Ex-stripper gets 99 years in fiance's death

In the conclusion to a tale that sounds like something out of film noir, a stripper-turned-soccer mom was sentenced Wednesday to 99 years in prison for plotting with a South Jersey man to kill her Alaskan fisherman fiance.

Mechele Linehan, 35, was convicted of murder last year for orchestrating the 1996 death of an Alaskan man she had promised to marry.

In January, John Carlin 3d, a steelworker from Salem County, was sentenced to 99 years for shooting fisherman Kent Leppink outside Hope, a tiny mining community an hour from Anchorage.

Linehan ordered Carlin to kill the fisherman, prosecutors said, because she believed she would be the beneficiary of Leppink's $1 million insurance policy.

Anchorage Superior Court Judge Philip Volland called the crime premeditated, cold and cruel.

Prosecutors said Linehan was inspired by

The Last Seduction

, a 1994 movie in which a woman coaxes her lover into killing her husband for money.

Linehan and Carlin maintain their innocence. Through his attorney, Carlin said he flew to Alaska willingly in 2006 and had expected to be vindicated.

The Alaskan judge said Wednesday that he could not hand down a sentence for Linehan different from the one he had given Carlin.

"I can find no principal distinction between the puppet who pulls the trigger and the puppeteer who pulls the strings," Volland said. "In my judgment, Ms. Linehan was the puppeteer who pulled the strings."

After Leppink's death, Carlin and Linehan went their separate ways.

Carlin, a Marine Corps veteran who last worked on the Collingswood circle project, returned to New Jersey and married a Russian woman.

Linehan married an Army doctor, gave birth to a daughter, and settled down as a homemaker in Olympia, Wash.

Their new lives began to draw to a close in 2004 when Alaska State Police formed a cold-case unit.

The Leppink homicide was the new unit's first case. Investigators called it the "Black Widow" investigation.

A yellowing piece of newsprint gave them their first break in the case. A state trooper found a three-line ad in a newspaper for a Desert Eagle pistol, a gun of the same caliber that killed Leppink. Trooper Linda Branchflower tracked down the seller, who told her Carlin had bought the gun.

Linehan had worked as a stripper at one of Alaska's top nightclubs. She met Carlin in 1996 after the death of his wife.

Carlin, 51, had traveled from Elmer, N.J., to Alaska in 1994 so his ailing wife could see the aurora borealis before she died.

Linehan, originally from New Orleans, also arrived in Alaska by way of New Jersey. When she was 14, she took her sister's ID and found work in a strip club in Brick Township, Ocean County, authorities said. When she turned 21, she moved to Anchorage, where she became a star attraction.

She was 23 in 1995 when Carlin saw her at the Great Alaskan Bush Co. strip club. He hired her for a lap dance and was captivated.

He fell in love with her and showered her with expensive gifts: a $3,200 fur coat and an $11,000 diamond ring that he hid in an ice cream sundae.

Carlin could afford the extravagances. Days after the death of his wife, he had received a $1.3 million insurance settlement in a lead-poisoning case, prosecutors said. His attorney, Clifford Van Syoc of Cherry Hill, had argued that Carlin suffered brain damage from exposure to lead paint while working on the Ben Franklin Bridge.

Linehan accepted Carlin's presents. They traveled to Amsterdam. Carlin proposed on Christmas Day 1995. She accepted.

But she had failed to mention that she was already engaged to at least three other men, prosecutors said.

One of those men was Leppink, a transplant from Michigan who was building a fishing business in the wilderness.

After their engagement, Leppink named Linehan the primary beneficiary of his $1 million life insurance policy.

Less than a month later, Leppink was found dead along a trail near Hope. He had been shot in the head, back and chest. Three .44 Magnum casings were recovered nearby.

Linehan didn't receive a dime of the insurance policy.

Just before he died, Leppink had discovered that his fiancee was romancing at least two other men. He then tore up his will and made his father the beneficiary of his estate.

A certified letter to his father detailed Leppink's suspicions.

"Since you're reading this, assume that I'm dead. . . . Use the information enclosed to take Mechele DOWN. Make sure she is prosecuted," he wrote.

Leppink named Linehan and Carlin as "the people, or persons, that probably killed me."

"Make sure they get burned," he wrote.