Former Olathe nursing-home worker stole over $155,000 from residents, records show
A former Olathe nursing-home employee is accused of stealing at least $155,000 from elderly residents by secretly swiping their debit cards, penning checks to herself and even demanding cash from their family members, new court records reveal.
Patricia Ann Myler, 39, indicated to the residents and their families that the money she was taking was paying their monthly bills at Villa St. Francis nursing home, where she was the accounts receivable manager. Instead, she funneled that money to her personal bank account over the course of 18 months, according to an arrest warrant affidavit released Friday.
Myler was arrested earlier this month and charged in Johnson County District Court with seven counts of mistreating an elder person, six counts of identity theft and three computer crimes. She faces a total of 15 felony charges and one misdemeanor.
Myler has not entered a plea in the case, and her defense attorney Brandan Davies said Friday afternoon that his team is still reviewing the case and declined to comment further.
“The State has disclosed voluminous amounts of financial records, and our team is examining those records,” Davies said. “This case has received some press, and we hope that the court of public opinion reserves judgment and allows the justice system to run its course.”
Villa St. Francis staff reported the supposed scheme in December 2020 to Olathe police when they discovered Myler had routed money from one resident’s account to her own and asked her to resign, court records show.
Another staff member’s subsequent review revealed several discrepancies in the nursing home’s accounting system and, in attempting to correct what appeared to be an error, learned a resident was far behind on monthly payments to the facility.
That resident, who is more than 70 years old, told staff she believed she had been paying her bill because Myler came to her room each month to assist with the payments, court records show. Instead, staff discovered one of the resident’s checks had been sent to a personal bank account — the same one Myler had submitted to the nursing home for her paycheck’s direct deposit.
The staff member confronted Myler over the phone about the findings several weeks after Myler resigned, and Myler eventually admitted to stealing what she thought was just under $40,000 from that particular resident but denied stealing money from any others, court records show. Investigators later learned more than $62,000 had been taken from that first resident.
A full audit of all residents’ financial accounts tied to the nursing home revealed at least a half-dozen other victims, each of whom had either had their accounts secretly manipulated or were convinced by Myler to pay money in ways that made them suspicious, according to the affidavit.
In one case, investigators found Myler made 18 transfers in 15 months from one resident’s bank account to her own, often in the name of the resident’s daughter, totaling more than $42,000, records show. No other staff noticed the resident falling behind on their monthly payments because investigators found Myler had been applying credits to that account to conceal that the payments had been rerouted elsewhere.
In another case, Myler began asking the son of a resident in his early 90s to set aside additional money for a private room and caretaker after learning the family had just received a $70,000 inheritance, the man told police. The resident’s son told police he found the additional charges odd but that he followed Myler’s instructions to set up electronic payments to what he believed was a Villa St. Francis account.
It was not until investigators contacted the family that they learned Myler had diverted more than $39,000 in payments to herself, and not the facility, according to the affidavit.
An Olathe detective contacted Myler in January only to have her hang up on him shortly into the conversation.
“I’m not going to tell you much, I’m just telling you that my boyfriend and my mom have absolutely no idea about anything,” Myler told the detective, according to the affidavit.
An investigation into Myler’s personal finances revealed she was living paycheck to paycheck before starting her job with Villa St. Francis in May 2019, which paid her a salary of just under $41,000, court records show.
“An analysis of her spending habits during her time employed by Villa St. Francis revealed her spending to range between three to six times more than she was making each month, which would not have been possible without the funds being deposited into her account directly from residents’ personal bank accounts,” investigators concluded in the affidavit.
More than $175,500 was spent from Myler’s personal bank account in 2020 alone, with a monthly spending average five times more than her actual take-home pay, police found.
Villa St. Francis has completed two independent audits since Myler left the company and both the Kansas Attorney General’s Office and the Kansas Department of Aging and Disability Services completed reviews of its processes, Villa St. Francis CEO Rodney Whittington said this month.
“When somebody has authority and access and wants to be abusive, they can,” Whittington said, adding: “I don’t think this is anything to make people not trust the facility they’re working with, or ours, for that matter. But there are certain times that those things are abused. And unfortunately, this was one of them.”
Myler was arrested and charged Feb. 4. She was released after posting a $15,000 bond and remains under house arrest ahead of a scheduling conference in the case on March 30, according to the district court.
