S. Gene Cauley was found dead in his lakeside home near Hot Springs on Friday morning. The death is under investigation by the Garland County Sheriff's Office and the county coroner.
S. Gene Cauley, once a high-profile class-action lawyer before pleading guilty to stealing millions from a client trust account, was found dead in his lakeside home near Hot Springs on Friday morning, and Garland County Sheriff Mike McCormick said the death has been ruled a suicide.
Coroner Stuart Smedley confirmed to Arkansas Business on Monday morning that Cauley, 48, was pronounced dead at 11:58 a.m. on Friday. The death appeared to be caused by ligature strangulation, Smedley said.
The body has been released to Davis-Smith Funeral Home in Hot Springs.
Arkansas Business had been attempting to get confirmation from Garland County authorities since Friday afternoon. Late Monday morning, McCormick released a statement saying that deputies from his office were called to Cauley’s residence on Friday morning for a “welfare check,” and met there with an unidentified family about 11 a.m. Cauley “was located inside and apparently died from self-inflicted means.”
Cauley was still on supervised release following completion of his federal prison sentence in April.
The house in which Cauley died is listed for sale for $589,000. He paid $698,000 for the house in the Rockwell community on Lake Hamilton in May 2007 and transferred ownership to an irrevocable trust on March 30, 2009, days before his law partners in Little Rock informed a federal judge in New York that $9.3 million was missing from an account that Cauley alone controlled. The account originally contained more than $65 million, the settlement of a class-action case.
After pleading guilty to wire fraud and criminal contempt of court, Cauley was sentenced to 86 months in federal prison. On Jan. 18, 2010, a week before he reported to federal prison, Cauley married Kathleen Rooney. After he was allowed to return to Hot Springs on home confinement last year to complete the final months of his sentence, the couple “separated” on Nov. 12. But court records indicate both continued to live in the house until after Cauley filed for divorce on Jan. 29.
The divorce was granted on April 15. The settlement indicated that Rooney had been trustee and beneficiary of a life insurance trust, but relinquished those positions in March.
The public record does not indicate exactly how much Cauley had paid of the $8.8 million in restitution he still owed at the time of his sentencing in 2009. After an initial $500,000 was paid before he was sentenced, occasional small payments have been entered on the court record, including $174.41 on May 3 of this year.
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