As we relayed earlier this month, the state of Nevada’s Attorney General made new laws after a large scale foreclosure fraud scheme was unveiled. Now comes the news that the woman who acted as the whistleblower on the scheme has been found dead in her Las Vegas home.
43-year-old Tracy Lawrence was scheduled to be sentenced on Monday morning. She faced a maximum of one year and a $2,000 fine after pleading guilty to one charge of notarizing the signature of a person not in her presence. When she did not show up her lawyer notified the judge that she was concerned about the woman's safety. Police went to her home and found her body. According to KSNV Las Vegas:
Metro Homicide Detectives working the case said, “It is unclear if her death was due to natural causes, or if it was a suicide.” Detectives said this afternoon that they have ruled out homicide as a cause of death.
Ruling out homicide within hours is fairly suspicious for a woman who had so little to lose. Her only crime was to robo-sign tens of thousands of fraudulent documents on behalf of Lender Processing Services, a large company routinely used by major banks. This month she turned herself into Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto. According to MSNBC,
Lawrence came forward earlier this month and blew the whistle on the operation, in which title officers Gary Trafford, 49, of Irvine, Calif., and Geraldine Sheppard, 62, of Santa Ana, Calif. — who worked for a Florida processing company used by most major banks to process repossessions — allegedly forged signatures on tens of thousands of default notices from 2005 to 2008.
Trafford and Sheppard were charged two weeks ago with 606 counts of offering false instruments for recording, false certification on certain instruments and notarization of the signature of a person not in the presence of a notary public.
Trafford and Sheppard face up to 30 years in prison apiece if found guilty. They are currently in California negotiating terms of surrender with Attorney General Masto. The timing of this case is questionable at best. Unless it is announced very soon that Lawrence died of natural causes, the police action to immediately declare her death as a non-homicide will be intensely scrutinized.