GLEN ALLEN, Va. (WAVY) — When you pay for a home warranty and need a contractor to come out and do some work, you wouldn’t expect the warranty company to send out a convicted felon.
But that’s what happened with Select Home Warranty when they dispatched Amanda Deese to local homes, and the customers had no idea who they were dealing with.
Long before her current murder-for-hire charges, Deese was a convicted felon for a financial crime, but that fact proved elusive to Select Home Warranty when it listed Deese on its roster of providers — as elusive as the company itself.
Select has an address listed with the State Corporation Commission on Sadler Road in Glen Allen. It’s an address, but it’s not a real address.
Scan the building directory and you won’t see Select Home Warranty. The company’s supposed suite number upstairs does have a receptionist, and she told us she forwards Select’s mail, but it has no physical presence.
Here’s the question we wanted to ask — and already have by phone and email — although it’s fallen on deaf ears.
“How could Select Home Warranty send out a contractor who was a convicted felon to someone’s home?”
Select’s customer service center told 10 On Your Side that someone named “Raymond White” would respond. That was two months ago.
The convicted felon whom Select Home Warranty saw fit to put on a roster of trusted contractors came to the home of Robert and Kelly Rogers in Chesapeake. They paid her $6,500 to remodel their bathroom.
Deese left the job mostly unfinished, and the couple was later awarded a judgement for money they highly doubt they will ever see.
They say Select’s background checks are somewhere between inadequate and non-existent.
“Either they didn’t do anything, or they don’t care,” Robert Rogers said. “Neither answer’s acceptable.”
Select also sent Deese to the home of Donald and Faith Sullivan. Lucky for them they paid her only the initial $75 show-up fee, and she never showed up again.
“As far as Select Group, I don’t think that they are very thorough in vetting their contractors,” Donald Sullivan said.
“There are other warranty companies out there who won’t send fraudulent murder-for-hire people to your home,” Robert Rogers said. “Choose one of them, any one of them.”
Deese’s sister lives next door to Darrell Higgins in Ocean View. Deese told Higgins she needed a place to stay and she ended up living in his garage. Deese was in Higgins’ Ford pickup in late January outside the Chesapeake jail — in the console, a loaded gun.
According to authorities, Deese was there to pick up an inmate, who would be the trigger man to eliminate a witness against Brian Askew, who is charged with malicious wounding after police say he shot a woman two years ago.
Meanwhile, Higgins claims that Deese stole thousands of dollars from him.
“Oh my God, she could talk you out of your underwear,” he said.
But more than a decade earlier, Deese was convicted in federal court of embezzlement. Court documents show that she stole more than $200,000 from a previous employer, claiming that the money was for legitimate expenses. That felony conviction in federal court dates back to 2012.
Currently, she’s facing two charges in Chesapeake, conspiracy to commit murder for the alleged plot to kill a witness, and possession of a gun by a convicted felon — the gun found in the pickup as she waited outside the jail.
Her next court date is coming up in May.