A New Jersey woman who made national headlines more than a decade ago by falsely claiming she had been kidnapped when she had actually gone to Walt Disney World has pleaded guilty to having stolen nearly $150,000 from an employer.
Bonnie Sweeten, 51, of Delanco, Burlington County, clutched a tissue and spoke softly Tuesday in federal court as she pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud. She was allowed to remain free pending her Feb. 21 sentencing.
Prosecutors said the former Feasterville, Pennsylvania, resident was hired in 2017 as a bookkeeper for an unnamed Doylestown excavation firm headed by someone who had known her for many years. They allege she used her position and access to issue dozens of company checks to herself, steal checks mailed to the firm and fraudulently endorse them over to herself and make tens of thousands of dollars of personal purchases on the company credit card.
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Authorities said in 2009 that Sweeten, who is white, called 911 claiming she and her 9-year-old daughter had been carjacked by two Black men and stuffed into the trunk of another vehicle. Authorities said she was actually on her way to the airport to fly to Florida using a co-worker’s identification card and feared arrest in a fraud case. She and the child were found unharmed the next day at Disney World. She served nearly a year in prison for the hoax.
“I wanted something so bad that I would do whatever I had to do to get it,” Sweeten told a judge in 2012 before she was sentenced in another case to more than eight years for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from an employer and others. Her voice cracked during an apology for a $280,000 theft from an elderly relative she called “cruel and sick.”
Sweeten told the judge Tuesday she had received treatment for oxycontin addiction in 2018 and had been “clean ever since.” Defense attorney James McHugh Jr. of the federal defenders’ office said his client’s latest crime took place five years ago and since that time she “has been a productive and law-abiding citizen.”