CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Jurors for the federal trial of West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Allen Loughry may spend the weekend considering the testimony of Kimberly Ellis, a court employee who described feeling threatened by Loughry.
The jury of 10 women and two men focused on Ellis as she testified over much of Friday afternoon, with several appearing to take notes about what she was saying.
In addition to Ellis’s testimony, jurors heard a clip of a meeting Ellis recorded when she was summoned to a room with Loughry, then court-administrator Gary Johnson, two court attorneys and the court’s senior financial officer.
One of the 22 federal counts Loughry faces is a witness tampering charge that appears to refer to Ellis.
Ellis is currently the director of administrative services for the court. Her relationship with the court began when she was an interior designer for the Silling Associates architecture firm, which worked on a Supreme Court remodeling project.
Her testimony indicated she first felt threatened Jan. 4, 2017, when her cell phone rang at 8 p.m. as she attended her son’s soccer game. It was Loughry calling. Ellis said he asked to keep the call off the record.
Ellis testified that Loughry told her, “It’s my understanding that you’re loyal to Steve Canterbury and you’re a spy. But you have nothing to worry about. We like you.”
Ellis said she described herself as a loyal court employee.
Next, she testified, Loughry instructed her to go to work early the next morning to scrape Canterbury’s name off of his office door.
Ellis said she suggested contacting another court employee whose duties better corresponded to such a task.
Ellis testified that Loughry said no. “He wanted me to scrape his name off the door.”
“Did you?” asked federal prosecutor Philip Wright.
“I did,” Ellis responded.
Ellis next felt like her job was in question on Oct. 19, 2017, shortly after WCHS-TV reporter Kennie Bass had requested information about justices’ office renovations.
Ellis was summoned to a meeting. Testifying that several other court employees, including Canterbury, had been fired over the prior months, Ellis turned the voice notes recorder on her phone as she entered the room and held it on her lap.
During the meeting, Loughry asked if she recalled a meeting where she had written on paper the cost for the office renovations for Justice Menis Ketchum and Justice Margaret Workman.
“I was very specific over and over, that level we spent on anything, I didn’t want mine to be more than Menis’s or Margaret’s,” Loughry can be heard saying on the recording. “Do you remember those conversations?”
“I don’t,” Ellis responded on the recording.
Prosecutor Wright followed up by asking, “Did you have a conversation with Justice Loughry about his office being equal or less than the cost of justice Ketchum’s or Workman’s?
“No, I did not,” Ellis said.
She added of such conversations, “They never happened.”
The witness tampering charge against Loughry alleges he “attempted to coach a Supreme Court employee by planting false facts about purported prior conversations between the employee and defendant Loughry that concerned the renovation costs of defendant Loughry’s office — conversations that did not, in fact, occur — and did so with the intent to dishonestly influence and prevent future truthful testimony by the employee before the federal grand jury.”
Ellis was involved with the remodeling plan for Loughry’s office before she ever went to work for the court. Much of her testimony Friday afternoon had to do with the extent of the renovation and how much Loughry was involved.
To provide context, prosecutors played a clip of a WCHS-TV interview with Loughry from last fall when reporter Kennie Bass exposed the ornate renovation and its $367,915 cost.
“How much input did you have in the renovations and furnishings of your office?” asked Bass on the recording.
“Well, very little,” Loughry responded in the interview. “When I came into office, the renovations were a part of six and a half years of renovations, the first third and fourth floors. More than 96 percent of those renovations were completed by the time it came to my office.”
Ellis testified that she began working with Loughry on the office renovation in 2013.
She testified about a sketch hand-drawn by Loughry that included a vision of a West Virginia map inlaid into the wooden office floor, with Loughry’s home county of Tucker highlighted in granite.
“He had seen it, liked the idea of it and wanted it on the floor of his office,” she said.
More emails from Loughry described during testimony specified aspects of the office renovation, including how high his desk should be to accommodate his knees.
In one email, Ellis testified, “He sent me a link to a toilet paper holder he liked.”
Ellis described going to Carpet Gallery one evening for two to three hours with Loughry, his wife, his son and his secretary to identify options for upholstery for a couch that wound up costing $32,000.
Jennifer Bundy
Court spokeswoman Jennifer Bundy also testified early Friday afternoon about the communications she had with Loughry over media inquiries about a couch and an antique desk he had taken home.
Bundy said it was her habit to take reporters’ questions directly to justices and work through responses. She said the questions she was getting from Bass and Charleston Gazette-Mail reporter Phil Kabler were no different.
“I answer how they want me to say,” Bundy said.
Some of the questions had to do with Loughry’s response that he had taken home the couch and antique desk because the court had a traditional home office policy.
“The chief justice was telling me there was a policy,” Bundy testified. “I had no reason to question that.”
Other witnesses have testified this week that they knew of no home office policy for the Supreme Court, aside from justices having access to computers they could keep at home.
One of the counts against Loughry is a mail fraud allegation that “Loughry caused another Supreme Court employee to send an email to a reporter that falsely and fraudulently claimed that ‘the court has a longstanding practice of providing the justices an opportunity to establish a home office, with court-provided technology equipment (i.e. computers) and furniture to suit their respective needs.”
Justice Benjamin
Justice Brent Benjamin told jurors in Allen Loughry’s trial that it’s sometimes better if justices don’t see eye to eye but that hard feelings on the court got particularly bad during an internal battle over the use of state vehicles.
“Justices aren’t always supposed to get along; we aren’t supposed to be friends,” Benjamin said from the witness stand Friday morning.
But, he testified, “by 2016 was certainly what I would consider one of the low points.”
Benjamin, who served alongside Loughry as a Supreme Court justice between 2013 and 2016, began his testimony on Thursday afternoon by describing an eruption of memos over state vehicle policy.
Loughry is facing federal trial on 22 federal counts. Most of those are fraud charges having to do with his use of state vehicles and state gasoline purchasing cards for his personal travel.
“There was a lot of frustration between some of the justices because of the vehicle expense issue that had been investigated that summer,” said Benjamin, whose testimony continued Friday morning.
Benjamin said the court’s infighting came to a head at a judicial administrative conference in early September 2016. Benjamin said that was the “low low.”
By the time justices got to the conference, Benjamin testified, it became clear to him that he was already in the minority because of his concern over the vehicle use issue.
Benjamin said his position was aligned with Justice Robin Davis, who had expressed concern. He said the other justices — Loughry, Menis Ketchum and Margaret Workman — were on the other side.
Ketchum has since pleaded guilty to a federal fraud charge for his own use of a state vehicle and gas card to go to golf outings in Virginia.
Benjamin said an official vote at the conference wound up 3-2. The majority decided not to establish a policy governing vehicle use, intending to put questions to rest about how state vehicles were being used and where they were being driven.
“It became apparent to me that it had been done in the office and brought to conference,” Benjamin testified.
“I was upset because I felt we needed to discuss it more.”
Benjamin said he did pull Loughry aside: “Allen, are you telling me it was always official travel, that you didn’t use them for personal purposes?”
Loughry confirmed that his use was always official, Benjamin testified.
“Where did you go?” Benjamin recalled responding.
He said Loughry wouldn’t tell him.
Security personnel
The Supreme Court’s top security officer also testified Friday morning about how Loughry would react when asked where he was taking a car.
“Sometimes he would shrug his shoulders and not say anything,” security director Art Angus said. “Another time he said ‘it’s none of their effin’ business.”
Angus and another court employee, Paul Mendez, provided separate but similar testimony Friday morning about helping Loughry move a couch and an antique “Cass Gilbert” desk out of his home.
Angus testified that Loughry had been mad for months about the state vehicle controversy, saying very little.
The ice first broke a little in early January 2017 when Loughry appeared unexpectedly in the security office.
“I need to talk to you,” Loughry said.
Angus told the jury, “That’s the first time he’d said more than two words to me since June.”
Angus recalled that Loughry then said, “I don’t trust you all.”
But he said he was about to fire longtime Supreme Court Administrator Steve Canterbury, along with general counsel Kirk Brandfass. So he needed some assistance from security.
Loughry’s request for help with the couch and desk took place months later, in November 2017, when media attention swirled over rumors that he had taken home a couch that belonged to a former justice as well as the antique desk.
This time, Angus testified, Loughry met him in front of a Supreme Court elevator.
“Can you help me?” Loughry said.
“With what?” Angus recalled asking.
“I need to move a couch and desk,” Loughry responded, according to Angus’s testimony.
Angus said he at first thought the move was from one office to another at the Supreme Court. He then realized Loughry meant the furniture was at his home.
Angus, considering the size of the job, asked about the dimensions of the furniture. He said Loughry told him the couch was long.
As for the other piece of furniture, Angus said Loughry told him, “It’s a ‘Cass Gilbert’ desk.”
Mendez, the other court employee who testified, said the group of furniture movers took great pains to avoid the media. A neighbor photographed the group moving the couch and it wound up on social media.
So the heavy desk was moved over several hours through the house and into the garage. The group then left the Loughry home for a while until receiving assurance that the neighbor was gone.
The group then loaded the desk onto a van and drove it to a state warehouse.
“He said he wanted to get the desk to the warehouse before the media saw him,” Mendez testified. “He was going to call the media to tell them it was there.”
Instead, the group raised the front door of the warehouse to leave and saw a crew from WCHS-TV. They closed the door and drove out the back exit.
“We were just wondering how they knew so quick,” Mendez said.