A former hotel housekeeper accused of stealing about $26,000 in coins has signed a plea agreement which, if the judge accepts it, will allow for three years of probation.
Rene Maria Manzanares, 46, has agreed to give an “Alford” guilty plea to one count of felony theft, says a plea agreement filed Sunday in Laramie County District Court.
An Alford plea works like a normal guilty plea but is merely an admission that the state has enough evidence to convict on the charge.
The plea agreement says that in exchange for the “Alford” plea, the prosecutor will argue for three years’ probation – with the possibility of 18-36 months in prison if Manzanares violates her probation.
Manzanares is scheduled to give the new plea Monday in Laramie County District Court.
The case judge may accept or reject the plea agreement.
If Manzanares violates any laws or court conditions before she’s sentenced, her plea agreement would be void but her Alford plea would remain – and the prosecutor could then argue for any sentence up to 10 years in prison, the agreement says.
The agreement also says Manzanares is responsible for restitution for all victims of “the defendant’s actions” including actions that didn’t result in criminal charges.
Cowboy State Daily was unable to reach the alleged victim by publication time, to see if Manzanares has already made restitution.
Laramie County District Attorney Sylvia Hackl declined Thursday to comment on the case, saying it would not be proper at this juncture.
Manzanares is not currently in the Laramie County Detention Center, the facility confirmed. She could not be reached Thursday via her listed cellphone number.
Docs Say
Manzanares is the former head housekeeper of the historic Plains Hotel in downtown Cheyenne.
An evidentiary affidavit in her case claims she stole about $26,000 worth of coins from a guest’s room and had other people sell them to coin dealers for cash.
The hotel owner, Astrid (who doesn’t have a last name), told Cowboy State Daily on Thursday that an elderly couple she knows was staying at the hotel last year because they lost their cabin home in a massive canyon mudslide.
Astrid was neighbors with them in that region, but her own cabin wasn’t her primary home. Theirs was, she said.
“I said you can live at the Plains Hotel for free,” said Astrid. “They put what they had… in a box and left it when they moved from a smaller room into a larger room.”
“What they had” was a box full of coins, Astrid indicated.
And The Housekeeping Manager
When Cheyenne Police Department Detective Matthew Freeman interviewed Manzanares during the course of his investigation last year, she said she was the housekeeping manager at the Plains Hotel. Manzanares said two years ago she found a plastic tote under a bed in a room she was cleaning with coins inside it, the case affidavit relates.
She put the box in the lost and found under her desk, she said. There they sat for two years, the woman added, according to the affidavit.
About a month before the investigation started she was cleaning her office and found the coins, then gave them to her associate Candace Miller, the document relates from her interview.
Manzanares told Freeman Miller gave her $500 for the coins, the document says.
The Coin Dealer
This interview followed other investigation, where Freeman spoke to a Cheyenne coin dealer who said a pair of women came into his shop with a tote full of silver and gold coins and sold several silver proof quarters, says the affidavit.
The coin dealer didn’t have cash on hand to buy about $20,000 worth of gold coins in the women’s tote, he told the detective at the time. He also had a suspicion it may have been stolen, he added.
The women returned May 7, 2024, and the coin dealer bought two pieces worth about $2,900 together, the affidavit says. Again, he couldn’t buy the rest of the coins.
The women left with the understanding that the dealer would call one of them, Martha Salazar, when he was ready to buy more coins, the affidavit says.
Freeman wrote he used an online database to learn that Salazar had also sold $850 in gold and silver to a pawn shop in Cheyenne.
In The Car
Another Cheyenne officer conducted a traffic stop on Salazar, in a Ford passenger vehicle May 22, Freeman wrote in the affidavit.
The detective came to the traffic stop to ask Salazar about the coins, and she claimed to have bought them from another woman, who was recently arrested in a non-related burglary, the detective wrote.
Salazar said she still had some coins left, and she showed the detective a bag of gold coins in her purse. The officer also searched her purse and found about $7,000 in cash, in tightly rolled $100 bills, says the document.
Freeman interviewed Salazar at the Cheyenne Police Department. She changed her narrative during that interview, he wrote, and said the coins came from her cousin Miller, who in turn got the coins from her girlfriend Rene Manzanares.
Salazar said Manzanares found the coins in a lost and found at the Plains Hotel, and that they’d been there several years, the affidavit says.
Salazar had used a false name when selling the coins, she clarified, because she didn’t want to pay taxes on the money she made.
Next Up
Freeman interviewed Miller next on May 29 at the police department.
Miller said she received a box of silver and gold coins from her girlfriend, Manzanares, Freeman related from that interview.
Miller didn’t know anything about the coins, so she teamed up with Salazar to sell them, the affidavit says, adding that the women made multiple sales, making $3,600 on one, $3,400 on another, then $1,000 and $7,425.
Miller said she had another cousin sell the rest of the coins for her. She claimed to have spent all the coin money already on bills and “gambling,” says the document.
Jail Call
Freeman reviewed a phone call Salazar placed from jail to Miller on May 28.
The affidavit says Miller said she didn’t have the money to bond Salazar out.
“Do you know the rest of those things? Where are those at?” asked Salazar in Freeman’s account of the call. “Why don’t you go get rid of them? Not here in town, but somewhere.”
Salazar stressed that it was the only way to get her out of jail. She said she hadn’t said “too much” to anyone, but the longer she was in jail the less likely she’d be to keep Miller’s name out of the matter, the document relates.
“(I) would already done that shit for you dude,” Salazar said, according to the affidavit.
Freeman then interviewed Astrid, who confirmed that Manzanares was at that time in charge of housekeeping.
Astrid also confirmed that if anyone found a high-dollar item left in a room, they were supposed to report it to her so there could be an effort to get the item back to its owner.
Colorado Woman
On Aug. 5, 2024, Astrid’s 74-year-old friend spoke with Freeman. The friend said she lived out of state but knew Astrid, and believed the stolen coins were hers.
The friend came to help with the hotel during the Cheyenne Frontier Days rush in July 2022, she told Freeman. She brought her box of silver and gold coins with her and stored them under her bed, she said.
At some point, the friend switched from one hotel room to another. She believed at that time that she forgot to move the coins out from under the bed when she switched.
The friend asked Manzanares if she’d left anything in her old room when she switched, and Manzanares said nothing was left behind, says the affidavit.
The friend trusted Manzanares at that time and figured maybe she’d left the coins behind in Colorado, she added.
But back in Colorado the woman couldn’t find the coins either.
She later concluded Manzanares stole the coins while cleaning her room, the document says.
The Colorado woman gave Freeman an inventory of her coins, the document says, which included many that police had recovered, but didn’t list some of the other coins recovered from Salazar.
Searching online, Freeman estimated the coins’ value at $26,000, but noted that they could be much more valuable depending on their years and conditions.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
