Posted: January 27th, 2010 - 5:05pm by Doug Powell

Running a restaurant is hard enough without dealing with rats and wackos.

The Post-Crescent reports that a woman who attempted to extort money from an upscale restaurant by putting a rat in her lunch entered no-contest pleas Tuesday to two criminal charges.

Judge Dee Dyer found Debbie R. Miller, 43, guilty after she entered the no-contest pleas to a felony extortion charge and a misdemeanor for obstructing police. She will be sentenced March 8 in Outagamie County Court.

Miller planted a rat in her lunch at The Seasons on April 17, 2008, and then demanded $500,000 from the owners. She threatened to alert the media if the money wasn’t paid.

Bob Doller, who owns The Seasons in Grand Chute with his wife, Jessica, said,

“This has been a long, drawn out battle and it has affected my business. We would hope that if anyone had any doubts that it was a true claim, they would know now that it was extortion. In April, it will be two years since this happened. If you compare 2007 to 2008 (the year of the incident), the loss was tens of thousands of dollars.”

The Dollers kept the rat after the extortion attempt. Insurance investigators sent it for testing and determined that it not only wasn’t a wild rat, but rather a domestic, white rat that had been cooked in a microwave. The restaurant doesn’t use microwaves.