Virginia Beach VA Aug 28 2018 For almost three decades, Kevin Darlene Edwards served as a probation officer in Virginia Beach, tasked with making sure defendants stayed out of trouble and got locked up when they didn’t.

In retirement, she worked part-time as a probation officer in Chesapeake and as a criminal justice instructor at Bryant & Stratton College.

Now 63, Edwards is set to add a new title to her resume: convicted fraudster.

Edwards, of Chesapeake, is scheduled to plead guilty Wednesday to charges she lied to multiple financial institutions to buy an $811,550 home she couldn’t afford and then secure a $200,000 loan to conceal the initial fraud.

Edwards, who retired in 2006 as the deputy chief of Virginia Beach’s probation office and in May from her position at Bryant & Stratton, did not respond to a request for comment.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Melissa O’Boyle declined to comment on the case, as did James Broccoletti, Edwards’ attorney, and Richard Doummar, her husband’s attorney.

Lawyers and former colleagues spoke favorably of Edwards’ work as a probation officer.

“There were no red flags for me,” said Cori Craver, who worked with Edwards in Chesapeake.

No charges have been filed against Edwards’ husband, Howard “Butch” Fawley Jr., a private investigator and retired Virginia Beach police officer whom Doummar described as well-respected.

According to court documents, Edwards and her husband decided to buy a 4,500-square-foot house on Cawdor Xing in Edinburgh in July 2014. It was to include several custom upgrades, including an elevator, outdoor shower and distinctive red roof over the front door.

Edwards initially told the builder she would use cash to buy the house, documents said. But she didn’t have that much money on hand, so she switched up the deal and told the real estate agent she’d been approved for a mortgage.

That wasn’t true either, however, and she used a series of forged documents and lies to secure two loans: one from Beach Municipal Federal Credit Union for $650,000 and one from a “hard money” lender named Holda Market Assets for $152,000.

Hard money lenders are private investment firms that generally charge higher interest rates than a traditional bank or credit union and require their loans to be secured with personal assets.

To make sure her purchase of the home went through, Edwards provided a real estate agent a falsified bank slip and two fake letters from Beach Municipal – both of which claimed she had been approved for mortgages before she had even applied. And to finally get the $650,000 mortgage, she showed the credit union two forged leases for rental properties.

The 30-day Holda Market loan was necessary to cover the down payment for the home. To secure it, Edwards offered a house on Elliott Avenue in Portsmouth that she did not own, court documents said.

Edwards closed on the Cawdor Xing house on June 1, 2015, the same day Holda Market wired her the money.

The scheme started to unravel shortly after that. According to court documents, she almost immediately defaulted on the Holda Market loan. She then started missing payments on the Beach Municipal mortgage in February 2017, leading the credit union to initiate foreclosure proceedings four months later.

The credit union put the home up for auction in March, but Edwards subsequently filed for bankruptcy, halting the auction. It was her second bankruptcy filing in 18 years.

Edwards’ chicanery didn’t end there, documents said. In an effort to keep Holda Market from learning she didn’t own the Elliott Avenue home, she told the company in August 2015 her grandson had died. It was a lie, documents said.

Holda Market then sued Edwards and Fawley.

Court documents said Edwards approached another hard money lender during the summer of 2016 to secure yet another loan. Edwards told the company she needed $220,000 to save her daughter-in-law’s home on Hall Drive in Chesapeake from foreclosure. In reality, she wanted it to settle the lawsuit, documents said.

In order to obtain the loan, Edwards gave the unnamed lender at least four fake documents that claimed the house in question was in foreclosure and that an auction had been scheduled. She then provided a closing attorney four other fake documents to get the deal to go through.

The lender eventually wired almost $201,000 to Edwards in August 2016. She used $175,000 to settle the lawsuit and the rest for unspecified personal expenses, court documents said.

Edwards stopped making payments on that loan in early 2017, prompting the lender to begin foreclosure proceedings on the Hall Drive house. Only then did the company realize it had also been duped, documents said.

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