There’s a fresh construction fraud case headed to the local court docket, on top of the case involving a well-promoted local realtor, Amy Argenbright, who is set for a two-day jury trial next month in Augusta County.
The new one that has come to our attention is in Waynesboro, involving a contractor alleged to have been paid $17,500 on a contract for home improvements on a city residence that was not completed.
Calvin Daniel Fulcher, 33, of Waynesboro, was arrested on Monday on a felony charge, which carries with it potential exposure to significant prison time.
Fulcher is due in Waynesboro General District Court on Sept. 22, in which a judge is expected to set a future date for a preliminary hearing.
The Fulcher case is at the very beginning of what will likely be a lengthy process.
These types of cases are more typically handled as civil, not criminal, matters, though the Google News headlines brought us a recent criminal fraud case involving a Fairfax County builder, Richard Craig Tadlock, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison and ordered to pay restitution of nearly $2 million on a construction fraud conviction last week – the verdict, according to the prosecutor in the case, sending “a clear message to other contractors.”
The case that has been making local headlines for more than a year now involves an Augusta County realtor, Amy Argenbright, who was indicted by an Augusta County grand jury in 2025 on one count of felony construction fraud.
From the archives
Coverage of the Amy Argenbright construction fraud case: click here.
That first indictment alleges that Argenbright’s company was paid $366,000 for construction of a single-family residence that her company failed to build.
Following press coverage of that indictment, prosecutors heard from additional alleged victims, and obtained two more indictments against Argenbright.
Court documents show the amounts in the additional cases as more than $1,000, Augusta County Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Caleb S. Kramer told AFP that one of the indictments is for a project valued similarly to the first charge, in the six-figure range, and the second is much less, “five figures rather than six.”
The Argenbright case is on the court docket for a two-day jury trial scheduled for Oct. 20-21.
In an interview with AFP in December, Kramer told us that he wanted the court proceeding involving Argenbright to set a precedent for other builders in the area, noting that Argenbright and her companies, past and present, have numerous default judgements against them, something he referred to as “toe-dipping.”
“I think the well is quite deep there,” Kramer said.
Perhaps to that point, Argenbright announced on Facebook in a July 31 post the launch of another new business, Pink Bibs Handyman Co., which, per the page, offers “Women-Led Handyman, Painting, & Cleaning Services.”
“One of my goals is, we want to make it very clear, this is not something that we kind of brush under the rug,” Kramer said in December.
“I think the best option here is deterrence. This type of thing will be followed up on, and it will have negative consequences, so you best not do it,” Kramer said.
When we reached back out this week, though, the tone from Kramer was a bit more muted.
He told us that the current sentencing guideline, in the event of a conviction, would call for “probation,” which wouldn’t seem to set a precedent – or at least, not the kind of precedent that Kramer was hoping for several months ago.
“Those guidelines are not binding on the Commonwealth or the court. I would also note that these cases have lots of variabilities in their factors that can result in large sentence variability,” Kramer said.
“Guidelines are just that, guidelines. They are a statistical tool that takes a bunch of information like about the case and defendant into an algorithm and spits out a range for the court to consider. They are not binding on us or the court,” Kramer said.
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Chris Graham
