Gunman In Alaska Murder Plot Found Dead
Was Convicted Of Conspiring With Stripper To Murder Her Fiance For Insurance Money
-
-
John Carlin III, photographed in an Anchorage courtroom on Jan. 18, 2008, was found dead under suspicious circumstances in a state prison while serving 99 years for first degree murder. (AP Photo/Al Grillo)
-
Carlin (shown here in 1996) was found guilty of conspiring with his girlfriend, a stripper, to murder another man for his insurance policy. (AP/Alaska Attorney General's Office)
-
In the mid-1990s, Mechele Hughes was an exotic dancer at The Great Alaskan Bush Company, where she attracted the attention of several men who wanted to marry her. (CBS)
-
A photo of Hughes and Kent Leppink, shown during her trial. Leppink had warned his family in a letter that something might happen to him; a few days later his body was found. (AP Photo/Al Grillo)
-
Mechele Linehan (who after Leppink's death had left Alaska and married a Washington state doctor) is taken into custody in a state courtroom in Anchorage, Oct. 22, 2007, after a jury found the former stripper-turned-soccer-mom guilty of first-degree murder in the decade-old death of Leppink. (AP Photo/Al Grillo)
-
-
Play CBS Video Video Love And Death In Alaska "In Full:" The cold truth in Alaska - a crime of money, power, greed and sex. Susan Spencer reports.
Corrections spokesman Richard Schmitz says Carlin was found dead under suspicious circumstances Monday night.
Carlin was convicted of conspiring with Mechele Linehan, a former Anchorage stripper-turned-soccer-mom, in the 1996 shooting death of Linehan's fiance, Kent Leppink. Leppink's body was found off a trail south of Anchorage.
Prosecutors say Linehan and Carlin orchestrated the killing in the mistaken belief that Linehan would receive insurance money.
Linehan was arrested in 2006 in Olympia, Wash., where she was living with her husband, a physician, after a cold case investigator in Alaska revived the probe.
The notorious case was featured in an edition of 48 Hours, "Love and Death in Alaska."
Prosecutors had fingered Carlin (one of three "fiancés" of Linehan, who was working as an exotic dancer at the time) as a shooter manipulated by Linehan into killing Leppink for his insurance money.
In April 2007 jurors found Carlin guilty of first degree murder. He received the maximum sentence: 99 years in prison.
In a jailhouse interview with 48 Hours Carlin denied that he pulled the trigger, though he admitted finding the murder weapon and tossing it into a dumpster.
Mechele Linehan was found guilty last October and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. She'll be 68, when she gets her first chance at parole.
© MMVIII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
- mccain isn''t with a soccer mom, he is with a hockey mom arlvabear
- Reply to this comment
- Looks like the chickens come home to roost...
- Reply to this comment
- Guess they won''t have to feed and house him for the next 99 years. Tax money saved!!!
- Reply to this comment
