Conifer woman gets 5 years for taking nearly $1 million from Windish RV

Christine Sylvester

GOLDEN – A Conifer woman faces a five-year stretch in prison for stealing nearly $1 million from her Lakewood employer to buy vehicles, fund expensive vacations and outfit herself with jewelry and clothes.

Christine Alice Sylvester, 40, a former title and billing clerk at Windish RV Center in Lakewood for almost three years, was sentenced Monday in Jefferson County District Court.

Sylvester pleaded guilty to felony theft in mid-December. She admitted creating a straw company, Leisure Financial Co., in a scheme that began within months of her employment at Windish RV Center in the spring of 2007. By November of that year, prosecutors said, Sylvester began using the bogus company to divert money to herself and eventually ran the total up to $951,000.

Sylvester created Leisure Financial in January 2007 “for the sole purpose of opening a business account at a local bank where she could deposit the stolen funds” according to the District Attorney’s Office. In her role as the title and billing clerk for Windish, Sylvester wrote final payoff checks to financial institutions after transactions that included trade-ins on the purchase of RVs.

Prosecutors said Sylvester wrote the actual payoff checks, but also issued duplicate checks to LFC using the same vehicle identification numbers and the original transaction dates and deposit the checks into her fraudulent account.

The owners of Windish RV Center were alerted to the scheme when an internal audit revealed what a spokeswoman for the DA’s Office called “significant discrepancies in their accounts.”  Sylvester was arrested in July 2010 after her employer contacted Lakewood Police.