Case against woman accused of stealing almost $1 million from resort still in courts

A woman accused of stealing close to $1 million from the gated Ocean Reef Club community over a six-year period has yet to stand trial.

Assistant public defender Jerome Gilhooly told Monroe County Circuit Judge Luis Garcia during a status hearing Tuesday that there are still thousands of documents to review in the state’s case against his client, Jamie Lynn Anderson, 41, and that he is not prepared to defend the case by its scheduled March 28 trial date.

The State Attorney's Office arrested Anderson in September 2015 on a charge of grand theft of over $100,000. Between April 2008 and March 2014, investigators say Anderson enacted a scheme where she would take cash payments in her role as general cashier at the tony subdivision and substitute them with checks, which she would deposit in the company’s vault.

Anderson admitted her crimes in November 2014 to a private investigator hired by Ocean Reef and said did it under pressure from her husband. However, she eventually told investigators that she, too, benefited from the stolen money -- buying things like drugs, cruise trips, concert tickets and a Chevy Camaro. The alleged theft was done so she could "maintain some normalcy," State Attorney Investigators wrote in their 2015 report.

Her husband, James M. Anderson, 40, committed suicide on Jan. 6, 2015.

Anderson said she would randomly select club member check payments and deposit them in place of cash received for toll tickets, food coupons and outlet cash receipts deposited in the front desk safe.

She would make copies of the member checks and keep the copies in her desk until she had another check to cover the first one. Any checks that were left over at the end of the month "became part of a falsified deposit for accounting purposes, which was posted to the general ledger by Anderson," State Attorney's Office Investigator Roy Bogue wrote in his Sept. 17, 2015 report.

Bogue said the staff accountant did not verify that the deposit was legitimate and recorded the falsified deposit as a deposit in transit on the bank reconciliation. Bogue added that the staff accountant "had no knowledge of the crime."

In the first couple of days of the following month, Anderson would deposit the exact amount of her falsified deposits into the bank.

This made it look like the accounting was “clean” each month and “no attention was drawn to the theft,” Bogue wrote. “At which point, she then repeated the process, and did so for several years.”

An outside accounting firm hired by Ocean Reef to measure the damage caused by the theft estimated Anderson got away with a total of $857,393.49.

In 2012, discrepancies with the resort community's bank books were discovered. But it wasn't until March 2014, when a surprise audit of the general cashier's vault revealed a $700 cash shortage, that Anderson’s higher-ups began to catch on to her. She denied responsibility, but Ocean Reef fired her because she was solely responsible for the vault and its contents.

After she was fired, an internal audit manager noticed a pattern of cash being removed and substituted with checks.

Ocean Reef hired private investigator Wayne Black of Wayne Black and Associates, who met with Anderson at a coffee shop in Homestead on Nov. 17, 2014. Black said Anderson admitted to taking the money. According to the warrant, Anderson wrote an apology note to her former boss at Ocean Reef, Ford Franklin.

Anderson provided Black bank statements that he said showed deposits into her account in consistent amounts that were missing from Ocean Reef accounts.

In February 2015, Anderson met with Black and Lisa Runyan-VanderRhoer, Ocean Reef's director of internal auditing. She told both Black and Runyan-VanderRhoer that she began stealing shortly after her daughter was born. She said she would steal thousands of dollars every month.

In her apology letter to Franklin, Anderson again blamed her husband’s drug addiction for her theft.

This story was originally published March 10, 2017 at 9:45 AM with the headline "Case against woman accused of stealing almost $1 million from resort still in courts."