A Missouri woman who prosecutors said devised an elaborate scheme to cheat Elvis Presley’s family out of millions of dollars by threatening to foreclose on Graceland, the singer’s historic Memphis home, was sentenced on Tuesday to four years and nine months in prison, according to The Associated Press.
In August 2024, federal authorities arrested the woman, Lisa Jeanine Findley, 54, of Kimberling City, Mo., on charges of mail fraud and aggravated identity theft. In February, she agreed to plead guilty to one count of mail fraud as part of a plea agreement in which the count of aggravated identity theft was dismissed.
On Tuesday, Judge John T. Fowlkes, Jr., of U.S. District Court in Tennessee, sentenced Ms. Findley to 57 months in prison, plus an additional three years of probation, The A.P. reported.
Joseph C. Murphy, Jr., the interim U.S. attorney, had recommended the sentence of 57 months with a three-year maximum period of supervised release, according to a pre-sentencing court document. Prosecutors and a lawyer for Ms. Findley could not immediately be reached after sentencing.
The scheme to sell Graceland started with a mysterious series of contacts and threats about six months after Lisa Marie Presley, the daughter of Mr. Presley, died in 2023, according to law enforcement officials.
It evolved into a long-running, brazen effort involving fabricated names, emails, forms and documents meant to wrest control of millions of dollars while using Graceland, a historic landmark and lucrative tourist attraction that draws 600,000 visitors a year, as leverage.
According to court documents, a fake company named Naussany Investments & Private Lending LLC claimed that Lisa Marie Presley had borrowed $3.8 million from the company and put Graceland up as collateral, and that she had failed to repay the loan before her death in 2023.
In addition to fabricating the claim for $3.8 million, Ms. Findley had offered to “settle” for $2.8 million, court documents showed.
It was not immediately clear who was behind the company.
When Naussany scheduled a sale of Graceland, the case started to emerge into public view. In May 2024, lawyers for the actress Riley Keough, the daughter of Lisa Marie Presley, went to court to stop what they said was a monthslong, fraudulent plan to sell the property in an auction. They said that the company “appears to be a false entity” and that the documents it presented about the loan were also fake.
No one showed up in court to represent the company, and a Tennessee judge blocked the sale. The case was turned over to federal law enforcement officials, who investigated and determined that the effort was part of an elaborate fraud devised by Ms. Findley to foreclose on the property.
Last year, in August, the affidavit filed in support of her arrest said she had used “aliases, email addresses and fake documents” to engage “in a scheme to defraud Elvis Presley’s family for millions of dollars by threatening to foreclose” on Graceland.
It said she had made a false claim about the loan and mailed a package containing a “creditor’s claim” and what purported to be supporting documentation from a U.S. Post Office in Kimberling City, Mo., to Ms. Presley’s business manager in California.
The affidavit also said that she published a fraudulent “Notice of Foreclosure Sale” in a Memphis newspaper, executed false affidavits that were sent to the Shelby County Register’s Office, and communicated with the news media through fake identities.
She also tried to create false leads, sending emails under the name “Greg Naussany,” to pretend a Nigerian identity thief was responsible for the fraud, a court document filed as part of the pre-sentencing phase said.
After she knew she was under investigation, the documents said, she sent emails to the investigations team saying an “illegal” from Belize was behind the scheme.
Her arrest was made on the anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley, who was found unresponsive at Graceland on Aug. 16, 1977, and pronounced dead at a hospital. He was 42.
Christine Hauser is a Times reporter who writes breaking news stories, features and explainers.
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