KY man gets 6 months tacked onto 10 year sentence for fraud after escaping to Florida
A man who fled Kentucky before he was due to turn himself in to serve a 10-year sentence for commodities fraud has had more time tacked on to his imprisonment.
In addition to his decade-long sentence, William Evans III will serve an additional six months for failure to surrender. He was supposed to self-report to a federal prison in Ashland on Dec. 15. Instead of showing up to prison, he fled to Florida in a rental car with a few personal items, according to court records. He was found near the Everglades after a two-day search.
Evans accepted a plea agreement and was sentenced for his new conviction Thursday afternoon in a federal courtroom in Lexington. In the agreement, he obliged to plead guilty and serve an additional six months, with a supervised release of three years.
In addition to these terms, Evans also waived the right to appeal the guilty plea, conviction and sentence.
In 2021, Evans admitted to committing commodities fraud. He acted as a professional investor doing business for Turning Point Investments, which was not authorized to operate in the commonwealth, according to court records.
In previous Herald-Leader articles, it was reported Evans pooled money from more than 20 investors and encouraged them to put in money from individual retirement accounts or other accounts which are penalized for withdrawing money early.
According to a sentencing memorandum, Evans would then put money from investors into his own bank account or into trading accounts in his wife’s name, use money from clients to pay off debts to other clients, and spend some on personal expenses, including improvements to his house and payments on a boat.
For those crimes, he was ordered to pay $16.9 million in restitution costs. Federal authorities froze more than $10 million Evans and his wife had in various accounts in 2020. They sold their house and boat to pay towards the costs, according to court records.
This story was originally published May 12, 2022 at 4:09 PM.
