With her Monday morning guilty plea, a former church secretary has admitted that she stole $670,000 from the Gordonsville-area congregation where she worked and worshipped for more than 20 years.
Accepting a prosecutor’s statement of facts, 64-year-old Brenda Waddy Ragland pleaded guilty in Louisa County Circuit Court to 14 felony counts that she embezzled from the church known as the House of God.
“It is a sad day for the church," Louisa Commonwealth’s Attorney Rusty McGuire said in a statement. "They put their faith in Mrs. Ragland to manage the church resources, and she violated that faith by turning church resources into her personal piggy bank."
McGuire said the long-running theft came to light last year when the church tried to obtain a letter from its bank before making a donation to the building fund of another church. The donor church, he said, was told it didn’t have enough money.
"The board immediately knew something was wrong," according to the statement.
Located in a sprawling, white, single-story building, the church sanctuary is located on Columbia Road near the village of Cobham just south of Gordonsville. A telephone message left at the church office was not immediately returned, and the church, whose primary worship services appear to occur on Saturday afternoons, did not seem occupied at the time of a Daily Progress visit to the site.
Court records show that last year Walter Preston, who serves on the church’s board, provided seven years of financial statements to Daniel Clore of the Louisa County Sheriff’s Office. Initially, the balance of missing money was $99,424 between 2016 and April 2023, according to Clore’s criminal complaint.
"The church spoke with Brenda about this, and she admitted to using the church’s bank account for her personal use," Clore wrote.
Ragland was arrested in January after turning herself in at the sheriff’s office. She was released on an unsecured bail.
On her social media pages, Ragland posts Bible quotations as well as videos of sermons and hymns from church services across America. In March, she obtained court approval for a bail modification to visit her daughter, a Christian evangelist in Summerville, South Carolina, who was recovering from a medical procedure.
While religion appears to be a major part of her life, Ragland, according to prosecutors, stole by dipping into church accounts but also by depositing tithings from her fellow parishioners into her personal bank account using the Cash App digital wallet service.
Megan Riordan, the assistant commonwealth’s attorney who helped prosecute the Ragland case, noted that the total figure of embezzled funds of $670,000 came from further examination of additional documents.
"That was the number we came up with the statements that were available to us," Riordan told The Daily Progress. She declined to elaborate.
The prosecutors have signaled that they intend to make restitution part of the punishment when Ragland is sentenced on Jan. 27. Facing up to 280 years in prison plus a fine of $35,000 atop any restitution payments, Ragland remains free on bail. Her attorney, Ghislaine Storr Burks, declined to answer a Daily Progress inquiry.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com
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