Lane County jail / Submitted photoScott Beard

Reports of former Deschutes County sheriff’s Capt. Scott Beard’s affair with a former employee were brought to higher-ups at the office in late 2014, according to newly released evidence in a 2014 Oregon State Police investigation, nearly a year before he was placed on paid administrative leave amid an internal investigation.

Beard, who oversaw the agency’s detectives division, was placed on leave in late September 2015, after a sheriff’s office audit suggested money was missing from several investigative accounts.

But nearly a year earlier, details of Beard’s affair with former sheriff’s office employee Krista Mudrick emerged when a suspected domestic violence incident between Beard and his wife was initially reported by the wife of a sheriff’s sergeant and eventually turned over to the Oregon State Police.

Oregon State Police found no evidence of criminal activity in the domestic violence case, according to its report, released to The Bulletin earlier this year.

OSP’s inquiry was limited to the issue of whether Scott Beard shot a gun in the house in front of his wife; when Mechele Beard denied any such incident, the case was closed. An OSP spokesman said the agency was not tasked with investigating or following leads that were civil or internal affairs issues.

“… The scope of the investigation was criminal in nature, which was specially focused on an incident where Scott Beard pointed a firearm at his chest and fired his weapon inside his home,” OSP Capt. Bill Fugate wrote in an email Thursday. “OSP’s primary and only focus was this finite and specific allegation. DCSO provided no information of misconduct other than the above incident.”

The affair — while itself not criminal in nature — would become relevant when both Scott Beard and Mudrick were federally indicted in February.

In the indictment filed Feb. 17, Beard was accused of using money he took from the sheriff’s office to buy Mudrick gifts, including vacations, cosmetic surgeries and a motorcycle; Mudrick was charged with one count of making a false statement to authorities. Beard pleaded guilty in May to two counts each of money laundering and theft concerning a program receiving federal funds and is scheduled to be sentenced in August. Mudrick has pleaded not guilty to the charge, and her next court date is Tuesday, court records show.

Mudrick, who was a reserve deputy, civil technician and field law enforcement technician, joined the office as a reserve deputy in 2011 and was terminated after she failed to make probation in March 2013, according to the sheriff’s office. The federal government, in the February indictment, alleged Beard and Mudrick’s relationship began “at least by October 2013” and continued “until at least September 2015.”

The reports of the affair, in hindsight, could look like the proverbial tip of the iceberg, now-Sheriff Shane Nelson and his legal counsel say. But the breadth of Beard’s illicit activities, they contend, was not known to them until the FBI investigated Beard in late 2015, revealing that he’d taken more than $200,000 from the office.

“So we (were) dealing with this in real time,” Darryl Nakahira, legal counsel for the sheriff’s office, said of the initial reports of an affair. “In hindsight, it’s a different sort of analysis, but we didn’t have full information.”

After the OSP’s domestic violence investigation concluded Dec. 5, 2014, six months passed before a Deschutes County internal auditor recommended that the agency analyze its investigative funds. That recommendation set in motion the sheriff’s own internal investigation, that, in turn, led to the federal inquiry about missing funds.

Chain of command

The report that was eventually sent up the chain of command began in an innocuous place: the Redmond High School gymnasium.

While sheriff’s office employees astride donkeys attempted to make baskets in a charity competition against the Crook County Sheriff’s Office on Nov. 22, 2014, Beard’s wife, Mechele Beard, approached Jaclyn Rupert, said her husband, Ty Rupert, who was a Deschutes County sheriff’s sergeant at the time.

After exchanging hellos, Mechele Beard told Jaclyn Rupert she believed Scott Beard was having an affair, according to Ty Rupert.

After meeting with Mechele Beard again twice after that charity game, Jaclyn told her husband she was concerned for Mechele Beard’s safety. She learned, she said, that Scott Beard might have shot a gun in their house with Mechele Beard present, in a possible effort to harm himself.

“The biggest issue was that there was a possibility of a domestic issue between Scott and Mechele,” Ty Rupert, who was promoted to lieutenant in April, said in an interview Wednesday. “(Sheriff’s deputies are) mandatory reporters, obviously and … that’s something we have to look into.”

Sometime between Nov. 22 and early December, when the state police initiated the domestic violence investigation, Jaclyn Rupert recorded a phone conversation between her and Mechele Beard.

During the recording, Mechele Beard does not say she knows she is being recorded; during the interview with the OSP investigator, she “indicated she felt she had been betrayed by Mrs. Rupert, for divulging the contents of their private conversation to others,” according to the report.

In Oregon, you are not required by law to notify someone with whom you are having a phone conversation that you are recording them. According to Ty Rupert, his wife recorded the conversation because she feared she would not be believed when she reported what Mechele Beard had told her.

They discussed Scott Beard’s affair with a woman named Krista, who Ty Rupert confirmed was Krista Mudrick. That phone call recording was submitted to Oregon State Police as part of its investigation and obtained by The Bulletin through a public records request.

Ty Rupert reported what Jaclyn had told him to his supervisor, Lt. Joe DeLuca.

DeLuca sent the report up the chain of command to then-Capt. Shane Nelson, who met with the Ruperts and reported the domestic violence allegation to then-Sheriff Larry Blanton, Nelson said Thursday. (Nelson was sworn in as sheriff last July, replacing Blanton, who retired).

“I just shared with (Blanton) the third-hand reports of the allegations of an extramarital affair and … the possibility of domestic issues,” Nelson said. “I can’t recall the specific information I shared, but I told him that the sergeant, and the sergeant’s wife, could be reached to get the specific information.”

Nelson said once he’d told Blanton of the affair with the former employee and the domestic violence allegation, he was told he could no longer be involved in the investigation because he and Scott Beard were of the same rank.

Chain of command dictates that members of an organization are accountable to their immediate supervisors.

Out of concern for Mechele Beard’s safety, the sheriff’s office asked the Oregon State Police to investigate, said Nakahira. He said that prior to sending the matter to state police, Blanton met with Mechele Beard and a female lieutenant in the office.

“… Mechele had really backed off of what she had said to Jaclyn so we said, ‘Hey, we’re here for your safety,’ and backed off,” Nakahira said.

The state police’s investigation consisted mostly of a 13-minute interview with Mechele Beard conducted by OSP then-Maj. Travis Hampton. Mechele Beard denied any criminal conduct against her by Scott Beard, state police records show.

Mechele Beard did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.

Blanton, reached by phone Thursday, denied knowledge of the affair; he characterized what was reported to him as “personal issues.”

“I didn’t know he was having an affair,” Blanton said. “There were (concerns) of personal issues with Scott Beard, and I took those to the Oregon State Police.”

Money

In the phone call recording, Jaclyn Rupert references money Beard gave to Mudrick and says there was a degree of doubt as to where Scott Beard obtained the money.

“… I brought up the money,” Jaclyn Rupert said to Mechele Beard early in the conversation. She explained what she told Nelson and her husband when the three of them met: “I said, you know, I guess there’s been some money that’s been given to her, from Scott. Mechele says it’s not coming out of their accounts, it was to help (Krista Mudrick) start this business up.”

Nelson, in an interview last week, said Ty Rupert told him Beard had reportedly given $1,000 to a nonprofit organization Mudrick was trying to start. Mudrick could not be reached for comment through email, her criminal attorney or a fitness business in Sunriver she has been associated with.

Nakahira said he did not believe Blanton knew of that detail in late 2014, and Nelson said he did not recall whether he’d shared that information with Blanton.

“I know at some point it came up that (Beard) was giving money to her supposed nonprofit, but I do not believe we had that specific detail in late 2014,” Nakahira said Thursday.

Nelson said the $1,000 was mentioned in the context of the affair — it seemed to support the possibility that Beard was indeed having an affair with Mudrick.

“Hindsight’s always 20/20,” said Nelson. “…Talking to you today, would there be concerns that was not the Beard family’s money? Yes, there would be concerns.”

Ty Rupert said Mechele Beard made a comment about not knowing where the money was coming from.

“That was their life,” Ty Rupert said. “I don’t know if Scott had a separate account from her, you know what I mean? That’s what the money reference was. In light of the fact of the possibility of there being an affair, that just looked kind of weird.”

Asked whether he had heard of Beard’s affair and the possibility that Beard was giving money of questionable origin to the woman, former Sheriff Blanton said, “Hell no.”

“The first I heard about any criminal investigation was when it was announced,” Blanton said, referring to the ongoing federal case against Beard. “If I’d known anything, I would have turned it over to OSP.”

The former sheriff continued: “I don’t consider myself the ethics police.”

He said people’s choices are up to them, but if those choices affected the office, he dealt with it. He said the Beard matter was investigated by an outside agency.

Lack of clarity on affair timeline report

Jaclyn Rupert also states in the recorded conversation that Scott Beard was confronted by the sheriff in October 2014 about the affair. She contended that Blanton believed what Scott Beard told him: that Mechele Beard concocted the affair because she was having problems since their children had gotten older and left the house.

Furthermore, early in the conversation, Mechele Beard confirms she told a woman named Linda — who Ty Rupert confirmed Wednesday was Linda Blanton, Larry Blanton’s wife — about her suspicion that Scott Beard was having an affair.

Nakahira said he did not know the exact timeline of the affair report, but that “close in time” to the OSP investigation, Blanton and Scott Beard had a “personal conversation.” Beard said he and Mechele were having problems, but he loved her and would do nothing to hurt her.

“… Sheriff Blanton asked (Beard), is there anything that he really needed to know about what was going on between him and Mechele Beard other than what Scott had just shared with him,” Nakahira said. “And Scott Beard said no, that everything was fine, and he was going to work it out with Mechele. We know that now to not be correct, right, because he’s having this affair with Mudrick, but he, straight to Larry Blanton’s face, said he loved Mechele and they were going to work it out.”

Nakahira said while an affair with another employee is not forbidden by sheriff’s office policy, the issue of employees having romantic or sexual relationships with one another falls within “general expectations of conduct and unbecoming conduct.”

Mudrick was fired in March 2013. The federal government, in the February indictment, alleged Beard and Mudrick’s relationship began “at least by October 2013” and continued “until at least September 2015.”

Within the office, the question of affairs with fellow employees can also provoke “concerns about whether or not there’s harassment going on as well,” Nakahira said.

It was neither the first nor the most recent affair to cause ripples in the sheriff’s office. About a year before information about Beard’s affair was sent up the chain of command, corrections Capt. Mike Espinoza resigned when it was revealed he’d had an affair with a fellow employee.

This March, another captain and head of the patrol division, Erik Utter, departed in the wake of an internal investigation into his affair with another female employee.

Lawsuit

After she was fired in March 2013, Mudrick filed a tort claim notice — in essence, notice of intent to file a lawsuit — with the county in September 2013, county records show. She intended to make a claim on the basis of sex discrimination, according to the document. But the county never received further communication from Mudrick or her lawyer about the suit, and there was no settlement, according to Deschutes County Legal Counsel David Doyle.

Mudrick also filed a claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in November 2013, records provided to The Bulletin by the sheriff’s office show.

“During my tenure I was the only female going through training, a haphazard training that was so unprofessional that my immediate supervisor Captain Shane Nelson, on numerous occasions came to me and apologized for the ineffective training I was undergoing,” Mudrick stated in a charge of discrimination.

“My termination was based on my failure to make probation,” Mudrick continued. “If I had been given proper training, and the rules and procedures in place for training had been followed, I would have passed the probationary period.”

That claim was withdrawn in March 2014, records supplied by the sheriff’s office show.

Nakahira said there were other “personnel actions” prior to Mudrick’s termination.

Beard was not Mudrick’s supervisor or responsible for her management, Nakahira said later in an email Thursday, though in the February indictment, prosecutors alleged “… Beard was one of defendant Mudrick’s supervisors.”

Moving on

Lt. Ty Rupert said he brought the matter forward thinking it was the “right thing to do.” He also said he felt the current sheriff, Nelson, had addressed it appropriately.

“It is important to me that, you know, the public knows that our current Sheriff, Shane Nelson, has made changes,” Rupert said. “He has addressed the issues with Scott Beard. Scott Beard is more than likely to be going to federal prison and held accountable for his actions.”

After high-level departures, the sheriff seems eager to move on, as well.

“I just want to reiterate, I want to do the right thing,” Nelson said. “And the sheriff’s office is going to do the right thing. We don’t tolerate that behavior. We only want teammates in line with our mission and values.”

— Reporter: 541-383-0376,

cwithycombe@bendbulletin.com