Woman Given 2-Year Term Over Spending : Crime: Priscilla Butler used most of $1.4 million embezzled by her mother to finance a lavish lifestyle. Judge calls the case ‘bizarre.’

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, received two years in prison to go along with her notoriety.

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

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

She will join her mother, Betty Jo Sutton-Gibson--a 42-year-old former bookkeeper who admitted stealing the fortune to feed her daughter’s extravagant tastes--at the women’s state prison in Frontera.

Subtracting her time in jail awaiting her fate plus “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 neglectful mother, was sentenced to five years in prison for grand theft. She embezzled the money from a heater manufacturing firm from 1988 to 1990. She did it by replacing vendors’ names on checks with her own, issuing new checks at a later date and covering her tracks by intercepting the returned stubs.

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 cashiers checks.

But the judge 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. Before the plea bargain, she faced a maximum prison sentence of five years. 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 molesting 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 for comment Wednesday, have denied the charges.

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

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 told The Times last month, “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 after her father returned from Vietnam and the parents divorced. Her mother met her stepfather when she was about 5; even then, 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 one-time 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. She was 22 and had acquired a Mercedes, a Porsche, a Jeep Cherokee, 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 much of her belongings.

Police began investigating after a bank officer alerted officials at Scheu Manufacturing Co. of Upland, where Sutton-Gibson worked as an accounting clerk, that the woman appeared to have engaged in some unusual banking activities.

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

Butler had claimed she did not know that her mother, who made $16,500 her last full year at Scheu, was merely a bookkeeper. She said her mother claimed the money--$1.4 million over two years--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 Elizalde-Daly said Butler’s two-page letter in pencil expressed remorse for Scheu’s outstanding losses, estimated at as much as $800,000.

Butler, through her attorney, 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.