Ex-Instructor Gets Prison for Impersonating Speech Expert

A former speech teacher was sentenced Friday to five years and four months in state prison on charges stemming from her 12-year impersonation of an Ohio speech pathologist.

Ventura Superior Court Judge Bruce A. Thompson compared Wilma Alzenia Alford’s crime to that of an individual who fraudulently substitutes a cheap fake for an expensive, authorized part for a Cadillac.

“You’ll never be able to show the damage. We just know that Alford was a defective part,” Thompson said. “She was never meant to be inserted in the system.”

Alford, 37, of Oxnard was arrested in November at Glenwood Elementary School in Sun Valley, where she had been teaching a special education class for a month. She pleaded guilty in December in Ventura Superior Court to grand theft of the more than $128,000 she earned from her previous employer, the Rio School District in Oxnard. She also pleaded guilty to two forgery charges.

She Used Another’s Transcripts

Alford, who called herself Dr. Ann Wood Wesley, was a speech therapist in the school district from 1977 to 1983. She was hired for the position on the basis of teaching credentials and other documents fraudulently obtained using the name and academic transcripts of a Cincinnati speech pathologist, Dr. Ann Stace Wood, 44.

Alford also forged Wood’s name to two separate applications for California teaching credentials, according to court testimony.

“For 12 years, this person has been leading a life of deception that has harmed innumerable people who came in contact with her,” Ventura Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Meyers told Thompson before sentencing. “Even those people who were near to her, the people she married, some in bigamous relationships, didn’t know what this lady was.”

According to a county probation report, Alford has been using Wood’s credentials since 1972 to practice speech therapy in Arizona, California and elsewhere, even though she never obtained a college degree. The report also said that she was married last year in Florida to Dr. Wallingford H. Bowlin, a Jacksonville physician, without obtaining a divorce from Theodore Wesley of Oxnard.

Defense Attorney Comments

Alford’s attorney, Brenda Souza, told Thompson that Alford’s offense “comes pretty close” to a victimless crime. She noted that the Rio School District had routinely given Alford good performance appraisals. “It would be hard to say she was incompetent. How do you measure competence?” Souza asked.

Meyers said the impostor’s victims included the schoolchildren she treated. “These are the particularly needy, sometimes even desperate individuals the defendant was dealing with, and she was not qualified,” Meyers said.

“The defendant took advantage of a the system, of a position of trust that she fraudulently obtained for herself.”

Thompson denied Alford’s request for probation because “she is still not willing to accept responsibility for what she has done.”