SEATTLE — To the very end, Mickie Jarvill maintained her poise.

Dressed in a tan business jacket, her honey-blond hair pulled back in a bun, the diminutive former Snohomish County attorney stood up in a federal courtroom Thursday and apologized for joining her husband in fleecing friends and family out of up to $2.5 million.

“I know that words like ‘I’m sorry’ are not sufficient,” Mickie Jarvill, 58, said in a soft voice. She vowed that trying to repay her victims the money she stole from them will “be the purpose of my life.”

A few minutes later, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Lasnik sentenced Jarvill and her husband, Michael, 57, to five years in federal prison for what he called a “truly shocking” pattern of violating people’s trust.

Evidence is clear that the couple, once prominent in north Snohomish County business circles, bought the trappings of success by pilfering others’ pockets, purses and bank accounts, Lasnik said.

The Jarvills didn’t just commit fraud, but “but were frauds themselves,” he said.

The pair left the courtroom in handcuffs.

“It’s the best jewelry she’s ever worn,” said Joan Penney of Skagit County. She and her siblings were powerless in the mid-1990s when they tried to stop the Jarvills from emptying their dying father’s bank accounts. Before it was over, the Jarvills wound up with the cash and control of the family’s former dairy farm near Arlington.

The five-year sentences were exactly what U.S. attorneys had sought in the case, the maximum punishment under law.

The Jarvills, both former attorneys but now disbarred, in June admitted using their former Smokey Point law office and investment business as a platform to defraud about 30 people during a seven-year period ending in 1999. Under an agreement with prosecutors, each pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud.

Most of the Jarvills’ victims are in their 60s and 70s and live in north Snohomish County and on Camano Island. Others were relatives, living as far away as Oklahoma.

The victims all are decent, honest people who mistakenly placed their trust in a couple who don’t share those qualities, assistant U.S. attorney Susan Harrison said.

The prosecutor spent nearly an hour cataloging some of what was discovered after the FBI and Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office began investigating during the summer of 1999.

There were forged deeds.

There were phony investments in a bankrupt company.

There were checks showing how the Jarvills spent money from their victims on $200-a-month equestrian lessons for their children, a $900 down payment on a daughter’s wedding cake, a house, a car and legal fees.

The couple’s financial dealings and legal problems first became public in a July 1999 story in The Herald.

Their crimes went unexposed for years because they kept bringing in new victims and using the fresh cash to partially pay off earlier investors.

In some cases, they didn’t even bother finding another victim, however, and simply took cash from someone, waited awhile, and gave them back a small portion of the money, claiming it was interest on one of what they billed as low-risk, high-profit deals, Harrison said.

“It wasn’t even robbing Peter to pay Paul. It was robbing Peter to pay Peter,” she said.

Attorneys for the Jarvills said their clients acknowledged their crime, which included looting nearly $600,000 from Mickie Jarvill’s cousins in Oklahoma.

The relatives had entrusted the couple with money they received after Mickie Jarvill’s uncle froze to death following a car accident and after a cousin’s husband died of cancer.

“Not in a million years would I have thought Mickie would do this to us,” said Peggy McAlester, one of the three cousins who traveled from Oklahoma to confront her in court.

Jan Fossum, 73, of Arlington lost more than $450,000 to the Jarvills. She leaned on a cane as she stood in the courtroom Thursday, recounting how she ignored her family’s warnings about the pair.

“Although I have lost a lot, you are a loser also,” Fossum told the couple, adding that they’ve lost friendship and trust.

Michael Jarvill said little at the hearing, telling the judge that he couldn’t top what his wife had said. His attorney, Todd Maybrown of Seattle, said Michael Jarvill discovered his wife’s illegal conduct in 1992, and instead of stopping her, joined in out of “love for family, fear and foolishness.”

The statement prompted murmurs of disapproval from about two dozen victims who showed up to watch the hearing.

Earlier, they had listen to prosecutor Harrison read from bank statements that she said were representative samples of the thousands of transactions that bore Michael Jarvill’s fingerprints. The list of dates and amounts came so quickly and lasted so long that it almost sounded like an auctioneer’s patter.

Harrison also read a 1999 letter to the Jarvills from an elderly woman who had entrusted the pair with $81,000 from the sale of her home, plus another $3,000 she’d borrowed from a bank.

The woman wrote that she could no longer afford rent and needed her cash back.

The woman: Mickie Jarvill’s own mother.

You can call Herald Writer Scott North at 425-339-3431 or send e-mail to north@heraldnet.com.