Crime & Safety

Woman Charged with Forging Checks at Three Lakeville Businesses

Authorities say Jeannette Marie Schlechter told them she forged checks to get money to support her methamphetamine habit.

A Burnsville woman has been charged with check forgery after authorities say she forged more than a dozen checks at three Lakeville businesses in late 2008 in order to pay for her methamphetamine habit.

Jeannette Marie Schlechter, 52, faces a felony check forgery charge, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $20,000 fine.

According to the criminal complaint, Lakeville police began receiving complaints in December 2008 from residents whose checks had been forged and used to buy merchandise from Lakeville retailers.

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Similar complaints continued into January 2009, and police used surveillance video from the victimized stores to identify the suspect as Schlechter, the complaint says.

Police eventually determined that Schlechter had forged 14 checks from 10 different checking accounts for a total of $4,013, according to the complaint.

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In June 2010, a Lakeville police officer met with Schlechter and asked if she would be willing to talk about the checks. Schlechter told the officer that she had written “a lot of checks” and didn’t remember specific ones; when the officer asked why she had forged the checks, Schlechter said she had been addicted to methamphetamine, the complaint says.

Schlechter told the officer that a friend had shown her how to “do check forgeries” and had told her at which stores she could cash the checks or buy merchandise with them. “[Schlechter] stated that she would attempt to purchase something expensive that she could either return for cash or sell to someone else for cash,” the complaint says.

The officer offered to show Schlechter surveillance video of the various transactions, but she declined, “becoming quite emotional, and telling law enforcement that she has since stopped associating with people who had led her into criminal activity in the past and is maintaining her sobriety,” the complaint says.

The Lakeville businesses to which Schlechter wrote forged checks were Mills Fleet Farm, which received 10 checks totaling $2,356; Gander Mountain, which received three checks totaling $1,396; and Rainbow Foods, which received one check for $260.

Schlechter is scheduled to make a first appearance on the check forgery charge Aug. 1 in Dakota County District Court in Hastings.


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