Skipping out on a five-figure hotel bill recently resulted in a felony theft conviction for a Cody man.

In a sentence finalized in early March, 65-year-old Dale L. Page was ordered to serve five years of supervised probation and to repay the Holiday Inn for the $9,261.36 worth of charges that he racked up in the fall of 2021.

“I’m very, very sorry that this incident happened,” Page said at a January sentencing in Park County District Court. He acknowledged that restitution needed to be paid to the hotel, “and I will work diligently to get it done,” he said.

Page had checked into the Holiday Inn on Sept. 17, 2021 after the home that he and his partner were renting in Greybull was damaged in a fire. Page, who’d worked with the Cody hotel in his role as a travel agent, told the staff it would be a short-term stay and that his insurance would pick up the tab.

He apparently wound up staying 45 nights, checking out on Nov. 1.

“Dale [Page] assured the staff he would bring up his room keys and settle his bill,” Cody Police Officer Blake Stinson wrote in an affidavit, but he left instead.

When a hotel staffer called Page in early December 2021 about the roughly $10,000 total bill, he “made statements about declaring bankruptcy and [that] insurance would not be paying the bill,” Stinson wrote, “and then he hung up.”

Page and his partner filed for bankruptcy the next day, though their signatures were dated the day before the Holiday Inn’s call. It marked Page’s third bankruptcy since 2010, records show. 

The hotel bill was listed among roughly $165,900 worth of debts. Beyond car loans, medical bills and credit cards, the couple said they owed $50,000 to the IRS and just over $8,000 to the State of Wyoming.

When Stinson interviewed Page in early February 2022, he reportedly told the officer that the hotel would get paid through the bankruptcy proceedings.

However, the couple reported having just $4,500 worth of assets and poverty-level income. As a result, no distributions were made to creditors when the case closed in April 2022.

Stinson concluded that Page never planned to pay for the Holiday Inn hotel room and the Park County Attorney’s Office charged Page with felony theft in late October 2022.

Page’s court-appointed defense attorney, Bethia Kalenak, later argued that bankruptcy law prohibited the Holiday Inn from pursuing the unpaid bill. Kalenak said the debt had been legally discharged after hotel owner Blair Hotels Inc. declined to participate in the bankruptcy case.

“It is improper, and illegal, for them to now attempt to collect that debt through criminal restitution,” Kalenak wrote in a March 2023 motion.

However, the parties later struck a deal, with Page pleading “no contest” to the felony theft charge last May. The plan was that he’d pay full restitution to the Holiday Inn at the time of sentencing, but when that didn’t work out, Blair Hotels agreed to accept payments of $500 a month.

“It’s a matter that’s been going on for quite some time due to various reasons, but certainly the state would like to see resolution today — as I’m sure the victims in this case would,” Park County Prosecuting Attorney Bryan Skoric told the court.

Public defender Travis Smith said he’d relayed to Page that, although the Holiday Inn is successful, “sometimes the margins aren’t as big as we think they are and that this reimbursement is imperative.”

Page called the restitution “my highest priority” and said he planned to pay more than $500 a month when possible. 

Page did note that he suffers from health problems and wondered what might happen if he’s hospitalized when a monthly payment is due.

Park County District Court Judge Bill Simpson said the defendant would need to contact the court in the event of an emergency.

“... You cannot ignore this,” Simpson said, noting that five to seven years of prison time could be imposed for any probation violations.

Page also had a suspended prison sentence hanging over his head at the time of his Holiday Inn stay, court records show, as he was on supervised probation in Washakie County for felony check fraud; that conviction stemmed from $1,938.91 worth of bad checks Page had issued to a Worland computer store in mid-2019.

Page repaid that debt after his sentencing and in November 2021 — just a couple weeks after he left the Holiday Inn hanging — he put in a successful request to have his probation become unsupervised.

Washakie County authorities did not seek to revoke that probation when Page was charged in Park County.

At January’s sentencing in Cody, Judge Simpson encouraged Page to pay his debt to the Holiday Inn as soon as possible.

“Don’t let the court down. Don’t let yourself down,” he told the defendant.

The judge finalized the sentence in a March 11 order.