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Andy Specht had an interesting piece in the N&O this weekend that warrants some exploration. It looked former Wake County Register of Deeds Laura Riddick, who until last year was a widely respected, longtime public servant, but who now faces embezzlement charges. In short, the people who knew her are trying to figure what the hell happened to the person they knew. Some highlights:
WHAT IT MEANS: Specht’s story is full of interesting and heretofore unreported details, but it doesn’t really shed light on the underlying question: What happened to Laura Riddick? Emails from her husband to various office staffers—which not all of them appreciated—show that Riddick was under a lot of stress, but that doesn’t offer an explanation for embezzlement. Of course, as a necessary caveat, Riddick is presumed innocent until proven otherwise.
Andy Specht had an interesting piece in the N&O this weekend that warrants some exploration. It looked former Wake County Register of Deeds Laura Riddick, who until last year was a widely respected, longtime public servant, but who now faces embezzlement charges. In short, the people who knew her are trying to figure what the hell happened to the person they knew. Some highlights:
- “Now friends and work associates of Laura Riddick are trying to square the former Wake County register of deeds’ longtime reputation with the news that Riddick is charged with embezzling $926,000 of the $2.3 million that went missing from an office she ran for 20 years.”
- “Voters elected Riddick, a Republican, to office in 1996 when she was 29 and she soon gained recognition for modernizing the registry by digitizing records, allowing the public to search and upload records online. … In her first campaign, Riddick beat Wake’s incumbent register on the promise she’d foster a new customer-service-oriented culture and introduce new technology. And regular customers say Riddick accomplished many of her goals. … Gene Davis, another Raleigh-based real estate attorney, said Riddick did an ‘extraordinary job’ of streamlining the record-search process. Davis, former vice chairman for the Wake County Democratic Party, said she made the Wake deeds website one of the most user-friendly in North Carolina. ‘Every document recorded at the Wake County Register of Deeds since 1785 is available online,’ Davis said. He added that Riddick would often go out of her way to help customers who needed it.”
- “Even Lorrin Freeman, the district attorney whose investigation led to embezzlement charges for Riddick, offered public praise for her as recently as April 2015. When Freeman became D.A. that January, she took over an investigation into a breach of Riddick’s work email. … Riddick wanted Freeman to administer her oath at her swearing-in ceremony in December 2016, email records show.
A Nov. 7, 2016, email shows Riddick emailing a UNC professor to ask for his legal opinion. ‘My good friend is our former Wake County Clerk of Court and she’s now our Wake District Attorney,’ Riddick wrote.” - In retrospect, the first sign of trouble emerged about a month before the investigation into Riddick’s office was announced: “After leaving The N&O, Riddick’s husband,
former reporter and editor Matthew] Eisley worked as manager of strategic communication with Raleigh law firm Smith Anderson until last year. In January 2017, UNC President Margaret Spellings announced that Eisley had been hired as the new vice president for communications for the UNC System office. His annual salary would’ve been $175,000. But four days before Eisley was scheduled to start,he ‘informed our office on February 23 that he was not going to be accepting the position,’ said Josh Ellis, UNC System spokesman. Earlier that month, on Feb. 2, county leaders met with Riddick and launched a probe of the Register of Deeds office.”
WHAT IT MEANS: Specht’s story is full of interesting and heretofore unreported details, but it doesn’t really shed light on the underlying question: What happened to Laura Riddick? Emails from her husband to various office staffers—which not all of them appreciated—show that Riddick was under a lot of stress, but that doesn’t offer an explanation for embezzlement. Of course, as a necessary caveat, Riddick is presumed innocent until proven otherwise.
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