Prison for former Jefferson Curves owner

Hockemeier stole $438K from husband’s mother

By JARED STRONG
j.strong@carrollspaper.com

BOONE — Myrna Hockemeier didn’t expect to go to prison Monday.

The 66-year-old Ames woman — the former owner of Curves, a women’s gym, in Jefferson and Carroll — asked a deputy sheriff to escort her to her car after a judge decided that she should be in prison for up to 10 years for stealing more than $400,000 from her former mother-in-law.

She needed to get some things in order — among them, giving her keys to a friend who could drive her car away from the courthouse in Boone.

“I had no clue,” she said of the prison sentence to someone in the courtroom after her sentencing. “I would have prepared for that.”

Court records show that Hockemeier obtained a debit card for her then-husband’s mother’s bank account in 2007 and frittered away the money gambling and buying clothes over the course of about seven years.

Her then-husband, Rudy Hockemeier, of Ogden, discovered the thefts when he got a letter from the Internal Revenue Service that said he hadn’t paid taxes on savings bonds that Myrna Hockemeier had cashed without his knowledge.

He filed for divorce in July 2014 after 19 years of marriage, and in May 2016, a state prosecutor accused Myrna Hockemeier of ongoing criminal conduct, a felony punishable by up to 25 years in prison.

She pleaded guilty to a lesser felony of theft in March.

“There were no winners in this deal,” Rudy Hockemeier said Monday.

Myrna Hockemeier opened the former Curves franchise in Jefferson, on the south side of the Square, in the spring of 2003.

More than a dozen people wrote letters of support for Myrna Hockemeier to keep her out of prison, but in the end it was a state prosecutor’s words that swayed District Judge Steven Oeth to incarcerate her.

People can’t just steal money and, when they get caught, merely get ordered to pay it back, assistant Iowa Attorney General Rob Sand argued.

“This was not just money to her,” Sand said of the mother-in-law. “It represented her life’s work. She had scrimped and saved her entire life.”

Hockemeier pleaded her case with a few words: “I’m just sorry for the bad choices I made.”

Yet Oeth admonished Hockemeier for her repeated thefts: “Every time you did that, you knew you were doing a terrible thing.”

Those sent to prison in Iowa typically serve no more than half of their total possible sentence because they get credit for good behavior.

Hockemeier is unemployed but was ordered to pay more than $438,000 in restitution.

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