Woman Sentenced to More Than Four Years

The Missouri woman behind a wild scheme to sell Elvis Presley’s famous Graceland estate-turned-museum will spend four years and nine months in federal prison, The Associated Press reports. 

Lisa Jeanine Findley, who pleaded guilty to mail fraud charges tied to the scheme earlier this year, was sentenced in a Memphis federal court on Tuesday, Sept. 23. Findley declined to speak during the hearing. 

The plot allegedly found Findley, 54, posing as multiple people and forging numerous documents. These included a phony claim that Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, had borrowed $3.8 million from a company called Naussany Investments and put up Graceland’s deed as collateral before her January 2023 death. 

Then, Findley, allegedly posing as someone named Kurt Naussany, sent numerous letters to the attorneys of Lisa Marie’s daughter, Riley Keough, demanding repayment of the $3.8 million. If the money was not sent, Graceland would be put up for sale. In May 2024, Naussany Investments started advertising a foreclosure sale for Graceland, prompting Keough to file a lawsuit of her own, claiming the loan documents were fake. A judge blocked the foreclosure sale on May 22, the day before the auction was set to take place.

(Compounding the drama was the fact that the foreclosure story broke several months after Keough and her grandmother, Priscilla Presley, settled a contentious dispute over Lisa Marie’s estate.)  

It wasn’t until August that federal authorities finally arrested Findley on mail fraud and identity theft charges. A few months prior, however, NBC News had tracked down Findley, who claimed she had been the victim of identity theft herself. The extensive report described Findley as “a con woman with a decades-long rap sheet of romance scams, forged checks and bank fraud totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars, for which she did time in state and federal prison.”

Findley pleaded guilty to the mail fraud charges against her in February, with prosecutors agreeing to drop the identity theft charge as part of the plea. Her public defender, Tyrone Taylor, pushed for a lenient sentence, noting that Presley’s estate did not lose any money. He also argued that Findley’s plot wasn’t as sophisticated as prosecutors made it out to be, saying it was a “concocted idea” with little chance of success. 

The judge, however, disagreed, calling it “a highly sophisticated scheme to defraud,” and adding it would have been a “travesty of justice” if it had somehow resulted in Graceland’s sale.