Stripper Mom Steals Movie Plot for Murder

By Pamela Mortimer

Mechele Linehan, 35, was finally brought to trial on charges stemming from the 1996 murder of her fiance Kent Leppink. A Superior Court found Linehand guilty of first degree murder.

Linehan, who was then Mechele Hughes, coaxed a lover into murdering her fiancé so that she could collect a $1 million insurance policy of which she was the beneficiary. Unbeknownst to Hughes, Leppink had removed her from the insurance policy, having suspected that he had become a target for the woman’s greed. Days before the murder, Leppink named his parents as the new beneficiaries and revealed that there may be foul play in the works.

Leppink sent a letter to his parents to be opened if something "fishy" happened to him. "Since you’re reading this, you [can] assume that I’m dead," he wrote, and then named Hughes, John Carlin III and a third man who hoped to marry Hughes as possible suspects.

"Make sure she is prosecuted," he wrote.

At the time of the murder, Hughes was a dancer at the Great Alaskan Bush Co. strip club in Anchorage. Witnesses claim that Hughes was well known for manipulating the men for whom she danced. It is believed that this manipulation is what convinced Carlin to help lure Leppink to a remote area where he was shot three times with a .44 magnum.

Regardless of the information supplied by the victim, prosecutors did not have the evidence to make an arrest at the time. The case went cold. Hughes quit stripping and over the next decade married a doctor, got a psychology degree from St. Martin’s University, had a daughter and worked for a time as an administrative assistant at the Washington State Executive Ethics Board. She was residing in Olympia, Wash., at the time of the arrest.

According to witness testimony, Hughes borrowed the plot of the 1994 movie "The Last Seduction," in which a femme fatale coaxes her lover into killing her husband.

Lora Aspiotis, a former stripper, testified that she watched the movie with Hughes and that Hughes admired the tough lead character, played by Linda Fiorentino.

"She told me that the character was her heroine and that she wanted to be just like her," Aspiotis said.

The Alaska State Troopers’ cold case unit finally got a break in 2005 when officials interviewed Carlin’s son, who was underage in 1996 and wasn’t permitted by his father to be interviewed. The younger Carlin, now an adult, gave investigators enough damning testimony to bring charges against his father and Hughes last year. He told authorities that he saw his father using bleach to wash out a handgun in a bathroom sink and that Hughes watched.

Carlin’s trial is scheduled for November.