ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, December 20, 1995 TAG: 9512200091
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ROCKY MOUNT
SOURCE: TODD JACKSON STAFF WRITER
For more than three years, the whereabouts of a man Franklin County authorities know as Patrick Rooney were a mystery.
But not anymore.
Rooney was found this week - in a Georgia prison.
He faces an embezzlement charge in Franklin County stemming from the operation of Franklin Memorial Park, the county's largest cemetery, on U.S. 220 between Rocky Mount and Boones Mill.
Rooney, who once owned 12 cemeteries in Virginia, West Virginia and Ohio, was not living in Franklin County when he was indicted in October 1992.
The Franklin County charges were not the first time he had run afoul of Virginia's perpetual-care cemetery law. Rooney was fined $1,000 in 1991 for failing to file reports for Rockbridge Memorial Gardens in Rockbridge County.
Sheriff W.Q. "Quint" Overton said Rooney's name - Patrick J. Rooney III, according to county records - was entered into a national computer database some time ago, but the search for him may have been hampered because he is incarcerated in Georgia under the name Francis Patrick Rooney III.
Rooney also appears to have more than one Social Security number, said Franklin County Commonwealth's Attorney Cliff Hapgood.
The prosecutor learned of Rooney's whereabouts recently from a federal agent familiar with Rooney and the Franklin County charges.
Hapgood asked that a picture of the Georgia prisoner be faxed to his office. A former employee of Franklin Memorial Park gave a positive identification.
Hapgood said he wants to have Rooney brought back to Franklin County when he is released from prison next year. Rooney is serving a six-month sentence in a federal prison in Jesup, Ga., for executing a scheme under false pretenses and concealing property from creditors, according to records sent to Hapgood from Georgia.
Rooney is charged with embezzling more than $100,000 from Franklin Memorial Park.
The financial mess that left the cemetery insolvent five years ago is still being cleaned up.
Overton, who bought two burial plots in the cemetery in 1990 and didn't receive deeds for them, publicly questioned the cemetery's management, along with Rocky Mount Town Council member Ben Pinckard, who was the county's Commissioner of Revenue at the time.
Pinckard discovered a $700,000 shortfall in cemetery trust accounts.
A short time later, Franklin County Judge B.A. Davis III ordered Rocky Mount attorney Eric Ferguson to act as a special receiver for the cemetery.
After several emotional meetings over the years between Ferguson and the cemetery's creditors - one of which ended in an argument between Pinckard and Rocky Mount lawyer David Furrow - Franklin Memorial Park was turned over to a board of trustees this year.
Pinckard, Overton and several others familiar with the cemetery's history are on the board. Many creditors, including Overton, have been assigned their plots, but there are others still to be found, the sheriff said Tuesday.
Miloslava Ferguson, no relation to Eric Ferguson, agreed to sell the cemetery to Rooney in 1990. She is the widow of Richard M. Ferguson, who founded Franklin Memorial Park in the early 1960s and ran it until his death in 1987.
After Pinckard discovered the shortfall, which dated from the cemetery's founding, Miloslava Ferguson agreed to pay back some of the money.
Hapgood said Tuesday that she retuned more than $100,000.
Miloslava Ferguson was not indicted with Rooney because a one-year statue of limitations for her involvement with the cemetery's management had expired, Hapgood said.
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