Woman pleads guilty to bilking millions from elderly couple

In a move that surprised many in the courtroom Monday afternoon, a former Bluffton reserve police officer and Beaufort County sheriff's deputy pleaded guilty to bilking millions of dollars from an elderly Hilton Head Island couple through 2004.

Lisa Cramer, 36, pleaded guilty in a Beaufort County courtroom to four counts of financial exploitation of a vulnerable adult. She received three years probation but will face 16 years in prison if she doesn’t comply with the terms of her probation.

Those terms include paying $3 million in a civil settlement to the victim's estate. That amount is about half what the civil suit was seeking.

The case moved slowly through the legal process, with spates of pre-trial motions, claims of bias on the part of detectives, changes in prosecution and debates about whether it was a civil rather than criminal matter.

Both civil and criminal cases were filed, both meandering on parallel tracks until Monday.

Cramer had been a caretaker for Bernard and Eleanor Breedlove for about a dozen years, from the early 1990s through spring 2004. Over that time, Cramer took $5.9 million in assets and money from the couple, according to authorities. Bernard Breedlove died in 2006 at age 95. His wife was declared incapacitated by a court in 2005.

On Monday morning, Cramer agreed to return about $3 million in exchange for the victim - who was represented by a court-appointed guardian - dropping some of the demands for land and money being sought, said Cramer's attorney, Lionel S. Lofton of Charleston. In the criminal matter, she pleaded guilty in an Alford plea, which means that she doesn’t admit guilt in what the prosecution claims are the facts of the case, but pleads guilty to the charges.

Cramer maintains that all of the money and items she received were gifts from the Breedloves, who she says treated her like a daughter. Lofton said he was prepared to show in the trial that lawyers and financial advisers representing the Breedloves had been involved in the transfer of assets to Cramer. Cramer had also contacted attorneys to perform an "adult adoption" of the Breedloves, he said.

"While we felt pretty comfortable with the case, every time you put your fate in the hands of a jury, you don't know what’s going to happen," said Lofton. "Basically, she's going to serve a three-year probationary sentence, and then she can put this all behind her and get on with the rest of her life."

Cramer now lives outside of Atlanta and has four young children.

Assistant state attorney general Curtis Pauling, prosecutor of the case, objected to the Alford plea, but was overruled by Judge James Williams.

"We were prepared to either go to trial or accept a guilty plea as a straight-up plea," said Mark Plowden, spokesman for the S.C. Attorney General's Office. "At the end of the day, it's still a conviction. She pled guilty, and she was convicted of all four counts."