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John F Duplease Jr. and Penny Williams were arrested last year, but the charges against them continue to pile up. A grand jury this week indicted Duplease on charges of being the leader of an organized retail theft enterprise, aggravated organized retail crime, organized retail crime, and failure to secure a firearm, the Worcester County District Attorney's Office said. The grand jury handed down a charge of organized retail crime for Williams.
Lancaster police arrested Duplease on May 8, 2021, after more than a year of investigations. Detectives said Duplease employed more than 25 people to shoplift items from stores such as a Home Depot, Target, Lowe’s, Walmart, CVS, Stop & Shop, and Hannaford’s, Lancaster detectives said last year. Duplease would store the items at his store — Adopt A Video, a now-defunct business in Leominster — or at this home and resell them online.
When police raided his properties, they found a literal warehouse of allegedly stolen items worth more than half a million dollars. Police said they found coffee makers, power tools, whitening strips for teeth, beauty products, electric razors, and more in piles.
“There were 1,695 stolen items located and seized at Adopt A Video and 4,609 stolen items seized at Mr. Duplease’s residence (estimated to be over $500,000 in merchandise recovered),” Lancaster police said in the news release last year. “An abundance of cash and other evidence were located at both locations as well.”
Williams is alleged to have paid the thieves for the stolen merchandise and helped package the items to resell them on eBay and Amazon, authorities said after her arrest.
Duplease and Williams were previously arraigned in Leominster District Court and ultimately released on $2,500 cash bail, the Worcester prosecutor said. These new indictments move their cases to Worcester Superior Court.
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