Ex-stripper accused in plot similar to ’94 movie

updated 7:26 p.m. ET Oct. 11, 2007

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - In the 1994 movie “The Last Seduction,” a femme fatale coaxes her lover into killing her husband for money. Prosecutors say a beautiful stripper obsessed with the film followed the script to its murderous end.

Mechele Linehan, 34, is on trial on charges she masterminded the decade-old slaying of her fiancé in hopes of collecting $1 million in insurance.

Life and art were so similar, prosecutors say, that they even sought, unsuccessfully, to have the movie shown to the jury.

It’s a case of sex, greed and manipulation that has transfixed the Pacific Northwest, from Alaska to Washington state, where Linehan had made a new life for herself as a college graduate, doctor’s wife and suburban soccer mom before cold-case investigators came calling.

Linehan — then known as Mechele Hughes — was one of the top girls at a strip club called the Great Alaska Bush Co. in 1996. A former co-worker said she was so sexy, she didn’t have to dance to earn big tips; men would pay just to talk to her.

Prosecutors say that is where the blonde borrowed the plot of “The Last Seduction” and had her fiancé, 36-year-old fisherman Kent Leppink, killed.

“If it was not for Mechele Linehan, Kent Leppink would be alive today because she set the stage and at least wrote the ending,” prosecutor Pat Gullufsen told the jury in his opening statement. “All she needed was someone to do the dirty work ... someone to pull the trigger.”

That person, the prosecutor said, was John Carlin III, another fiancé of Linehan’s. Carlin was convicted in April of murdering Leppink.

Leppink suspected plot
Leppink’s body was found by utility workers on the ground near a lonely trail in Hope, more than an hour’s drive from Anchorage. He had been shot three times with a .44 Magnum. Prosecutors say Linehan and Carlin had lured him to the desolate mining community by fabricating a series of e-mails that Leppink found, saying Linehan was holed up in a cabin. The cabin didn’t exist.

According to prosecutors, Linehan wanted the proceeds from Leppink’s life insurance policy. But what she didn’t know was that Leppink suspected evil afoot and changed the beneficiary to his parents days before he was murdered.

And in yet another film-noir twist, he sent a letter to his parents to be opened if something “fishy” happened to him. “Since you’re reading this, you assume that I’m dead,” he wrote, and then named Linehan, Carlin and another man who hoped to marry Linehan as possible suspects.

“Make sure she is prosecuted,” he wrote.

Still, prosecutors did not have the evidence to make an arrest at the time. Linehan left stripping, and over the next decade she married a doctor, graduated from Saint Martin’s University with a degree in psychology, had a daughter, and worked for a time as an administrative assistant at the Washington State Executive Ethics Board, which guards against ethical misconduct by state employees. She was living in Olympia, Wash., when she was arrested.

The Alaska State Troopers cold-case unit caught a break in 2005 when they interviewed Carlin’s son, who was underage in 1996 and wasn’t allowed by his father to be interviewed. As an adult, he gave investigators enough damning testimony to bring charges against his father and Linehan last year.

He told them that he saw his father using bleach to wash out a handgun in a bathroom sink and that Linehan watched.

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