NEWS RELEASE
OFFICE OF THE UNITED STATES ATTORNEY

SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS
A. COURTNEY COX
UNITED STATES ATTORNEY

Nine Executive Drive, Fairview Heights, Illinois 62208, Telephone (618) 628-3700

FORMER FBI EMPLOYEE SENTENCED FOLLOWING PLEA TO EMBEZZLEMENT

A. Courtney Cox, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Illinois, announced today that on September 10, 2008, former FBI employee of 25 years, KAREN LOUISE STROHMIER, 53, of Centreville, VA, plead guilty to embezzlement, a federal felony, and was sentenced to three years probation, the first six months to be served in “home confinement” with electronic monitoring, and ordered to make full restitution to the United States.

On December 26, 2007, an Information was filed in United States District Court alleging that STROHMIER, while acting as an administrative officer in the FBI’s Indianapolis Office, stole $22,425 in money orders which belonged to the United States Department of Justice and had come into her possession by virtue of her job as administrative officer.

According to a stipulation of facts filed at her plea, STROHMIER occupied an administrative position with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Indianapolis office and in that capacity obtained money orders to pay for FBI expenses so that investigations would not be revealed to the public. She admitted that she converted money orders, which should have been used by her to pay FBI bills, by depositing the money orders into her bank account or cashing them and keeping the money rather than delivering the money orders to the vendors. To cover up her scheme, she copied the money orders she obtained and attached the copies to the invoices kept by the FBI. Since the copied money orders did not reflect that she had deposited some of them into her own account or cashed them, her scheme was not detected because the FBI records showed that a bill had been paid in full by the FBI when in fact it had not been. So as not to be caught, STROHMIER used this scheme on vendors who, when they did not receive payment for a previous bill, simply re-billed. Those re-billings would then be handled by the defendant as if they were new bills and the defendant would obtained new money orders from the FBI and pay them in full, once again attaching the receipts for the money orders obtained by her.

After the defendant was transferred to Washington, a vendor who had billed the FBI in Indianapolis and who had not been paid, complained to the FBI. When told that the records indicated payment had been made, the vendor was adamant that no payment had been made. Agents from the FBI determined the defendant had deposited money orders into her own account relating to this vendor and notified the Inspector Generals Office of their findings. Investigation by the Inspector General has revealed that $22,475 in money orders, listed in the information, were deposited into the defendant’s account without authorization from the FBI. STROHMIER, who confessed and agreed to repay the Bureau, admitted that she had stolen $86,025. She repaid $50,000 of the $86,025 to the clerk of the court at the sentencing hearing and was ordered to pay the remainder as part of her sentence.

The investigation was conducted by the Office of Inspector General of the United States Department of Justice. The United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Indiana recused itself and the Attorney General appointed Assistant United States Attorneys, Michael Carr and James Cutchin, from the United States Attorney’s office in the Southern District of Illinois to handle the prosecution.