A longtime Cody bar manager is accused of stealing nearly $200,000 in gambling-style machine profits from her employer over the past three years.
Julia Harvey, 63, faces four counts of felony theft in Cody Circuit Court, each punishable by up to 10 years in prison if her case rises to the felony-level court and if she’s convicted.
Park County Deputy Attorney Larry Eichele charged her July 18, and her preliminary hearing is set for Thursday.
She is out on bond, her court file says.
Harvey did not respond to a Monday voicemail request for comment by publication time.
Court Docs Say …
An evidentiary affidavit filed in the case says Cody Police Department Detective Scott Burlingame was called into the case March 1, after other Cody police officers alerted him of a possible embezzlement at the Rocky Mountain Discount Liquor Store. The loss initially reported was nearly $100,000.
A later accounting would tally it at about $193,000, the document says.
Burlingame met with the store’s owner, who lives in Gillette and hired Harvey to work in his store 20 years ago.
The owner said he learned Jan. 9 that his business account was missing two deposits totaling $3,219.84, the document says. He sent his secretary to audit the store, and she reportedly found two stacks of cash rubber-banded together in a main desk drawer and another behind the desk.
The owner fired Harvey at 6 a.m. Feb. 23, the affidavit says.
Way More Money
Four days later, he was in the Cody office when a skill games operator came to conduct aweekly clean-out of the machines housed in the business’ bar portion.
Skill games are devices that resemble slot machines but have a learning component.
The operator presented the bar owner with a pdf receipt showingrofit from his four skill games, then handed him $3,633, the document says.
The bar owner voiced surprise.
“That’s a pretty good month, that’s more than we normally get,” he reportedly told the operator, the affidavit relates.
The operator countered, saying that wasn’t for the month, it was for the week.
Find The Shortfall
Burlingame learned that the skill game operator had always sent an email with the profits receipt to the business, but he sent it to Harvey’s business email account.
She deleted that account when she was fired, but the bar owner managed to resurrect it, the affidavit says. When he did so, he reportedly saw several emails in the deleted-email folder.
The bar owner said Harvey was the only employee who had access to the gaming machine profits, and she was the one who made the bank deposits, says the document.
Burlingame asked the bar owner’s secretary to compile a total loss list showing the gaming profits, their shortfalls and how long the alleged thefts had been happening.
She sent him a spreadsheet March 5 showing profit shortfalls spanning from Dec. 29, 2020, to Feb. 20, 2024, says the document.
The affidavit says a later forensics report says the machines generated $301,218 in profits over that time, but $192,967 was missing,meaning that the alleged thefts consumed nearly two-thirds of the machines’ profits.
The bar owner did not respond to a Monday voicemail request for comment by publication time.
Search Warrant, Home Visit
Burlingame applied for and later executed a search warrant for Harvey’s bank account and discovered more than $100,000 in deposits in addition to Harvey’s pay, the affidavit says.
He went to interview her at her home in April and started asking questions about her work.
“So you’re investigating me,” she said, according to the affidavit.
The document says that Harvey offered the following explanations:
• She lost a step mentally and had memory lapses after having a surgery.
• There was a problem with the deposits.
• She had put money in a gun safe that would spring open and fling money behind the desk.
• She’d hold onto cash lumps for two or three weeks until there was a “decent deposit” to take to the bank, if the machines ever doled out more money than they earned.
• Perhaps she hadn’t paid for every pack of cigarettes or every can of Mountain Dew while at the store.
• The email receipts did not make sense to her.
• She would take money out of the gaming machines’ profits to make up for short tills.
Burlingame told Harvey the shortfall was about $193,000, reportedly.
“Oh my God,” Harvey responded, according to the affidavit.
The detective then asked her about the $114,000 in cash deposits into her own account, above her pay, and she said she’d sold things, like a bed, two computers and ring doorbells, the document says.
Burlingame told her that would only amount to a few hundred dollars.
“I never walked out of there with money in my hand,” Harvey answered, the affidavit says. “I’m not saying that I didn’t screw up somewhere.”
The document says that ultimately, she indicated she “borrowed” nearly $100,000 from her employer without paying it back.
Not The First
Harvey's case is not the first of its kind in Wyoming.
A Wyoming Downs manager, Heidi Huggins, was sentenced to 180 days in jail in 2016 following allegations that she embezzled roughly $44,000 from the company - after Wyoming Downs learned that eight deposits were missing from its bank account.
She was also sentenced to 10 years of supervised probation to follow her jail sentence to give her a chance to pay the company back, the Gillette News Record reported at the time.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
