North Wales woman admits killing her ex-husband, gets up to 20 years in prison
Hsiu-Chin "Linda" Lin pleaded guilty to third-degree murder, sparing herself a possible life prison term.
A North Wales woman on Wednesday admitted shooting and killing her ex-husband last year in the garage of the home they owned together.
Hsiu-Chin "Linda" Lin will serve 7½ to 20 years in state prison under a guilty plea negotiated for the third-degree murder of 67-year-old Chien-Kuo Lin.
Her lawyer, John I. McMahon Jr., called the agreement "an excellent resolution for my client in a case that was very, very difficult." The case had been scheduled to go to trial in Norristown next week before Judge William R. Carpenter. If convicted of first-degree murder, Lin would have been sentenced to life in prison.
McMahon said the plea negotiated with prosecutors "took into consideration a long history of abuse that she had suffered at the hands of her husband."
Lin, 64 and a small woman who needed the help of a Mandarin Chinese language interpreter at court hearings, had been divorced from her husband for three years.
Montgomery County prosecutors said she shot him in her garage last June after he came to pick up belongings from the home they once shared. He was living with a mistress in Philadelphia and had taken control of a shared packaging company they ran, according to a statement their son gave to police at the time.
Before shooting him, Lin told her adult son -- who has lived with her since suffering a stroke in 2010 -- that she was going to do it, police said. She also called one of her two daughters and said that she was going to kill him; her daughter urged her not to do it.
Chien-Kuo Lin died of a gunshot wound to the chest, police said. His ex-wife went inside after the shooting, told her son to call the police, and sat at her kitchen table until they arrived.
McMahon has said that the killing was not premeditated, and that Lin simply "snapped" that day.
"Living for so many years at the hands of the abuser was so horrific ... that I think there's a sense of relief that she won't have to be subjected to that anymore," he said Wednesday. "But at the same time, she has obviously a lot of pain arising from the fact that she's away from her children, who she's very close to."