cuz her mother would let her get away with not going to school,” Sutton-Gibson says, in one of her frequent third-person self-references.

“I’d come home, and as soon as that kid was old enough to have her own TV and own phone, I kinda pushed her into her bedroom, and lots of times she had dinner in her bedroom, ‘cuz her mother did not cook, and as far as being a typical family, that was out of the question.”

Before Sutton-Gibson went back to jail, Mendenhall asked if perhaps she was attempting to spare her daughter prison time by blaming herself. Her Texas accent sounding distant, Sutton-Gibson offered a painful reply:

“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. But then when her mother got in the picture again, uh, ‘Don’t work; go to school. I’ll buy you this and this and this,’ she wasn’t happy. She was miserable. And she is miserable now.”

Butler agrees.

“I was spoiled rotten my whole life. That’s part of why they went bankrupt,” Butler says. “Every time something bad happened, I went to the store and bought something. And it felt good until we left the store. That was just how we always handled things. . . .

“I was spoiled by her my whole life. Other families had to wait to buy a car. Not mine. Kids in school thought I was spoiled. But I always thought they were spoiled because their parents went with them to Sunday school; they were at all the PTA meetings, the plays. I was on a majorette team starting when I was 6 all through high school, and she never went to a single parade I was in.”

Still, prosecutor Elizalde-Daly says, Butler had to know something was wrong. Sutton-Gibson told police her daughter had repeatedly asked if the money was “good,” but said she always lied to her about it.

Butler holds the Scheu Co. partly responsible for not catching on to the scam quicker. “I do blame them for letting it get so out of hand,” she says in a mocking tone.

“I mean, if it was my company, I think I would have caught on a little sooner.”

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

An attorney for the Scheu Manufacturing Co., whose employees have been stung personally and financially via their profit-sharing program, says it remains unclear whether insurance will cover any of the loss.

Three Saturdays ago, police got Butler out of jail for the day to help inventory the articles in her storage units that had been bought with the embezzled money.

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

Leland Scheu, another company executive, watched the loading of boxes filled with the elaborate Christmas decorations, his wife sometimes shaking her head in disbelief.

“Julie, go take a look,” he said. “There’s a damn stuffed reindeer in there!”

Less than a year before, Priscilla Butler had watched the Australian ballet from the orchestra section of the Orange County Performing Arts Center, where she had season tickets and membership in one of its support guilds.

Now here she was, sitting cross-legged on an asphalt driveway in jail blues, blinking back tears and watching people cart away her zoo of stuffed animals.