Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 2, 1995 TAG: 9505020145
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Boston Globe
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Ellen F. Cooke said in a statement that a psychiatrist who evaluated her in February attributed her behavior to ``enormous pressures and stress.''
Cooke released the statement through her lawyer as the Rev. Edmond Browning, the church's presiding bishop, announced the completion of an auditor's report on the losses.
Browning said much of the money diverted by Ellen Cooke went to purchase a house in Montclair, N.J., and a farm in Lancaster, Va., which she owned with her husband, the Rev. Nicholas Cooke III. Both properties have been turned over to the church.
Other sums went to personal expenses, including school tuition for her children, jewelry and travel, the bishop said.
He related a scenario in which Cooke ``maintained absolute control of the auditing and reconciliation functions of the treasurer's office'' while she was shifting funds to her personal accounts. She wrote checks to herself by disregarding requirements for multiple signatures on checks, ``thereby evading the usual control procedures,'' he said.
In her statement, Ellen Cooke said the therapist had told her ``my subsequent actions, blocked from memory during this time, were a cry for help, which I fully expected to be discovered and questioned and which escalated as I tried to escape from a situation which had become unbearable.''
Cooke, who was the top lay officer at the church's New York headquarters, said a priest who counseled her helped her see that her actions were ``inappropriate and wrong'' but also ``helped me acknowledge the pain, abuse and powerlessness I have felt during the years I worked as a lay woman on a senior level at the church headquarters.''
Browning said he hired an outside law firm and auditors to review the issues but that no decision has been made on whether to seek prosecution.
The report by Coopers & Lybrand, accountants with no prior relationship to the Episcopal Church, ``weighed 12 pounds and evaluated every line of expenditure since 1986,'' said James Solheim, who formerly was communications director for the church at its diocesan office in Boston.
Browning disclosed Monday that ``contrary to public statements'' earlier this year, he had asked Cooke to resign in December because ``her working style did not well serve our common mission.'' He said that while he acknowledged the full circumstances to the church's Executive Council in February, he though that ``because of her years of service to the church, she should be allowed to leave with dignity.''
Cooke's comments Monday blaming her own ``powerlessness'' was a surprising statement from a woman who was known as a tough-minded and demanding administrator during her tenure as treasurer of the Massachusetts diocese and in New York. ``In Massachusetts, by the time she left in 1986, senior staff were ready to resign if she had stayed,'' said Solheim.
A spokesman for the Massachusetts diocese, the Rev. Canon Edward Rodman, said church officials had evaluated several areas of Cooke's work in Massachusetts after receiving information from the audit at the national church. ``We found no unauthorized expenditures in her last year,'' Rodman said.
The auditors looked ``for signs of complicity on the part of other members of the staff and have found none,'' he said.
Cooke's husband, Nicholas, is a graduate of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., and has served in parishes in Virginia and New Jersey. He took a post at a parish in McLean in January.
by CNB