FORMER CORPORATE OFFICER CONVICTED AND SENTENCED IN BALTIMORE CITY FOR FELONY THEFT

Attorney General J. Joseph Curran, Jr. announced today that Terri Lynn Bower, 34, of 241 S. Ann Street, Baltimore, was convicted January 8 of felony theft in the Baltimore City Circuit. The Honorable Paul A. Smith accepted Bower’s guilty plea and sentenced her to five years incarceration, suspended. The Court also imposed a 5-year period of supervised probation with the conditions that Bower undergo an evaluation to determine if she requires counseling and that she pay $11,962.29 in restitution.

According to the statement of facts the State presented, Bower was Vice President of Operations and Treasurer of TravelGuide Software, Inc. Between August 1998 and September 1999, she stole $11,962.29 while she ran the company’s business office in the Canton area of Baltimore. She stole the money by writing checks to herself and for her personal benefit and then obscuring the theft in the company account records. The theft went undetected until April 2000, when TravelGuide Software CEO David Wallis, working from the company’s Reston, Virginia office, began to suspect that the accounts and financial reports made by Bower were fabricated. Wallis referred the case to the Criminal Investigations Division of the Maryland Attorney General’s Office.

The case was prosecuted by the Criminal Investigations Division of the Maryland Attorney General’s Office and the Maryland State Police.

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