Former sheriff charged with theft counts in fundraising scheme
WEST CHESTER » Former Chester County Sheriff Carolyn “Bunny” Welsh and her live-in boyfriend, a former deputy sheriff, were charged Tuesday with criminal counts involving fundraising efforts to support the Sheriff’s Office K-9 Unit.
Welsh and former Lt. Harry McKinney appeared before Senior Magisterial District Judge Daniel Maisano of West Chester, accompanied by their attorneys and were arraigned on two misdemeanor counts of theft. A preliminary hearing has been set for next month.
The charges grew out of an investigation into the fundraising activities of the Friends of the Chester County Sheriff’s Office K-9 Unit, which was operated out of the office that Welsh headed for 20 years, by the county Controller’s Office. The charges are being handled by the state Attorney General’s Office.
Welsh, 76, and McKinney, 64, both of Pennsbury, were released on their own recognizance after the formal proceedings at which they were notified of the charges against them.
“Bunny Welsh used her position of power for her and her partner Harry McKinney’s own personal gain instead of serving her community as she was elected to do,” state Attorney General Josh Shapiro said in a statement after Welsh and McKinney turned themselves in to the state authorities for fingerprinting and processing.
The pair “allegedly used public employees to perform work for private charity events both on and off
duty at the expense of Chester County, and McKinney then used those fundraised dollars to cover his own personal expenses,” said
Shapiro. “This blatant misappropriation of funds is unacceptable. My office has made over 60 public corruption arrests since I took office and I will continue to hold any public officials accountable for abusing their office and public trust.”
Special Agent Sean McGlinn said in a criminal complaint that Welsh placed McKinney in a supervisory role in the Sheriff’s Office, even though he carried an entry-level work classification. From that position, according to the complaint, McKinney utilized the re
sources of the office to conduct all the fundraising for the office, but primarily the private fundraising for the K-9 Unit that the two had initiated in the mid-2000s.
Even though expenses for the K-9 Officers were paid for by grants, community donations, and private contributions, McKinney was put in sole charge of raising and dispersing those funds, absent any other county or official oversight, according to the arrest affidavit.
The largest of the fundraising efforts, according to McGlinn’s complaint, was an annual Wild Game Dinner, at which those buying tickets could feast on treats like alligator bites, deer braciole, stuffed quail, crawfish casserole and an assortment of wild game sausages. Money raised from the event would go to the K-9 Friends organization.
The complaint states that because the dinner required a great deal of volunteer work, deputies would volunteer to prepare for the event during their normal workday. McKinney would oversee the deputies running the events, while Welsh would allow them to perform those duties while being paid by the county, even though the events were private.
It also alleges that the pair used public resources to compensate the deputies for time they spent on the events outside their workday.
“For any time spent volunteering after work hours,” McGlinn wrote, Welsh awarded the deputies with 1/5 hours of compensatory time per hour that could be accrued and used at a later date … while still being paid by Chester County.
The charges levied against the two include theft of services by diversion and theft by unlawful taking. The first charge concerns knowingly diverting services to the benefit of others they are not entitled to — allowing on-duty sheriffs to perform nongovernmental work during regular work hours while they were being paid by the county. The second involves rewarding those deputies with days off for their work at private charity events outside normal business hours.
McKinney was also found to have reimbursed himself from the K-9 unit fund for expenses that involved a family pet who was not a working canine, the complaint states. For that, he was charged with a second count of theft by un
lawful taking.
The complaint does not specify the amount of the theft, but because the counts are charged as misdemeanors, the value would be less than $2,000.
Welsh is represented by veteran white-collar criminal defense attorney Geoffrey Johnson of Philadelphia. In a brief telephone exchange Tuesday, Johnson said that his client had been charged only with “providing comp time to deputy sheriffs for working at a charity event,” but declined to comment further.
McKinney’s attorney, criminal defense attorney Rob Donatoni of West Chester, said only that the charges against his client, “speak for themselves.”
Welsh, who retired from the office in 2020 after having served five terms, is among the most recognizable of county elected officials in recent memory. She was photographed with President Donald J. Trump at the White House on multiple occasions, wearing her navy blue ceremonial sheriff’s uniform, and was among his earliest supporters. Her exploits were carried on the pages of newspapers across the region, with the simple moniker of “Sheriff Bunny” letting people know who the star of the story would be.
The K-9 Unit was among her biggest public relations efforts, becoming a well-publicized and highly popular part of the office, with public events and promotional appearances by K-9 officers with names like Luke and Nero and Dexter and Murphy at local schools and organizations. The officers had particular skills such as bomb or drug detection, tracking criminal suspects, or hunting down lost children, and were frequently loaned to outside law enforcement agencies. The dogs were also on display almost daily in the county Justice Center, with 10 K-9 teams deployed throughout the building at various times and places.
In November 2018, however, she announced that she would not seek re-election and that she planned to pursue other opportunities, although she did not spec
ify what those opportunities entail.
“Sometimes God leads you down a path and opens doors where you least expect it,” Welsh said. “After serving as sheriff for 20 years, I will be looking forward to a new challenge in 2020.” This summer, she served as a delegate to the Republican National Convention, which ended with the renomination of President Trump.
McKinney was terminated from his position by incoming county Sheriff Fredda Maddox in January.
Welsh campaigned locally for the president and appeared at her local polling place at the Chadds Ford Elementary School on Election Day, where she was photographed smiling and not wearing a facial mask, despite
the county being in the grips of a resurgence of the coronavirus. Days afterward, reports were confirmed that she had entered Chester County Hospital for treatment of COVID-19. She was released last week.
The challenge that Welsh faced most in 2018, however, was a unique one. In August, newly elected county Controller Margaret Reif, a Democrat, issued a subpoena for financial records held by Welsh’s office for the Sheriff’s K-9. Unit. It was the first time in memory that one county official had publicly and openly questioned the way another ran his or her office.
Reif and her team of auditors suspected, and later said they confirmed, that funds that had been collected for the K-9 officers
and their handlers had been misused by people in the office, most notably McKinney, Welsh’s longtime live-in life partner.
After some disagreement, some of the records that Reif’s office requested were turned over. Though incomplete, they formed a picture of improper use of the funds that the controller later detailed in a remarkable summary.
The expenses questioned included $4,718 paid for a stay at the Hilton Baltimore in June and July 2015; at least $5,290.74 on
75 miscellaneous lunches and dinners over a three-year period;
$4,200 for a custom-made golf cart; $2,500 for tires and front and back winches on a privately owned pickup truck; and $579 for a one-night stay at the Quality Hotel in Exton in September 2017.
The audit estimated that more than $198,000 was raised and spent over the years 2015 to 2017 for the K-9 unit through private donations to the sheriff’s office that used county property and employees to accept and record them.
Among other expenses, paid for with checks and credit cards, the controller said that it could not ascertain how those individual payments directly related to the services K-9 Unit was formed to provide to law enforcement agencies and others in and out of the county.
The 23 instances of questionable actions by the K-9 Unit that a summary report of the controller’s audit cited — including failure to register as a charitable organization, file for tax-exempt status, and establish an overall “formal or informal structure” for receipts and disbursements — led the office to the rare step of bringing the matter to the attention of other elected officials in the county, according to a statement issued by the controller’s office.
Welsh and her supporters fired back, saying the fundraising was not within the controller’s purview since they were private, not taxpayer, dollars.
The case was referred to the state Attorney General’s Office by former county District Attorney Tom Hogan, who said his office had a conflict with the matter because of its past involvement with the Friends of the K-9 unit organization.
On Tuesday, Reif declined to comment on the Attorney General’s charges. The allegations in her audit are not part of her criminal charges, and neither Welsh nor McKinney face counts related to her specific findings.
Welsh also faces a civil action filed by the controller’s office over allegedly inflated overtime payments made to McKinney with her approval for the care of the
K-9s he owned when he worked for the Sheriff’s Office. The controller is seeking the return of
$67,000 in payments made to McKinney over a three-year period.
That action, which was also reportedly the subject of a state Grand Jury investigation, remains in Common Pleas Court.