CA Mayor Admits To Stealing Funds From Local Church, Attempted Suicide

SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, CA — The mayor of a Northern California city has publicly confessed to embezzling money from a local church and attempting to end her life recently.

Tamara Wallace submitted a letter to the Tahoe Daily Tribune on Sunday, detailing her struggles with guilt and shame.

“This is the hardest thing I have ever had to do. I am publicly admitting that I took funds from the Presbyterian Church over an extended period," Wallace wrote.

On Sept. 11, her birthday, she attempted to end her life.

"I was so filled with guilt, shame, and grief that I experienced a mental health crisis that made suicide seem to be the best solution," she said. "It was only by the grace of God that I failed."

Since then, Wallace said she has spent 18 days in a mental health facility and is now taking medicine. She says she is also in an "intense, all-day, every-day group" as well as attending counseling sessions.

"My husband, children, extended family members, and close friends were in shock and extreme anguish as they found out I had almost succeeded in taking my life," she said. "No one had any idea what I had done to the church."

Wallace says she hadn't been caught stealing and that she has turned herself in. The 57-year-old says she had prepared a list of account numbers and passwords that she provided to the church while still in the hospital.

"There are, I am finding out through my counseling sessions, reasons why I would do something so horrible, but they are in no way an excuse for my actions," Wallace said.

Wallace went on to share the details of her troubled past.

In her letter, Wallace described a lifetime of trauma and loss that she says contributed to her mental health crisis. She wrote that she endured years of abuse beginning at age 4, including being drugged, and that when she disclosed it to her alcoholic mother at age 10, she was blamed instead of protected.

Those experiences, she said, left her with deep shame — particularly guilt over feeling she had not done enough to protect younger girls in her family.

“I am trying to follow the example of Christ’s forgiveness … by working through the process of forgiving my mother and those who so terribly abused me and altered my life in unimaginable ways,” she wrote.

Wallace also cited decades of compounding grief. She cared for her father as he died at home, then lost her son Christopher to fentanyl poisoning. Her oldest son survived bone cancer but lost his leg and has been seriously ill for the past year.

She herself spent 10 years bedridden with migraines and high fevers from an autoimmune disorder. She described family crises, repeated brushes with death and even being chased into City Council meetings amid threats over her public service.

Sept. 11, the date she tried to take her life, was both her birthday and a day marked by multiple traumas, including her parents’ divorce and being inside a congressional office building during the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

“Still, these things may be reasons, but not an excuse for my behavior,” she wrote. “There is no excuse.”

She said she coped with this history by “compartmentalizing” — excelling in school, becoming a hard-working mother and public servant, and burying her abuse and grief.

Wallace likened her embezzlement to the hoarding behavior she had seen in foster children: a self-soothing mechanism born of trauma.

“For some internal thinking reason, I used this theft as a soothing mechanism,” she wrote, adding that while she justified using much of the money to help others, including her deceased son’s children, she knows that does not absolve her.

Wallace said she has reached out to the church and expects to face legal consequences. She vowed to repay every cent and use her experience to warn others against suicide and to help survivors of abuse.

“There is no reason I should have lived that day other than that I still have a purpose remaining on earth,” she wrote. “Most important is that I will use this experience to hopefully stop others from committing the selfish, wrong-minded act of suicide.”

She also thanked her husband and children for standing by her despite their pain.

I love our town and, regardless of the outcome, will dedicate my life to making it a better place to live. God bless you all.”

Read her full letter here.