by A woman from Missouri has been sentenced to prison for more than four years for illegally trying to sell Elvis Presley‘s Graceland home.
Lisa Jeanine Findley, who declined to speak on her own behalf during the hearing, was sentenced by US District Judge John T Fowlkes Jr to four years and nine months in prison, as well as an additional three years of probation.
In February, Findley pleaded guilty to a charge of mail fraud, which was connected to the scheme, as well as a charge of aggravated identity theft. However, the latter charge was dropped as part of the plea agreement.
Findley pretended to be a fake loan lender, Kurt Naussany, and claimed that Elvis’s late daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, had taken out a $3.8 million loan before her death in 2023, using Graceland as collateral.
In July 2023, Findley, posing as Nausanny, began to contact Riley Keough, Lisa Marie’s daughter and sole trustee of Graceland, demanding the $3.8 million payment and announcing plans for a foreclosure sale of the property that Presley lived in until his death in 1977.
However, it later emerged that Nausanny didn’t exist and neither did the loan. Lisa Marie’s signature was also proven to be forged on the documentation, and a judge prevented the sale of the property in 2024 after this evidence came to light.
In total, Findley pretended to be three different people as part of the elaborate scheme, including a Nigerian scammer, while trying to cover up the original fraud plot. Under this fake alias, Findley sent emails in Luganda to The New York Times claiming that ‘he’ was part of a criminal enterprise responsible for the crime.
Defence attorney Tyrone Paylor had attempted to secure a lighter sentence for Findley due to the fraudster not making any money from the scheme, stating, “This outrageously concocted scheme was, to quote Marvin Gaye, ‘doomed from the start’.”
However, the judge saw things differently, sharing, “This was a highly sophisticated scheme to defraud,” and claimed it would have been a “travesty of justice” if the sale had gone through.
Keough is yet to comment on Findley’s sentencing.
