Theft charge the latest in former sheriff ‘firsts’
WEST CHESTER » Carolyn “Bunny” Welsh has a number of “firsts” on her resume.
She is the first non-law enforcement professional to have run for and been elected as the sheriff in Chester County. She is the first woman to be elected as sheriff in the county’s 300-year-plus history, and for many years was Pennsylvania’s only female sheriff. She was one of only a handful of female sheriff’s in the nation, and upon her retirement in 2019, she was the longest-serving row officer — male or female — in the county’s political history, with two full decades on the job.
And now, she is the first female county elected official ever to be charged criminally and forced to face a possible trial in Chester County Common Pleas Court. As
such she joins a short list of other county officials whose careers were tarnished by formal allegations of illegal behavior, either in or out of office.
Welsh and her live-in boyfriend, former Lt. Sheriff Harry McKinney, waived their preliminary hearings on criminal theft counts involving fundraising efforts to support the Sheriff’s Office K-9 Unit, which McKinney formed and supervised and which Welsh promoted vigorously during her last years in office.
Welsh and McKinney appeared before Senior Magisterial District Judge Charles Nistico by video at the Chester County Justice Center, where both ran the Sheriff’s Office until last year, accompanied virtually by their attorneys. Neither addressed the charges against them but said they agreed to have their cases transferred to Common Pleas Court without a contested hearing.
Although moves such as waiving a preliminary hearing are not an admission of guilt and the couple is expected to enter not guilty pleas at their formal arraignment on Jan. 14, the decision not to go through with the proceeding is sometimes a signal that a defendant intends to resolve his nor her case with a guilty plea and negotiated sentence at the trial court level.
The charges against the pair — longtime public faces of the county Sheriff’s Office — 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 criminal charges are being handled by the state Attorney General’s Office.
Welsh, 77, and McKinney, 64, both of Pennsbury, are free on bail.
Welsh is charged with single counts of theft of services by diversion and theft by unlawful taking. McKinney is charged with one count of theft of services and two counts of theft by unlawful taking. Both charges are second-degree misdemeanors.
Welsh now joins the company of the late Theodore S. A. Rubino as a top county elected official charged with committing crimes while serving in office. Coincidentally, Rubino was charged with a financial crime, as is Welsh. The man who was both chairman of the county commissioners and the Chester County Republican Party, Rubino was convicted in 1977 of extorting $6,400 from architects doing work on the former Memorial Hospital in West Chester while he was commissioner.
Rubino was sentenced to six months in federal prison, served about half that time, and then worked in community service at the old Coatesville Hospital for more than three years. He died in 1989 at his home in Malvern.
The only other former county official to be charged criminally in modern county history was former Common Pleas Judge John M. Wajert, who served in the early 1970s. After he left the bench, Wajert was charged by county authorities with several counts of theft, accused of taking money from his clients’ accounts.
The charges against Wajert were dismissed in 1983; however, after a hearing in which his then-attorney, the late John J. Duffy, argued that he was suffering from dementia and could not have understood that what he was doing with his clients’ funds was illegal. Wajert died in 2003 in Hawley.
At the video preliminary hearing before Nistico on Friday, Welsh was represented by prominent Philadelphia white-collar defense attorney Geoffrey Johnson, while in a shuffle, McKinney was represented by defense attorney Coley Reynolds of the Omnis Law Group of West Chester. McKinney had been represented by veteran county criminal defense attorney Rob Donatoni at his arraignment last month.
The prosecution was represented by Deputy Attorney General Megan Madaffari.
Both defendants said little during the 10-minute proceeding, except to answer Nistico’s questions about whether they understood what they were doing by waiving their hearings, which they said was correct. The two, although they live together in Chadds Ford, appeared in different rooms during the Zoom call, with Welsh sitting in front of a Christmas wreath festooned with American flags, while McKinney sat in what appeared to be a study, with a bookshelf in the background.
In the criminal complaint filed by the Attorney General’s Office, Special Agent Sean McGlinn said 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 resources 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, patrons were told.
The complaint states that because the dinner required a great deal of volunteer work, county 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 the 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 unlawful 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 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.