Last Seduction, First Conviction: Woman Gets 99 Years in Murder Plot

A former stripper-turned-soccer-mom convicted of plotting to kill her former fiance 12 years ago was sentenced Wednesday to 99 years in prison.

Mechele Linehan, 35, who until her arrest had been living a quiet life as the wife of an Olympia, Wash., doctor, was convicted in October of first-degree murder in the 1996 shooting death of Kent Leppink.

Prosecutor Pat Gullufsen said Linehan plotted with another man who hoped to marry her, John Carlin III, to lure Leppink to a rural trail, where Carlin shot him with a .44-caliber handgun.

The motive was a $1 million insurance policy that Linehan mistakenly believed named her as the beneficiary, prosecutors said.

Carlin was sentenced in January to 99 years in prison for firing the shots that killed Leppink.

Anchorage Superior Court Judge Philip Volland called the crime the worst in its category: premeditated, cold and cruel.

"It was a calculated homicide accomplished through deceit, deception and manipulation," Volland said. "It was done for the most venal of reasons and it was dismissed by the two participants in the most casual of ways. It was a man killed by his friend and his fiance."

Prosecutors said Linehan was inspired by a 1994 movie, "The Last Seduction," in which a woman coaxes her lover into killing her husband for money.