Guilty on all counts – that’s the jury’s verdict in the case of two Nenana women charged with first-degree theft and scheme to defraud.
Nenana Senior Center Director Vickie Moyle, 67, and her daughter, Annie Williams, 48, were accused of scamming their 74-year-old friend in a 2019 real estate deal, and Friday’s decision marks the second time a jury has found the women guilty.
The verdict from a 2022 trial in Fairbanks got tossed because some of the testimony had broken rules of evidence.
During the retrial, attorneys again brought in witnesses to suss out a clear narrative from the tangle of paperwork, tax law and small-town relationships.
The case turned on whether the defendants understood key elements of tax law, and while there’s some arithmetic involved, the bigger questions the Nenana jury had to consider were about knowledge: Who knew what when, and how did they use it?
That rose to the surface Thursday, the final day of the trial, in an exchange between Alaska State Troopers Fraud Investigator Andrea Jacobson and Assistant Public Defender Patrick Roach.
“The whole point of this case is whether or not they ripped off an older lady that was not – that’s what this is about,” Jacobson said.
“Well but this whole point, the whole point of this case is what they knew,” Roach replied.
The uncontested pieces of the timeline went as follows.
In the spring of 2019, the City of Nenana informed 74-year-old Mae Jensen that her home had built up unpaid taxes equivalent to more than 90% of the property’s $70,000 value.
By September, Jensen was signing off on a quitclaim deed that transferred possessory interest to Williams, one of the defendants.
Between those two dates, the defendants had gone to Jensen with a deal in which they’d handle the back taxes and make up the rest of the home’s value by paying Jensen directly.
But the city couldn’t enforce the collection of those back taxes because of a six-year statute of limitations, and the property also couldn’t have incurred additional taxes under Jensen’s ownership due to a senior tax exemption.
Parties agreed Jensen didn’t understand those laws at the time of the deal, so that’s where things got trickier.
On Wednesday, Nenana Mayor Joshua Verhagen testified that the defendants had visited the city office more than once in an attempt to confirm how the laws applied to Jensen’s property prior to buying it from her.
In closing arguments Thursday, State Prosecutor Jeffrey Roe said that makes the case cut and dry.
“It should be abundantly clear that they were aware that that $64,000 tax bill – well, tax amount that the City of Nenana said was owed – could not be collected on, was not legally actionable. It was effectively a zero,” he told the jury.
Lawyers for the defendants said the picture was a lot blurrier than that.
Roach, Williams’ attorney, said the city hadn’t been collecting property taxes for decades until Verhagen took office in 2018, meaning other homes had accrued large sums of unpaid taxes
But around the time of this case, Roach said, city officials began regularly notifying people that their property owed taxes, even after learning that the city couldn’t legally enforce collection.
And he presented an email the Nenana city clerk had sent to a title company that said 27 years-worth of property taxes were owed on Jensen’s home.
The email was not presented at the previous trial.
“I don’t know where this came from. I haven’t seen this before,” Jacobson said.
The clerk had sent the email two months after Jensen’s deal with the defendants.
“Does that seem strange?” Roach asked.
“Well, it only seems strange in that it is a weird thing for the city, for the city, including the mayor, to say, ‘even though we can’t collect anything, we can sure ask people to pay for these outrageous amount of back taxes,’” Jacobson said.
On Thursday, Roach used that background in an attempt to impugn the city officials’ credibility and poke holes in the state’s case.
“That’s all the evidence that the state has that Vickie and Annie knew that taxes were owed – their [the city’s] statements – the words of people who were clearly biased, who clearly had a motive to misrepresent what happened,” he said.
The jury began deliberations Thursday afternoon and returned the verdict around 4 p.m. on Friday. Williams and Moyle’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for June 23.