Another Hotel TV Theft Suspect Pleads Not Guilty

A suspect in the theft of nine televisions from a Casper hotel in May pleaded not guilty to two charges Friday.

Rachel Johnson is charged with a misdemeanor count of receiving stolen property vauled under $1,000 and one felony count of being an accessory after the fact to a burglary,  Natrona County District Court Judge Daniel Forgey told her during her arraignment.

A trial date will be set later.

According to a police affidavit filed in Natrona County Circuit Court, Casper police officers investigated an overnight burglary of nine new Samsung flatscreen televisions worth $6,300 from the Holiday Inn at 721 Granite Peak Drive in east Casper.

Investigators got a lead when they found someone trying to sell the televisions on Facebook.

They also determined the organizer of the caper was James Arner, a former hotel employee who with several others orchestrated the theft conducted at 2:30 a.m. May 20.

After they'd loaded the televisions on a Ford F150 pickup loaned to them by Johnson, they drove to her apartment on the west side of Casper and stored them there.

She asked him to move the televisions the next day. Johnson was present when Arner and his mother Susan Arner removed the televisions from the apartment before taking them to a rental storage unit in Paradise Valley, according to the affidavit.

All the televisions were recovered by the end of May.

Arner and his accomplice Mathew Pickett have pleaded not guilty to charges of burglary and conspiracy to commit burglary.

Another accomplice, Gilbert Casias, pleaded guilty to one count of burglary earlier this week. As part of a plea deal, Casias agreed to testify against his co-defendants, and prosecutors will seek no more than a two-to-four-year prison sentence.