Buying Spree on Stolen Cash Costs 2 Years : Courts: Former Laguna Niguel waitress who spent most of the $1.4 million that her mother embezzled now will spend some time in prison.

She has been wooed by Phil Donahue, featured on “A Current Affair” and called a “wild shopaholic” in this week’s National Enquirer.

On Wednesday, 23-year-old Priscilla Ann Butler, a former Laguna Niguel waitress who became famous for spending most of the $1.4 million that her mother embezzled, got two years in prison to go along with her notoriety.

NBC’s nationally syndicated “Trial Watch” program had its videotape cameras rolling as Superior Court Judge Charles S. Havens sentenced Butler in a crowded San Bernardino County courtroom.

Butler sat stoically and penniless in the courtroom as Havens, calling her case “bizarre,” sentenced her for receiving stolen property.

She will join her mother, Betty Jo Sutton-Gibson, 42--a former bookkeeper who admitted stealing the fortune by altering checks with an eraseable typewriter to feed her daughter’s extravagant tastes--at the women’s state prison in Frontera. Subtracting her time already spent in jail awaiting her fate and “good time” credits, authorities expect Butler to be free in about four months.

Sutton-Gibson, who confessed to police that she embezzled money partially to compensate for being a poor mother, was sentenced to five years in prison for grand theft.

In an 11th-hour bid to spare herself prison, Butler last month surrendered the remnants of her lavish lifestyle--an estimated $200,000 in luxury cars and $450,000 more in designer clothing, furnishings and cashier’s checks.

But the judge Wednesday called that effort “too little, too late.” He sentenced her to the maximum allowed under a plea bargain made March 7, when Butler changed her plea to guilty. Havens also ordered Butler to pay $5,000 to a state victims assistance fund.

Her blond hair draped over her shoulders, Butler remained expressionless as the judge recalled details of the case, calling her relationship with her mother “sick.”

Havens admitted he had vainly tried to discern a “motive” for the mother’s frantic giving and her daughter’s feverish spending.

Havens took note of Butler’s claim in court documents that her mother compulsively bought her things to atone for her stepfather having molested her--as the judge put it, “for being subjected to or not being protected from sexual attacks.” Both the stepfather and Sutton-Gibson, who could not be reached Wednesday, have denied the charges.

“I guess we’ll never know” whether the molestation occurred and if it was a motive for her mother’s crime, Havens told Butler. “I thought for a long time about giving you probation--I really did. . . . but state prison is the only appropriate sentence.”

Wednesday’s hearing was the latest chapter in the story of dazzling excess and troubled relations for Butler, a majorette while in high school in Chino Hills, who last month told The Times, “I’ve been spoiled rotten my whole life.”

In a lengthy interview April 13, Butler said she was born in West Covina and raised by her mother alone after her father returned from Vietnam and the parents divorced. Her mother met her stepfather when she was about 5; even at that early an age, Butler said, she fought with him.

To make up for the discord, Butler said, her mother showered her with gifts. By the time she was in high school, she said, they had spent so much money on Butler that Sutton-Gibson and her husband filed for bankruptcy.

By 1989, the onetime waitress and fabric store clerk was living on a $6,000 monthly allowance from her mother in a spacious Laguna Niguel home filled with art and Ralph Lauren furnishings. The rent was $1,800 a month. She was 22 and had acquired a Mercedes, a Porsche, a Jeep Cherokee and a Saab--and was awaiting arrival of a four-wheel-drive Mercedes station wagon for her boyfriend.

She was one day from closing escrow--in cash--on a $488,500 home floored with limestone and featuring a library when police arrested her last August and seized many of her belongings.

Police began investigating after a bank officer alerted officials at Scheu Manufacturing Co. of Upland, a heater manufacturing firm where Sutton-Gibson worked as an accounting clerk, that the mother had engaged in some unusual banking activities.

Police confronted Sutton-Gibson at work, and she confessed. Hours later Butler was arrested.

Butler has previously claimed that she did not know her mother, who made $16,500 her last full year working at Scheu, was merely a bookkeeper. She said her mother claimed the money--$1.4 million in two years time--came from promotions and an inheritance.

But in a letter to the court Wednesday, Butler wrote that she was sorry for not finding out where the money came from.

San Bernardino County Deputy Dist. Atty. Michele M. Elizalde-Daly said Butler’s two-page letter in pencil expressed remorse for the victim’s outstanding losses, estimated at as much as $800,000.

She asked for probation and offered to do community service work. She also said she intends, once freed, to switch her college major from environmental design to art history, so she can be a museum curator.