Bank robber to reporter: About those bogus checks, yea, I did it

Declaring that he wants to come clean “and put this matter behind me,” convicted Santa Rosa bank robber Christopher Wenmoth now says he is guilty of the check-forgery charges recently filed against him.

Wenmoth, a frequent correspondent with a Press Democrat reporter since his arrest on bank robbery charges last summer, confesses to the check counterfeiting in a pair of letters he wrote at the Sonoma County jail.

The new charges allege that in December of 2007 and January of 2008 he created and cashed bogus checks that drew $22,678 from his former employer, Center Point Inc., a drug and alcohol treatment program in San Rafael.

Wenmoth, 40, had declared in a previous letter that he is innocent because he didn’t know the checks were bogus when he cashed them, and he gave all the money to the treatment program clients to whom it belonged.

But he wrote in a new letter, “The fact of the matter is, I am guilty of printing counterfeit checks, forging signatures on those checks, and cashing those checks to get money that was not mine.

“I used the money to pay gambling debts, and to finance gambling trips to Lake Tahoe,” Wenmoth wrote.

“I want to tell the truth and put this matter behind me. At the same time, I do not want to go to prison, and hope that I can get a suspended sentence or county jail time.”

Wenmoth, a Santa Rosa native, could have been sent to prison for his amateurish holdup of the Montgomery Village branch of US Bank last July 23.

But after he pleaded no-contest, he and his attorney persuaded Judge Arthur Wick that he was not a criminal but a gambling addict who regretted the robbery and was determined to fix his life. Wick spared him state prison and imposed a jail sentence which, because of credits for good behavior and time already served, would have run only through early June.

Wenmoth wrote in one of the most recent letters to The Press Democrat that though he avoided jail in the bank robbery case, he doubts he will be able to do the same with in the bogus-checks case.

“I got lucky to avoid prison for bank robbery, and I doubt lightening (sic) is going to strike twice.

“However, the mitigating circumstances that kept me out of prison in the bank robbery case also apply to this case ... Still, I worry that I am trying the court’s patience with me playing the addiction card once again.”

Prior to Wenmoth’s sentencing for the bank robbery, prosecutors with the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office urged Judge Wick to send Wenmoth to prison. Scoffing at the notion that Wenmoth was driven to robbery by a gambling addiction, prosecutor James Casey had declared to Wick, “He is addicted to something, and that something is his own narcissism.”

On Monday, Spencer Brady, the county’s chief deputy district attorney, said, “We sought prison on the first case. I think it’s fair to say we’ll be seeking state prison” on the check-forgery charges.

Wenmoth is due back in court on the forgery charges May 13.