Ted Rollins and partner Mike Hartnett
at the New York Stock Exchang
Birmingham resident Sherry Carroll Rollins was one such wife in the 1990s when she was married to Ted Rollins and living in Greenville, South Carolina. Ms. Rollins decided that a visit to her husband's office while he was away on business might yield some interesting information. She was right about that--on multiple fronts.
Ted Rollins now is CEO of Campus Crest Communities, a Charlotte-based company that builds student housing near public universities around the country. The firm has drawn more than $730 million in Wall Street investment since going public in late 2010. Rollins' primary market might be college students and their parents, but his own "family values" leave something to be desired.
We already have reported that Ms. Rollins' first trip to the office turned up information about a trust fund for her daughter, Sarah, who now is 19 years old and still knows almost nothing about the fund that her grandfather (and Ted's father), John W. Rollins Sr., established.
Sherry Rollins found limited information on the trust fund that day--but she came away knowing it existed. Here is how she described her findings in an e-mail to Legal Schnauzer:
I went to his secretary's desk. I sat down and found a yellow legal pad with a list of all his files written in it.
One thing on the page caught my eye: Sarah's Trust Fund; it listed where it could be found on the computer.
I went into [the secretary's] list of files and saw that the file existed. I was not computer literate at that time and could not open up the file.
Perhaps more significant at the time were Sherry Rollins' findings about her husband's apparent extramarital activities. She saw written documents that pointed to multiple affairs, and infidelity would be one of the grounds in the divorce complaint she filed in 2001.
As we reported previously, Sherry Carroll was perhaps the only individual in recent years to marry into the Rollins family without an ironclad prenuptial agreement. Ted Rollins was willing to marry her without a prenup and form a family with her two sons, Eric and Zac Parrish (ages 16 and 10 at the time), from a previous marriage. The couple would have two daughters of their own--Sarah (19) and Emma (15).
When the lack of a prenup is considered with Ted Rollins' apparent marital misconduct, he stood to cough up substantial sums of money in a legitimate divorce case. That perhaps is the No. 1 reason he apparently used family contacts to help concoct an illegitimate divorce case--getting the South Carolina divorce complaint that Sherry Rollins had filed unlawfully moved to Alabama, where Shelby County Circuit Judge D. Al Crowson issued such a one-sided decree that it has left Ms. Rollins and her daughters on and off food stamps.
What exactly did Sherry Rollins learn about her husband's extramarital activities while visiting his office? She never has pieced it all together in a precise way. But some information pointed to a woman named Holly Matheson, who worked for the Upstate Alliance in South Carolina; she now is the third Mrs. Ted Rollins. Other information pointed to a woman who worked at Emory University, the recipient of major Rollins-family philanthropy.
Here is how Sherry Rollins described her findings in an e-mail to us:
Then another item caught my nervous eye; it was the phone message book. . . . The book contained call after call from Cary Sheahan, a girl who worked in the office of the director of executive health care at Emory. She was the go-to person for every Rollins family member who needed anything at Emory. Every year each one of them checks in for a full physical and stay in the John W. Rollins wing of the hospital to be checked out fully and completely. [Ted] was dating Cary, it appeared from her messages and the numerous calls to him. She left messages with his secretary about how excited she was to be meeting him and where. There were messages from me mixed in with the girlfriends' messages. I have often wondered if [Cary Sheahan] was a code name used by Holly Rollins or if he was dating Cary and Holly at the same time.
Did Ted Rollins appreciate his wife's investigative skills? Not exactly. From Sherry Rollins:
I have often mentioned the trust fund to Ted and asked questions about it after finding the yellow legal pad with his list of files. I tore out the page with the list of files and kept it for a long time. I confronted him with it and he refused to discuss it.
Why would Ted Rollins refuse to discuss a trust fund that was established for his oldest daughter? We don't have an answer to that question, but we do have this addendum from Sherry Rollins, regarding another woman who apparently was close to Ted Rollins on a number of levels:
The person who would definitely know about the Trust Fund would be Terri McGinn, who lives in Taylors, South Carolina, near Greenville, and was his assistant for years and often talked with his father and Linda Prickett (Ted's mother). [Terri McGinn] would know all about it, as he slept with her, too.
She works for the Golden Strip Child Center in Greenville, the organization which was set up by the Duke Endowment monies to Furman University and to Greenville for the prevention of child abuse while I was living there. Interesting that that this is where she works.
I suggest you interview her on all things Rollins. She was his other hand, she was his muse, she was his everything for most of the time we were in Greenville, South Carolina. She was his stand-in mother while I was having Emma and getting back to normal and I didn't have the time to constantly serve him. She will KNOW all about the trust fund and where it is.
(To be continued)
Previously in the series:
New Court Ruling Might Force Wealthy Rollins Clan To Allow Light Into Some Dark Financial Corners (April, 23, 2013)
Why Would Wall Street CEO Ted Rollins Take Steps To Keep His Daughter's Trust Fund Under Wraps? (May 28, 2013)
