Woman convicted of movielike murder

ANCHRORAGE — A former stripper accused of borrowing from a movie plot to kill her fiancé before she re-created herself as a cookie-baking doctor's wife was convicted of first-degree murder Monday in the decade-old death.

Mechele Linehan, 35, was charged with conspiring with another fiancé to kill Kent Leppink, who was shot three times in 1996 on an isolated trail 90 minutes outside Anchorage.

Linehan exhibited no emotion as the verdict was read. Superior Court Judge Philip Volland allowed her husband, Colin, "one final embrace" before she was led from the courtroom in handcuffs.

Outside the courtroom, Colin Linehan was visibly shaken and tight-lipped.

Leppink's mother, Betsy Leppink, said, "God is good," as she left the courtroom.

Sentencing was set for Jan. 25. Linehan faces 20 to 99 years in prison.

In the monthlong trial, prosecutors claimed Linehan was following the plot of the 1994 movie "The Last Seduction," in which a femme fatale coaxes her lover into killing her husband for money.

Linehan's other former fiancé, John Carlin III, was convicted in April of Leppink's murder and will be sentenced in November.

Linehan's sensational trial was full of tawdry details about her lifestyle and alleged manipulation of men she met while dancing at the Great Alaskan Bush Co. strip club in Anchorage.

Prosecutors had little direct evidence but attempted to prove that Linehan was in on planning Leppink's murder to cash in on a $1 million insurance policy, not realizing Leppink had removed her as the beneficiary just days before his death.

"This person manipulated the circumstances with her guile and deception," prosecutor Pat Gullufsen told the jury during his closing argument. "All she needed was someone to kill him."

Linehan is now married to a doctor in Olympia and the mother of an 8-year-old daughter. Colin Linehan proclaimed her innocence in his testimony.

But in 1996, she was Mechele Hughes, who socialized and danced under the name "Bobby Joe" at the club where she took home between $1,000 and $3,000 a night.

Prosecutors say that is where Linehan borrowed the plot of "The Last Seduction" and had the 36-year-old Leppink killed.

The movie is a modern-day film noir in which a ruthless woman — played by actress Linda Fiorentino — uses her sexual wiles to manipulate men.

A former stripper, Lora Aspiotis, testified that she watched the movie with Linehan and that Linehan admired the tough-talking Fiorentino character.

Prosecutors said Linehan strung along Leppink — they didn't have sexual relations — while also becoming engaged to Carlin, a man they said she slept with once. But the state said she took both men for lots of money, including an $11,000 wedding ring, a down payment on a motor home and remodeling work at her house.

But that wasn't enough, prosecutors said. Instead, she paid the $2,606 premium on a $1 million life-insurance policy on Leppink, supposedly to insure the profits of a commercial-fishing business they were going to open.

Days before Leppink's murder, Linehan made a call purportedly to cancel the policy. She was actually trying to find out if the policy was still active, Gullufsen said.

"There is no hidden language in there. It was to get the money. They needed it," Linehan lawyer Kevin Fitzgerald said of her attempts to get the premium back.

But that's when the plot was set in motion, prosecutors said.

Gullufsen said Linehan and Carlin cooked up the plot to lure Leppink to a nonexistent cabin in Hope, a secluded community south of Anchorage.

They had her disappear and then fabricated a series of e-mails and notes that they knew Leppink would find, prosecutors said.

The correspondence indicated Linehan was hiding out at a cabin near Hope. Prosecutors said Carlin brought Leppink to the isolated area, where he shot him three times with a .44-Magnum. Leppink's body was found by utility workers May 2, 1996.

Linehan was not in the state when Leppink was shot but at Lake Tahoe with another man, Scott Hilke, with whom she maintained a relationship throughout her time with Carlin and Leppink. Hilke was not implicated in the plot.

Prosecutors did not have the evidence to make an arrest at the time, despite a letter Leppink wrote his parents, to be opened if anything "fishy" happened to him. The letter pointed to Carlin and Linehan.

"Make sure she is prosecuted," he wrote.

The Alaska State Troopers cold-case unit caught a break in 2005 when they interviewed Carlin's son, who was a minor in 1996 and wasn't allowed by his father to be interviewed. As an adult, he gave investigators enough damning testimony to bring charges against his father and Linehan last year.

He told them that he saw his father using bleach to wash out a handgun in a bathroom sink and that Linehan watched.