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“It’s in the boxes.”

That was the only answer Saint Luke Lutheran Church council chair Pierre Cronier received when he went to the home of former treasurer Barton Burron and pleaded with him to reveal what happened to the church’s money in April 2014.

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Burron, a chartered accountant and the longtime treasurer at the New Edinburgh church, simply pointed to the four boxes of documents that Cronier had come to collect. He suggested the answer was somewhere inside.

Cronier told Burron’s sentencing hearing Thursday that alongside other church members, he worked hundreds of hours to piece together the “tangled web of deceit” ultimately revealed by those documents.

“It was distressing and unsettling when we discovered his scheme,” Cronier said in a victim impact statement. “We worked under a heavy and sad cloud.”

Church officials discovered that their trusted colleague had, over five years, funnelled $607,725 of Saint Luke’s money into his own failing property development scheme without any approval. The high-risk real estate venture collapsed in 2013.