MEMPHIS, Tenn. (BN24) — A Missouri woman who orchestrated a scheme to fraudulently sell Elvis Presley’s famed Graceland estate is set to be sentenced Tuesday in federal court, nearly a year after she tried to auction off the Memphis landmark in a phony foreclosure sale.
U.S. District Judge John Fowlkes will hand down the sentence to Lisa Jeanine Findley of Kimberling City, who pleaded guilty in February to one count of mail fraud. A second charge of aggravated identity theft was dropped as part of a plea deal. Prosecutors said Findley attempted to defraud Presley’s family by fabricating loan documents and threatening to sell Graceland unless the family paid millions of dollars.
Authorities said Findley falsely claimed that Lisa Marie Presley had borrowed $3.8 million from a sham private lender called Naussany Investments and Private Lending before her death in January 2023, and that she pledged Graceland as collateral. Findley then demanded $2.85 million to halt the supposed foreclosure.
To advance the scheme, Findley posed as three different people connected to the fake lender, published a fraudulent foreclosure notice in a Memphis newspaper in May 2024, and created forged legal documents. Actor Riley Keough, Presley’s granddaughter and heir to the estate, sued to block the sale, and a judge quickly halted the auction, calling the authenticity of the loan documents into question.
The fraud unraveled further when a notary whose name appeared on the papers, Kimberly Philbrick, stated she had never met Lisa Marie Presley nor notarized any documents for her. Investigators later determined Findley fabricated the paperwork and even tried to shift blame onto a Nigerian identity theft ring after the case began collapsing.
Graceland, Presley’s 13-acre Memphis mansion, has been a museum and tourist attraction since 1982 and continues to draw hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. It remains under the control of the Promenade Trust, which Keough inherited after her mother’s death.
Legal experts described the attempt as one of the most audacious real estate fraud cases in recent memory, targeting one of the most iconic properties in the United States.
Findley now faces sentencing that could bring significant prison time for the scheme, which prosecutors said was both elaborate and reckless.
