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Felony theft charges filed

Two state prisoners face charges for stealing from older men.

Tabetha L. Payne, 28, and Kari J. Wilson, 39, both in Taycheedah Correctional, are charged with felony theft in two separate cases.

Payne
On Nov. 1, 2016, an 88-year-old resident of the Wisconsin Veterans Home in King asked the Waupaca County Sheriff’s Office to tell Payne and her boyfriend not to have further contact with him.

After speaking with the veteran, Waupaca County Sheriff’s Deputy Andrew Thorpe spoke to Payne and her boyfriend.

“I informed them that I spoke to him in person, that he requested that I relay to them that he does not want further contact with them and that he said it was because of their past and leave it at that,” Thorpe reported.

According to the criminal complaint against Payne, the veteran later told Thorpe that he gave Payne large sums of money based on assurances she would receive a $1.2 million settlement from a hospital due to an allergeric reaction to medication that caused her baby to have breathing problems.

He said Payne never paid him back.

The veteran provided receipts totalling more than $38,250 that he said he gave Payne between March 2015 and September 2016.

Payne was convicted in Winnebago County of forgery uttering and credit card fraud and placed on 36 months of probation on April 27, 2015.

On Feb. 14, 2017, her probation was revoked and she was sentenced to one year in prison.

Wilson
On Jan. 28, 2016, a 64-year-old man contacted Clintonville police and accused Wilson of stealing $87,000 in cash from his home.

According to the criminal complaint, Wilson and her young child had been living with the man since November 2015 in exchange for cleaning his house and providing care.

The man told police that although he prohibited her from entering his bedroom, he caught her in there several times.

He kept a paper grocery bag full of banded $100 bills under a pile of clothes on the floor in his bedroom beside a small safe with financial documents.

The man had been at a nursing home for 10 days prior to his discovery that the money and the safe were missing.

A Clintonville police investigator met Wilson at the Shawano County Jail on Feb. 5, 2016.

She initially denied touching the money, then said she took about $3,000, the complaint says.

On April 25, 2016, Wilson was sentenced in Shawano County to three years in prison and seven years of extended supervision after she was convicted of armed robbery, armed burglary and battery while committing burglary. Her appeal of this case is pending.

In a second case on April 25, 2016, Wilson was convicted of drug trafficking and possession of methamphetamine.

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