OUR NEIGHBORS: Conviction dogs felon trying to pick up the pieces

WASILLA — Despite more than $120,000 paid for a mistake made 15 years ago, a clean slate has proved priceless for one local felon.

Heidi King was convicted of embezzlement in 1997 after working as a full-charge bookkeeper for a title insurance company. She mortgaged her house to pay her restitution, served 18 months in Highland Mountain Correctional Facility and re-entered the working world.

Now, after a career change, her past has resurfaced and she is stuck, unable to be a productive member of the society that paid for her rehabilitation.

King moved to Alaska with her husband in 1993. Her father committed suicide when she was 11, and with the recent death of her mother, they moved to Wasilla to be closer to her husband’s family. A year later, King’s sister was murdered in Redding, Calif.

“After that point, I started to make the poor choices I did,” King said.

Devastated by the death, King said she tried to fill the void created by the grief and loss with material things. She was working for Alaska First Title Insurance at the time and started skimming off the top. She refused to give specifics about exactly how she did it, but she said “there definitely needs to be better internal controls.”

King continued to steal for more than a year. Then, in 1995, she said the guilt of what she was doing got to her. She confessed to her boss and agreed to cooperate with an investigation. At the end of a trial, she was ordered to pay more than $82,000 in restitution and lawyer fees for the criminal charges. Another $38,000 was awarded to the victims through civil court action.

In addition to the money, King was sentenced to two years in prison with another two suspended. King said the 18 months she spent in prison was one of the worst experiences of her life, but it allowed her to get the counseling she needed.

“Going to jail is what saved me,” King said. “After I confessed to my boss, I took a .22 to my head.”

King said she had never confronted the grief of losing any of her family members. She was forced to look deep into herself and confront what she had done and who she had harmed. She said she emerged a changed person after both counseling and her prison sentence.

At Highland Mountain, she said a company helped her write a résumé and send out applications for employment even before she was released.

“In my cover letter, I was open and honest about my conviction,” King said.

King started working for a local window covering shop. In 2000, she was hired as an administrative assistant with the University of Alaska Anchorage. She was promoted three times and has a binder full of letters of support and gratitude for work she did for the university.

In 2009, King saw a job opening as sales tax manager for the Kenai Peninsula Borough. It was a significant raise in pay and responsibility, and King said she saw it as an opportunity for a fresh start.

Asked if she had any second thoughts about applying to such a financially minded job in the public sector, King said, “It shouldn’t matter. So many years have gone by, it shouldn’t matter. At that point, it had been over 13 years ago.”

At that time, the Kenai Borough only asked job applicants if they had been convicted of a felony in the last 10 years. King did not check the box, nor did she indicate her past conviction on her cover letter.

The record of her three-month evaluation with the finance director shows King receiving satisfactory or above average marks. It was at this meeting, King said, the director told her he found out about her past from another employee. However, King said, the director said he believed in giving people second chances.

Two weeks later, King was fired.

Between the performance evaluation and her termination in June, King said the public caught wind of her past and put the pressure on the administration to fire her. She largely blamed bloggers posting on a newspaper website in regards to an article about the mayor.

King moved back to Wasilla to begin the job search again. She applied for positions with the University of Alaska similar to the one she previously held. She soon received an e-mail from the human resources department informing her she was not eligible for many of the positions because convicted felons are not allowed to work with cash or credit cards.

“I had a university credit card and a travel card when I worked there in the past. All of the positions I held came with cards,” King said. “I passed all the audits without a single question.”

When King informed the university of this, the response was that she should have never held the positions she previously had.

“There was full disclosure when I was first hired there,” King said.

Now, King is just one more of the 9.8 percent of unemployed workers in the Mat-Su — except she has a big black mark on every application that asks her about her criminal past.

“It’s very sad the state spends so much money and time to rehabilitate felons,” King said. “Yet, we are not affording them opportunities to prove themselves or serve the state with their employment.”

Contact Todd L. Disher at todd.disher@frontiersman.com or 352-2252.