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Life Without Parole For Texas Man Involved In Murder-For-Hire Shooting, Stabbing Of Single Mom

COLLIN COUNTY (CBSDFW.COM) - It was a love triangle and ultimate murder-for-hire plot that ended with a daughter finding her mother shot and stabbed to death inside a North Texas home in 2017. Now another person involved with the killing of Kelli Underwood is going to prison.

After a jury found him guilty of capital murder, Robert Veal was sentenced to life behind bars without the possibility of parole.

Veal, 37, was one of two people hired to kill Underwood.

Robert Veal
(credit: Collin County Criminal District Attorney's Office)

According to investigators, Underwood had been having an affair with her boss, Ronnie Welborn. When the mother of his child, and then-girlfriend, Kadie Robinson found out he had been cheating the two began plotting against Underwood.

Veal and another man, Delvin Powell, were hired to make the hit and ultimately killed the victim in her home in the Collin County town of Princeton. Prosecutors said the two men were seen with the 46-year-old single mother on the last day she was known to be alive and witnesses identified both Veal and Powell "by name and description".

Powell, a Plano resident, was sentenced to life in prison without parole in 2019 for his part in the crime.

Underwood's lover, Welborn, and his girlfriend, Robinson, have also been charged in the murder-for-hire plot.

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