Lunch Lady Sisters Accused of Stealing Almost $500K from School

In the photos, she seems like she could be your grandma, your great-aunt, your parents’ quiet neighbor. She has sad, dark eyes, softly curled gray hair and a somber expression—but then again, who smiles in their mugshot? That meek-looking woman in a floral shirt is 67-year-old Marie Wilson, who, along with her 61-year-old sister, has been accused of stealing almost half a million bucks from the New Canaan, Connecticut school system.

Wilson and Joanne Pascarelli were longtime lunch ladies at New Canaan High School and Saxe Middle School, respectively. According to the Hartford Courant, one of their coworkers complained about “possible theft” from the cash drawers in the school cafeterias. The school system looked into the allegations and Pascarelli was placed on administrative leave. She resigned in December, and Wilson sent her own resignation letter a few days later.

In one of the more damning findings reported by the New Canaan News, administrators at Saxe Middle School discovered that the average daily deposit from the 2013 fiscal year through the 2016 fiscal year was anywhere between $18 to $33 dollars. In the summer of 2016, new software was installed and the daily deposits increased to an average of $93. But this year, in the months since Pascarelli left the cafeteria for the last time, the daily deposit magically increased to $183 a day.

Some of Wilson and Pascarelli’s cafeteria coworkers were interviewed by police officers, and confessed that they weren’t the ones who counted the cash in their register drawers before or after lunch. Instead, you-know-who would take the drawers to their offices and count the money themselves.

One of Pascarelli’s coworkers told the cops that she questioned the woman about her cash-counting process and, “in retaliation, was assigned to wash dishes for months.” When one of Wilson’s coworkers questioned her, she transferred the woman from New Canaan High School to the middle school.

Both women turned themselves into the New Canaan police department over the weekend, and both of them have been charged with larceny and defrauding a public community. The cops estimate that, between 2012 and 2017, the women stole $478,588. (Officers also believe that the women could’ve been padding their bank accounts with sweet, sweet lunch money for fifteen years, but the statute of limitations prevented them from investigating any alleged thefts that could’ve occurred before 2012).

“There is much more to this story,” Wilson’s attorney Mark Sherman told the News. “Marie is innocent and did not personally divert a single nickel of town money for personal gain. She is not going to be scapegoated for the missing money.” (Pascarelli’s attorney said he was “not at liberty” to comment.)

If you like serving sliced cling peaches and embezzling cash, it seems like becoming a school cafeteria worker could be the ultimate career. In May, Rebecca Naomi Dorris was arrested for allegedly stealing $27,541 from the Arkansas middle school where she worked. (And it wasn’t exactly a complicated scheme: she just pocketed some of the cash while the students paid for their meals).

The same month, the Radford, Virginia school system learned that a beloved, now-late lunch lady had embezzled more than $250,000 during her last decade of employment, using the school’s debit card for purchases at, “Amazon, Walmart, Kroger, restaurants, gas stations, resorts and even for her utilities and taxes.” And on May 28, Brenda Watts, a longtime cafeteria manager at North Springs High School in Atlanta, pleaded guilty to stealing almost $120,000 in cash from the school cafeteria food cart. She was ordered to repay the money, but is not facing any jail time.

Back in Connecticut, Wilson and Pascarelli have denied stealing any money. They have both been released from jail on $50,000 bond each, and have court dates later this month.