Convicted of multiple thefts in the St. Mary's case, McKay was sent back to the women's prison in Jessup. Gibson was gratified, though he didn't assume he had heard the last of her.
"I actually said in dialogue with colleagues that if she was able to, God forbid, get out of jail, she's going to hurt somebody else," said Gibson, now a lieutenant.
Joanne Mauck, who ran a prison ministry at the Maryland Correctional Institute for Women in Jessup, was surprised to see McKay again. If there had been one prisoner she believed had truly repented her crimes and longed for a second chance, it had been Cindy McKay.
So when McKay reappeared in the makeshift prison chapel - looking quite chipper to Mauck's eye - Mauck couldn't help herself.
"I am very disappointed in you," she said to McKay.
Mauck never forgot McKay's reply. "Get over it," she snapped.
Perhaps, Mauck thought to herself, she had never really understood McKay at all.
Thanks to good behavior credits, McKay served only one year of an eight-year sentence at Jessup. She was then shipped to a Delaware prison to serve 11 months for swindling the elderly woman.
By the summer of 2005, she was a free woman again and on her way back to Baltimore.
She moved in with Christopher Haarhoff, the third youngest of her six children. She wasted no time wearing out her welcome. Christopher, then 19, kicked McKay out after his girlfriend discovered that McKay had obtained a credit card in her name.
McKay was there long enough to meet a neighbor, Tony Fertitta, a 50-year-old muscle car enthusiast. The two started keeping company and continued after she and another son, 17-year-old Matthew Haarhoff, moved to the Old Mill area.
Fertitta worked two jobs, delivering packages for UPS and loading freight for a wholesaler. He had never been married or had children. He wore gold necklaces and enjoyed flashing wads of bills. He was sweet - some said dopey - around women, though he'd had rotten luck with them.
Fertitta didn't know about McKay's criminal past. Neither did her new employer, Cheryl's Chalets, a portable toilet company (and eventual victim of her larcenies) that hired her as an office manager to replace the owner's daughter, who was leaving for a military tour of duty.
Fertitta took McKay to Ravens games, and they shopped for jewelry together. She told co-workers that they were considering moving in together, and she thought Fertitta might even pop the question. His co-workers remembered him showing off pictures of McKay on the cell phone she had given him for Christmas.
