A man accused of writing thousands of dollars in bad checks to businesses in Arkansas and Missouri to purchase items ranging from a pumpkin to a zero-turn mower appeared in Baxter County Circuit Court Monday (February 10).
Seventy-nine-year-old Robert Jarvis, who lists an address in Theodosia, pled not guilty to the charges against him in three Baxter County cases.
According to information from law enforcement agencies in Baxter and Boone Counties in Arkansas and Howell, Stone, Taney and Webster Counties in Missouri, Jarvis has frequently purchased merchandise with bad checks and then almost immediately sold the items to pawn shops.
In court documents, five pawn shops are mentioned as locations where Jarvis took the merchandise he had purchased with bad checks.
The long list of purchases includes audio equipment, zero turn mowers, power tools, computer equipment, generators, chain saws, lawn trimmer, groceries, gift cards, an electric smoker, battery booster packs, guitars, flutes and other musical equipment, a commercial floor jack, a pellet grill, children’s toys, a pumpkin and Hershey’s chocolate.
At one point, Jarvis rented a U-Haul truck and failed to return it as promised. The truck was eventually reported as stolen. Jarvis is alleged to have used the truck to pick up a zero-turn mower he had reportedly purchased with a bad check. He is then alleged to have hauled the item to a pawn shop on the same day of the purchase where he sold it for $1,000 cash.
Jarvis is reported to have left the business with the zero-turn mower at 5:30 p.m. and sold it to a pawn shop about 11 minutes later.
The Boone County business where Jarvis purchased the mower also reported that he requested assistance in loading the mower into the U-Haul truck.
The U-Haul truck was finally located in Branson and Jarvis was arrested on October 8 last year. When Boone County sheriff’s investigators traveled to Branson and interviewed him, Jarvis admitted he “was not being threatened or forced to participate in the scheme.”
Jarvis was reported to have given no reason for his activity except to say he was “just trying to live, trying to get by.” He indicated on an affidavit of indigency filled out after his arrest in Baxter County that he was retired and Social Security was his only income.
He said he had been living in the U-Haul. On his affidavit of indigency, he also noted that his residence had been “repossessed” because he was “underwater on the loan and interest.”
Between June 20 and September 5 last year, Jarvis passed five bad checks in Baxter County to various businesses.
The total of the bad checks is somewhere around $23,000.
Jarvis’ bond in Baxter County is set at slightly more than $11,000. One of the conditions of the bond is that he is not allowed to have a checkbook.
He is set to reappear on his Baxter County cases June 2. There are other appearances dates for cases in Boone County and several counties in Missouri.
In court documents, Jarvis is alleged to have had two accomplices — 45-year-old Patricia Lynn Wille and 44-year-old Joshua Bell. A criminal case has been opened on Wille in Boone County, but records in Baxter and Boone don’t show a case has been opened on Bell in either Baxter or Boone. Wille was due to appear in Boone County Circuit Court January 7 but she was a not show and a failure to appear warrant was issued.
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