WHEN A THEFT IS BOTH CIVIL AND CRIMINAL
Can a case be civil and criminal at the same time? Yes.
Rod Vilencia’s saga began in 1993 when a sales deal went haywire. Vilencia had been boarding his filly Ariel with a woman for more than a year when he discovered that she had taken his horse and moved. He agreed to accept a payment arrangement to sell Ariel to the woman if she would sign a purchase agreement and send it back with her first payment.
They made the verbal agreement via phone, and Vilencia then sent her the written purchase agreement and a photocopy of the registration papers that belonged to the filly’s mother, proof that the horse was out of purebred stock.
He then waited for her to make her first payment and return the purchase contract. Time passed, the purchase agreement never arrived and she failed to return his calls. Eventually her phone was disconnected.
Vilencia reported the incident to law enforcement, but both the woman and the horse had vanished. He continued his search for Ariel, and the woman who took her, for more than a decade. Nearly 11 years later, Vilencia was shaken by a bad dream that woke him up in the middle of the night. He felt compelled to go to the computer and search one more time, and suddenly, there on a website was his missing Ariel— still in possession of the woman who had taken her.
Now what? Vilencia called the breed registry and was infuriated to find out the woman had also stolen his name and signature. She had used the photocopy of the paperwork on Ariel’s mother to create fake documents, and she had forged his name and signature to fraudulently register the horse in 2002.
Vilencia needed help, and an Internet search brought him to Stolen Horse International. The help he needed to keep him grounded and focused began that morning.
In December 2004 a search warrant was served on the suspect at her ranch. Officers found incriminating evidence to be used against the woman in the prosecution of the case, including the original contract that was signed by her but never returned with payment and the other paperwork that Vilencia had sent to her in the summer of 1993.
The woman surrendered and was booked into the county jail on suspicion of three felonies related to theft, forgery and computer crimes and the misdemeanor offense of unauthorized use of someone else’s livestock.
In September 2005, a court finally awarded Vilencia temporary custody of Ariel and two of her offspring. In April 2006, 13 years after his horse was taken, 13 months after he started legal proceedings and six months after Vilencia brought his horses home, the woman pleaded guilty to felony forgery in the first degree in order to avoid a trial in the stolen horse and forgery case that the state had against her.
Was this the happy ending? No! The nightmare continued when the courts allowed the woman to sue Vilencia in civil court. How can a convicted felon sue the victim, and for what? In laymen's terms, she sued for undue use of the justice system, attorney's fees and - believe it or not- back board for 11 years She didn't win. "The woman lost in arbitration to me and then because she lost she forced the case forward to a 12-person jury trial," Vilencia says. "With the judge's redefining of the jury’s actual verdict she lost the entire case to me and became responsible for repaying me all of my expenses, which amounted to $500 plus all of my expenses from the arbitration forward, an additional $60,000. I never pursued her for the money as I knew that she would never pay me.”
Persistence can pay, but you do need to be tactful. “Find out who the supervisor is or who the sheriff is or who the chief of police is and call them,” says Jordan, who before his retirement in 2013 supervised criminal investigators in the detection and prevention of agricultural crimes, including horse thefts. “Usually a reasonable person who has been around for a while will see if he can help you.”
• Keep it polite. No matter how solid your case is, you can hurt your chances of succeeding if you behave badly and alienate the people whose help you need, Jordan says: “You don’t call snorting and bucking and cussing and all that.”
• Be truthful and cooperative with the investigator. Providing false or misleading information in an attempt to get a result faster can only hurt you in the long run, if the investigating officer becomes suspicious of your motives.
Jordan says that a case can be declared a civil matter quite easily during the investigation. “Usually [the accuser is] going to tell you it is someone they know. They are going to tell you that right off the bat because they want you to go get them,” he says. “We are going to talk to the other guy, too, and the truth is going to be somewhere in the middle, usually. Neither one of them may be doing things just right.”
SEE YOU IN COURT?
If your horse’s disappearing act has been deemed a civil matter, then your only hope of getting him back is to take legal action. In other words, you’ll have to sue the perpetrator in a civil court and present enough evidence to convince a judge and/or jury that you’ve been wronged. This can be a long, expensive process.