Court-bound woman kills self

A Santa Ana woman who did not appear in federal court Friday to be sentenced for defrauding a local consulting company committed suicide in a Costa Mesa park and was found Saturday morning, authorities said.

Jamie Watkins, 52, hanged herself from a tree at Shiffer Park off Bear Street in Costa Mesa sometime either Friday night or Saturday morning, police said. She was facing 10 years in federal prison for defrauding Deloitte Consulting LLP out of $550,000 between June 2000 and October 2003. The FBI arrested her 2005, and she later pleaded guilty to using the company’s expense reimbursement program to help furnish her house and buy jewelry while she was the operations manager there.

Watkins was due in court Friday for sentencing. When she didn’t show, a warrant was issued for her arrest and U.S. marshals set out to find her.

Her car was discovered near her Costa Mesa office, which is only a block away from the park, but she was nowhere to be found, federal officials said.

A family on Tanana Place, a residential street that dead ends against the park, said they saw Watkins twice Friday afternoon and she seemed OK.

“None of us saw anything that indicated something was going down,” said Chuck Crabtree, a retired minister from Stockton. He and his family were selling items out of his late brother’s home Saturday when he found Watkin’s body about 6:45 a.m.

He recognized her from the day before in the park, when she had asked him for the time.

“She said ‘Sir, can you tell me what time it is?’ and I said it was 4:12 p.m., and she said ‘Thank you’ and walked away,” Crabtree recalled. “There was no hurry. She was the only one in the park at the time.”

Quinn McGuire, 13, said he recognized Watkins from an earlier encounter that day. While he, his mother and Crabtree were moving things in the garage, Watkins approached him from the street and asked for a pen, Quinn said.

She had two papers attached together with her, he said. She flipped to the second page and signed it, returned the pen, then walked back into the park, he said. Quinn and his mother, Sharlene McGuire, said Watkins did not seem distraught and was friendly.

Authorities declined to comment whether the papers were a suicide note.

Crabtree said he saw Watkins hanging from the driveway. At first, he said, he thought it was a dummy left as a prank by some kids and ignored it. Even as he got closer to post “Estate Sale” signs in the park, he thought nothing of it.

That was until a married couple who walk through the park every morning happened by and immediately told him what they saw.

“She just pointed back at the body and said ‘Dead...dead,” Crabtree said. He said it looked like she had used a trash can next to the tree to boost herself up.