Female Armed Robber Gets 10 Years in Prison

Panama City, Fla.--The woman who entered jewelry stores alone and tied up employees at gunpoint before emptying the showcases will spend the next decade behind bars.

In Florida federal court on Friday, Abigail Lee Kemp, 25, of Smyrna, Georgia, was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for conspiracy, interfering with commerce by robbery and using a firearm during commission of a crime, the U.S Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Florida said via a news release.

Also sentenced on Friday was one of Kemp’s three co-conspirators, 43-year-old Larry Bernard Gilmore, who got 32 years in prison.

The two also were ordered to pay about $1.5 million in restitution for the more than $4 million in jewelry stolen between April 2015 and January 2016, when Kemp was arrested.

Kemp’s court-appointed attorney, Michelle Daffin, declined to comment on her client’s sentencing.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Kemp and Gilmore, along with 36-year-old Lewis Jones III and Gilmore’s older brother, 47-year-old Michael Bernard Gilmore, worked together to rob a total of six jewelry stores. They hit outlet mall stores in Panama City Beach, Florida; Woodstock and Dawsonville, Georgia; Bluffton, South Carolina; Sevierville, Tennessee; and Mebane, North Carolina.

After the first robbery in April 2015 in Woodstock, Jones and the Gilmore brothers started training Kemp to commit the robberies on her own, using the Gilmores’ window tinting shop in Atlanta as their training facility.

The three men reviewed the jewelry store layouts with Kemp, taught her how to handle a gun and secure store employees with zip ties and versed her on what merchandise to steal. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, they also gave her code words, picked her clothes and disguises and purchased the supplies for her, all the while selecting the dates and locations for the robberies.

While she was in the stores, Kemp would communicate with Jones and the Gilmore brothers, who were conducting surveillance outside, via an earpiece.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office also noted that in December 2015, a jewelry store manager recognized Kemp when she walked into the store and asked another employee to contact police. Kemp and her co-conspirators called off the robbery and left. Five days later, they committed what would be their sixth and final robbery, in Mebane.

Kemp was arrested a few weeks later at her apartment outside Atlanta.

She entered two separate guilty pleas in the case, the first in July and the second earlier this month.

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