- Announcer: The following program
is a PBS Wisconsin Original Production.
[upbeat music]
- Man: Stereotypical white picket fences
and red, white, and blue flags flying in front yards.
It's the hometown of Ronald Reagan.
[soft guitar music]
- Mayor Burke: It's a community that's about 16,000 population.
Basically kind of a conservative county in a way.
- Man: A month ago, I was at old Saint Pats in Chicago.
And the usher says, "Where are you from?"
I said "Dixon," he goes, "Oh.
You're the town that the woman stole the 54 million from."
- It is the biggest case of municipal fraud in history.
The tiny town of Dixon, Illinois
lost an astonishing $53 million to one government employee.
[ominous music]
- Welcome to Director's Cut .
I'm Pete Schwaba, and that was a clip
from the documentary All the Queen's Horses .
The film tells the story of Rita Crundwell,
the city official in tiny Dixon, Illinois
who over the course of two decades,
managed to steal $53 million in taxpayer funds.
Joining me tonight is the film's director,
Kelly Richmond Pope.
Kelly, welcome to Director's Cut .
- Thank you for having me. - Oh, our pleasure.
Great work on the film.
My first question for you is just what aspect
of the story did you find most astonishing,
and what made you wanna dedicate,
really, years of your life to telling this story?
- That's a great question.
You know, I think what was most astonishing
for me is the ability for so many residents
to trust one person with their finances.
And it's inherent for us.
We all trust.
We can probably think of five people on our hands
that we trust without checking into anything, right?
And so what was really astonishing
was how she was able to violate the trust
that she knew that she had with people in order to steal.
So that was the first thing
that was pretty astonishing to me.
- Yeah, I think when you hear those numbers,
initially you're like, what?
Like, that's just such an ungodly sum,
and I don't even know what a yearly budget is for Dixon,
but that jumped out.
And when I was telling people about this film for the show,
they were like, "Oh yeah, I kinda remember that."
Like, it's such a big number.
People remember it on the national news.
Some people benefit from whistleblowers,
yet they seem to have issues
with the concept of whistleblowing.
Why is that?
- Well, I think the word whistleblowing
is a really naughty word in our society, right?
And we think about that someone has stepped
outside of the path and said something against the team.
And so that feels very violating,
even if what the person is saying
is something that you need to know.
So I think, historically, we have always been untrustworthy
of a whistleblower and in fact, we really shouldn't do that.
I mean, we really should listen to them.
We really should embrace them.
And we should really respect the courage that it takes
to come forward with something against someone that you know.
- Well said.
Let's see another clip from All the Queen's Horses .
[tense music]
- Kathe Swanson: In October of 2011, Rita was out of town,
and I needed my bank statements
to produce my treasurer's report.
In the past, Rita would say to me,
"Now be sure and give them the list over the phone
of the statements that you want."
I would just run down the list.
But that day I was under the gun,
I had too much work to do, and I just called and said,
"I want all of the bank statements."
That's when they came.
I saw this one account that I had never heard of before.
And what I noticed on it was three large deposits.
And it was in care of her.
It was RSCDA, the city of Dixon and care of Rita Crundwell.
I didn't know who to go to.
I sat on it for a couple of days.
I hid it in my car.
In three days' time,
the mayor came into my office, Mayor Burke.
So I told him about it.
He said go and get me a copy of that right now.
- My initial reaction was that there had to be
an explanation for it.
But Kathe kept looking and she could not,
she couldn't tie it into anything.
And so she asked me if I was gonna go to the police with it.
And I said, "No, absolutely not."
- He said, "Kathe, I will take care of this.
"I will go to the FBI, but we cannot say anything
"because if we're not correct,
"we don't wanna harm Rita in any way."
- I called the FBI.
I said, "I think there's a cancer in city hall,
but I need to talk with somebody."
And I took the bank statement along.
- The mayor came into the field office,
sat down and discussed with the case agents
what they had discovered.
- I told him, I said, "I hope I'm wrong about this thing."
And he said, "I don't think you are."
- Kelly, you said in your Ted Talk that I watched,
which was great by the way,
that you had to strategically stalk
Kathe Swanson, Rita Crundwell's coworker
in order to get her to talk.
How do you strategically stalk someone,
and is there a danger that you could push too far
and she would not wanna be on camera?
How do you handle that balance?
- So your first question is the definition
of strategically stalking, right?
So what you do is you send 50 emails
and you don't get a response, right?
Find out where the person works,
and then you go to said office to interview another person,
and then ask that person is the person at work at the time.
And then you just strategically stalk that way.
So that's how it really happened.
I was going to interview Paula Meyer,
who is the woman that took over Rita's job,
and during that interview at the end,
I asked Paula, I said, "Kathe works in this building?"
She said, "Yes."
And I said, "Do you think she's here today?"
And she said, "Yes."
And she said, "Why?"
And I said, "I've been trying to contact her
"and she won't respond.
"Do you think you could go down
"and tell her I'm up here and just, you know,
"let her know I just wanna talk to her?"
And so I felt like it could go one of two ways.
She could say yes or she could say no.
And up walks Kathe with her planner and says,
"Okay, what date do you want?
Will you just stop emailing me?"
And so that's really how it happened.
But I knew that it was really important
to talk to the whistleblower.
And so what's interesting about All the Queen's Horses
is despite it being about Rita Crundwell and her crime,
it's really about the bravery of Kathe Swanson.
And I knew that if not Rita, then it had to be Kathe
because I didn't want a documentary
that just told the story without one of those people.
So Kathe really became the focal point
of the film if you watch.
And so it's her journey,
really in the first half of the film,
and then we bring her in at the end.
But, you know, just to think about the journey
of this whistleblower.
You've worked for a person for 20 years
and you've realized that they're stealing
millions of dollars.
How much courage does it take
to blow the whistle on that person?
So it really is about Kathe and a little less about Rita.
- That's funny, I thought the exact same thing
while I was watching this, like, you don't talk to Rita,
but to me, Kathe's story is more interesting
because it took the courage on her part,
and the way she discovered it is just so interesting.
So let me ask you this,
if she doesn't discover it, does Rita ever get caught?
- Very interesting question.
Rita probably would not have gotten caught.
You know, she would've retired,
money would've started rolling back into the town,
and no one probably would've expected a thing.
And what we really are talking about
and we haven't said this word here,
is we're really talking about the privilege that she had.
The privilege, the access.
For someone to never suspect you to do anything wrong,
is really the value that Rita knew she had within herself.
So you know, she would've retired,
money would've come back in,
and she would've just ridden off into the sunset,
and no one would've ever suspected a thing.
- Yeah, it's almost, the access she had,
it was almost like they were daring her not to steal,
you know, like, I mean, it's incredible.
We have about-- - You know what's interesting?
Oh. - No, go ahead.
- I was gonna say, what's interesting about Rita's role
is Rita represents a person in a lot of our lives.
You think about the person that maintains the finances.
If you find a good finance person,
you wanna keep them happy and you wanna keep them close.
A lot of people don't-- feel very uncomfortable
talking about money, dealing with money, managing money.
So when you find a person
that's really comfortable with that, you embrace them.
And that's who Rita was.
The residents, the city council,
the mayor felt like they had just a gem in Rita
because she loved the job,
and she protected everything, or so they thought.
And so, you know, you embrace a person
like that who really understands finances.
And so I always love to say Rita,
the person, the model Rita is a person in all of our lives.
Someone we unconditionally trust,
and we don't do any due diligence on them
because they've met certain criteria
that allow us to say, "I trust you."
- Right, I have a question about the residents of Dixon
after we take another look at a clip
from All the Queen's Horses .
- Kathe: That morning, I went into the mayor's office.
I said, "Jim, I can't do this anymore."
And he just looked up at me and he said,
"Kathe, today's the day."
[tense music]
- Mayor Burke: So I just called her on the intercom
and I said, "Rita, could you stop up here?"
And she said, "Sure."
- Kathe: She came down the hall.
I couldn't look at her because I knew right then and there
they were already in the office waiting for her.
- Mayor Burke: So as she come up the door, she said, "Yes, sir?"
I said, "Rita, these gentlemen
would like to ask you a few questions."
And she said, "Sure."
I was looking right at her face.
Her countenance never changed at all.
So with that, I exited the office.
And then, just like that,
there's like about 15 of 'em came into City Hall.
Come right upstairs and they shut City Hall down.
[tense music]
- Agent Carroll: We brought in agents from downtown.
Used the agents out in Rockford.
Of course, the marshals were with us
because of the amount of seizures that were going on.
- Kathe: They sealed off the stairs.
And it was quite intense.
[tense music]
- And at that time, she was approached.
She was given her Miranda rights and asked for,
if she would like to talk to us, which she did give an interview.
It lasted about an hour and a half.
During that interview, she was cooperative.
She only thought she'd taken around $10 million.
If somebody gives a partial confession or something
we want that, it locks their statement in.
And that's what she did.
[soft music]
Think she was a little overwhelmed,
surprised, you know,
20 years of her life and basically everything she knew,
that was all coming down.
- Back with Kelly Richmond Pope,
the director of All the Queen's Horses .
Kelly, what was the general mood?
The residents have to feel very self-conscious,
I would think, about what happened in their town.
From their elected officials to the people.
I know there's some point in the film where a guy says,
"We don't want people to look at us
like we're a bunch of boobs,"
but from a provincial, like,
is there a kind of a pall or a mood around the town,
even when the neighboring town was suspicious
of what was going on,
the fact that nobody in Dixon knew or wanted to confront it,
is there a mood there now that's just off?
Or how are the residents affected by this?
- Well, I think when I was filming,
there was a mood, a shock, you know?
A shock was definitely in the air.
People just didn't understand.
They didn't understand why she did it.
They didn't understand how she did it.
And they just didn't understand all of those factors.
And so, one of the first,
well, one of the most important screenings that I did
was taking the film back to Dixon.
And I remember being at the Dixon Historical Theater,
which seats 952 people,
and I think there was 962 people there.
It was standing room only.
And what I realized was how important the film was
for the residents to explain what happened.
Because the news doesn't really explain that.
You know, the news, oftentimes when fraud happens,
will explain the lavish lifestyle that the person has,
but they don't talk about the how,
the environment that created it.
And so I think the film really answered a lot
of unanswered questions for a lot of the residents.
So it brought a sense of relief after they, at that screening.
And then the next year, we took the film back to Dixon.
And this time, the U.S. Marshal who worked the case,
Jason Wojdylo and Paula Meyer and myself
did town halls with the residents all day.
And people had the opportunity
to ask law enforcement a question.
And so, and then ask the finance director a question.
So I really feel like what this film did
is really became almost like a movement
and a sense of therapy for a lot of people who were harmed
and had a lot of unanswered questions.
There was, I think at first, a level of embarrassment
and maybe questioning me.
Because as you can imagine,
I look very different from many of the residents in Dixon.
I'm not from Dixon.
So there was that hurdle from a filmmaking perspective
for people to trust that I was gonna take this story
and do right by them and right by the town.
So there was some level of hesitation,
but I think through time,
because there were multiple trips to Dixon.
Maybe 20, 25 through the years.
And so I began to build my credibility with them.
- And you kind of defend them in a way,
as does the lawyer who sues the town
and the accounting company, kind of absolving the residents,
saying, "They had no way of knowing this,"
but that's a really good answer.
Very quickly, before we go to the next clip,
you don't have Rita Crundwell on camera.
What's it like as a documentary director
when you don't get someone, an interview you want?
How do you fill the void that exists because of that?
- Well, what I wanted a viewer to feel
is to understand who Rita was
just like everybody else in Dixon.
She kept people at a arm's-length distance.
So I wanted to provide the viewer
with enough information so that they just, at surface level.
She had a surface-level relationship with her.
So as a viewer, you experienced
the surface-level relationship with her.
You know, even if we did have that interview,
would we have believed her?
You know, I didn't want the focus of the film
to become "I don't like her," "She's telling the truth."
I really wanted the focus of the film
to be about how fraud can happen.
So Rita almost could have been a distraction.
I wanted the sense of what she did,
but not necessarily her as a person to distract the viewer
from the true learning that I wanted them to have.
- That's a great answer.
And just like in narratives,
characters are defined by their actions
as opposed to what they say.
So very well-said.
Let's see another clip from All the Queen's Horses .
- Announcer: Now let's congratulate
your 2011 world champion, Good I Will Be,
owned and shown by Rita Crundwell of Dixon, Illinois.
- Mayor Burke: She was leading a big lifestyle.
I thought, and I think everybody in town thought
that it was all due to these horses.
You know, there'd be stories in the paper
that she's got another national champion
and she'd have pictures,
and then there were stories that she'd sold horses
for $200,000 and $300,000.
So that was the image that she was conveying.
That was the image that I had.
[slow country music]
- I must have went by Rita's horse farm 15 times, you know?
And I always asked my wife, "Who has that many quarter horses?"
- It was really kind of mind-boggling
and see the spread that she had.
It's like, oh my gosh.
[upbeat music]
- Pat: Nobody ever questioned the magnitude of that money.
- Bonnie: She told people that her parents
were investors in Campbell's Soup companies.
I mean, certainly her parents could've owned
many acres of farmland, which is very high-revenue.
Honestly didn't think too much about it.
Curious, but like everyone else,
you just kind of, oh, hmm, interesting.
- I do know for a fact, several people,
many people benefited from her money.
And I suspect 85% of it was cash.
- Back with Kelly Richmond Pope.
Kelly, you're an accountant and a professor.
You decided to make this film.
I know you did one other film.
You didn't go to film school, to the best of my knowledge.
How do you, how does an accountant and professor
become a filmmaker?
Two very different professions.
Can you walk us through your kind of evolution
into a new profession?
- Sure, it's a common question, right?
This weird combination, right? [Pete laughing]
One of the things that I am is a researcher.
And so when you go through a PhD program,
what you do is you learn how to ask a question,
develop a hypothesis, and then look for data
to support or refute that hypothesis.
Documentary filmmaking is really the same process.
What was the question I was trying to answer?
That question was how does one person steal $53 million
and no one know?
What's the data that I need to collect?
Well, I need to talk to law enforcement.
I need to talk to residents, I need to talk to the mayor.
I need to talk to some forensic accountants
other than myself.
And so you then put that together.
And this kind of film,
I'm following a chronological timeline.
So that sort of helped because I just wanted people
to understand the story and then punch in
some various theories that I wanted them to take away.
So it's really a visual research paper,
just like I do as an empirical researcher
in my day job wearing my accounting professor hat.
I mean, that's what we do.
We teach, but we really spend a lot of our time
doing research and publishing.
And so documentary filmmaking is,
it's a nice complement to the research skills
that I acquired when I was a PhD student.
- Did you know right away,
that kinda leads me to this next question.
Did you know right away,
you've got this film about numbers
and white collar crime and embezzling
and that kind of thing, how to make it more cinematic
and visually appealing to viewers?
And you do that with graphics and good music,
but what was your process with that?
- I think I knew right away how to do it.
And I think that's the teaching, the educator in me
because your goal every time you walk into a classroom
is to excite your students.
So your goal with the filmmaker is to excite your viewer.
So I knew that colors, sound, music added to the experience.
I mean, it adds to my learning environment
that I create with my classroom,
so let's bring that same environment
into the viewing experience for a moviegoer.
So I knew that it needed,
I knew that it needed to have that.
For some strange reason,
people don't like accounting and don't like numbers.
So I knew it was my responsibility--
- Pete: Imagine that. [laughs]
- Imagine that, right?
So it's my responsibility to make it fun for them
and make it attainable and that you would have
some learning nuggets from that.
And so that was my journey, you know?
Trying to make it fun, make it digestible,
and make it important to everybody.
- And I don't mean to belittle what you do.
I just learned how to balance a checkbook
a week ago Tuesday, so.
Let's see another clip from All the Queen's Horses .
- The prosecution put together a PowerPoint presentation.
[soft guitar music]
For each year of her crime spree,
they had a couple of boxes outlined in black
where they would relay the budget committee's discussions
of what needed to be cut.
[tense music]
But then on every page, they had a box outlined in red.
And during these drastic cuts to the Dixon budget,
there were comments like, "Rita spent $6,000
on a custom-made saddle."
[tense music]
Ms. Crundwell upgraded her motor coach.
She upgraded that thing five times
until she finally bought one that was $2.1 million.
[tense music]
But particularly, in the year 2008
is when she crossed the $5 million threshold.
And again in 2009, more than $5 million.
And again in 2010, she stole more than $5 million.
And I think she did that because beginning in 2008
was the start of the recession and she had best excuse.
- Showing all of her assets made everybody realize
that she just kept buying
and the people of Dixon were suffering.
- We're back for our final segment with director
Kelly Richmond Pope and her film, All the Queen's Horses .
Kelly, I won't ask you your budget
'cause I don't do that kind of thing,
but I know it's always a struggle for indie filmmakers.
We have indie filmmakers that watch the show.
Where did you go to raise the money?
Being a numbers person, did you have some kind of secret
that none of us know?
Where did you find your budget?
- Well, it was a lot of begging and a lot of bartering.
But I will say what was helpful
is having a career in higher education
and as a researcher, doing white collar crime
and forensic accounting research to support my project.
So I do a lot of public speaking,
a lot of training, a lot of workshops.
And so I have a lot of corporate contacts.
And so I was able to sort of tap on the door and say,
"Hey, you want me to do a podcast for you?
I need you to support this film for me."
Well, it's sort of like someone asks me to do something,
but I ask them, I need you to do this for me.
So that helped.
It was tough, though.
You know, being a non-filmmaker
was really hard in terms of the fundraising
because just imagine when my proposal hits the desk
of the review committee of the grant or fellowship,
they're like, "She's not a filmmaker.
She hasn't gone to film school."
I just become a bunch of things that I'm not.
So I had to utilize an outside network
that probably most traditional filmmakers wouldn't,
but those people supported me and supported the work.
So I was able to raise the money to get the project done.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that Kartemquin Films
and their Diverse Voices in Docs program
was the program that I went through
that really taught me the ins and outs of filmmaking
and fundraising and developing a log line
and really how to put a crew together.
And I knew how to do a budget, of course,
'cause I teach courses on that,
but I really didn't know the ins and outs of filmmaking
until I went through the DVID program.
So I learned everything there,
but then it taught me how to utilize the network
that I had really built for myself as a professional.
And so if it wasn't for that,
I don't know that I would have been able to finish the film
because a lot of funders don't support
non-filmmakers, you know?
But there's a lot of people that have a lot of ideas
and there's a lot of complementary skills.
So don't close the door on those non-filmmakers
'cause they may just surprise you.
- Well, and they probably felt very comfortable with you
keeping track of the budget
'cause they knew if something looked fishy,
you'd just investigate and figure out
what the deal was anyway, so.
We have about 20 seconds left.
Great job narrating, by the way.
I didn't see you in the credits.
Professor or filmmaker?
What do you prefer in 10 seconds?
- I prefer forensic storyteller.
That's what I prefer. - Wow.
Very diplomatic, okay.
Thank you so much for being with us today, Kelly.
Good luck with the film, you did a great job.
- Thank you. - You're welcome.
- Thank you for having me, I appreciate the time.
- My pleasure.
And thank you for watching Director's Cut .
For more information on All the Queen's Horses ,
please go to pbswisconsin.org and click on Director's Cut .
While you're there, send us an email
or find out how to submit a film.
Also, don't forget to like PBS Wisconsin on Facebook
or follow us on Twitter.
I'm Pete Schwaba, [sighs]
and this film has inspired me to come clean.
I have 16 bucks in an offshore account
I haven't paid taxes on in years.
We'll see you next time on Director's Cut .
[gentle music]
- Paula: We have to become ACA compliant right now
if we go to that 2.5% if we don't wait until January.
- Woman: Correct.
- Interviewer: You sit in a very interesting position
because you're the person that filled her shoes.
- Right.
- Did you have any reservations about that?
- No, actually taking the job after she was here,
my first thought was, "Well, really,
how could I do any worse?" [laughs]