Marjorie Caldwell Hagen escaped jail time in Arizona today in the latest of her long-running legal troubles.
She’s the Congdon heiress from Duluth who was accused of helping murder her mother, Elisabeth Congdon, in the Glensheen Mansion on the shores of Lake Superior. She was acquitted of that crime.
Later, she served prison time in two states for arson. But there have been two other suspicious deaths associated with her over the years, too; charges were dropped in one and never filed in the other.
Today, Hagen, 76, was sentenced to three years of intensive probation in a case of forgery and fraud in Arizona.
She’d been arrested after befriending an elderly man in Tucson and getting his power of attorney to handle his finances.
But then he died, and she kept writing the checks. In a plea agreement, she pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, but included in the deal was the agreement that her criminal past wouldn’t be used in determining her sentence.
Her sentence could have ranged from six months to 2.5 years in prison or up to 12 months in jail.
Hagen claimed that she had provided care for the man and, when he died, took his money from a joint account to pay debts and repay her expenses.
