Tag Archive for: Mechele Linehan

48 Hours: Mechele Linehan

Did you see 48 Hours update the story of Mechele Linehan this weekend? What do you think?

Click on Mechele Linehan’s label below to read my thoughts about her.

Alaska to Retry Mechele Linehan

News out yesterday…
Alaska to retry ex stripper for ’96 murder

She may have won her appeal, but it ain’t over yet.

To read my thoughts on Mechele, click on the labels below.

Mechele Linehan: Wins Appeal

Base of column at courthouse

There is more breaking news today. Mechele Linehan’s conviction was overturned says CBS’s Crimesider. The courts have ruled that two key pieces of evidence presented at trial should have not been allowed. From Crimesider:

The first was a letter, apparently written by Leppink to his parents, that said in the event of his untimely death “Mechele, John or Scott were probably the people or persons that probably killed me. Do me another favor, make sure Mechele goes to jail for a long time.”

…The second piece of evidence that the court ruled inappropriate was the testimony of Lora Aspiotis, a former stripper who worked with Linehan at the time of the murder. She testified that Linehan’s favorite movie was “The Last Seduction” where a woman convinces another man to kill her husband for $1 million and gets away with it. Aspiotis testified that Linehan said the female protagonist was her hero and she wanted to be just like her.

I shared my thoughts about Mechele Linehan in 2008 after seeing her talk to 48 Hours. Nothing about her behavior supports honesty, if you ask me. I hope the next trial puts her right back where she belongs. I personally believe woman is a danger to society.

By the way, one of Mechele Linehan’s fiances posted a comment on my blog. Scott Hilke wrote the following about my thoughts of Mechele (3rd page in comment section), “Having known Mechele Hughes Linehan intimately for a number of years (I’m the “fiance” that isn’t dead or in jail for the rest of his life) I would say your observations are spot on.”

Thanks, Kirsten, for the update.

Mechele Linehan: Sentenced

Mechele Linehan was sentenced yesterday to 99 years in prison.

I wrote about Mechele a few weeks back here.

Mechele Linehan

Mechele Linehan was profiled on 48 Hours this past weekend. The segment was titled Love and Death in the Wild.

Mechele was a beautiful girl who knew the power of attraction, and she learned at a very young age how to use it. She had no problem attracting men so when she took a job as an exotic dancer at the age of 18 in Alaska, it would come as no surprise that the men encircled her off the stage as well.

48 Hours found several men with whom she dated, and who wanted to marry her. And supposedly she was engaged to three men at one time (or at least they thought they were). Each of the guys being much older than her. Two of the three talked to 48 Hours.

Read more The story is long and involved, but Linehan never married any of them men, and one of them, Kent Leppink, turned up dead during the time Linehan was seeing him. At the time of Leppink’s murder, however, Linehan was out of town.

With that, Linehan was never charged, and eventually moved on to Washington state, married a doctor, got a master’s degree and had a child.

Eight years would pass before a cold case unit picked up the case and followed up on it, and when they did, they narrowed in on Mechele.

Leppink left behind a letter from the grave professing his love for Linehan, but also said that if anything happened to him that looked suspicious to look at Michele or the other people in her life.

I am not going to detail all the events of the story as you can read all about it on 48 Hours website yourself, but I will tell you that Linehan was finally arrested, charged and convicted of the first degree murder of Kent Leppink yet she still swears to this day she had nothing to do with his murder.

Linehan’s husband and a friend appeared on 48 Hours to stand beside her in their belief she is innocent as did a handful of people who swore Mechele was a manipulative, deceitful liar.

With that, I wanted to share with you what I saw. Is Mechele a decent person whose life story is being twisted and used against her, or is she a mastermind deceiver?

First off, I think the facts don’t bode well for Mechele at all. I think most people will see logically her behavior and actions don’t add up to “love” as she led these men to think it was. The life insurance policy for Kent is exceptionally unusual. Most young 20-year-olds don’t think of taking out a life insurance policy on someone — let alone someone they now profess was likely gay (which I don’t believe for a minute). It defies logic. I find the timing of Mechele’s calls about Kent’s life insurance policy before his death is exceptionally odd, too. I see a whole host of red flags, and I could probably post an entire post about those, but putting all of this aside, what do I see?

Mechele plays the part of a sweet, innocent, demure women in the interview with 48 Hours. She is soft-spoken, and gentle (she reminds me a bit of Melanie McGuire in that sense). She softly weeps as she wipes the tears from her eyes begging for you to sympathize with her.

I find this classic deceptive behavior. When I see people talking really soft and demure, when they are a grown adult, no matter happy or sad, it is almost always a red flag for me. It’s unusual behavior for adults unless they are especially shy and reserved which clearly Mechele wasn’t, or she wouldn’t have stripped in a club for a living. Any time I see this mousy behavior, I go into high alert. It’s a big red flag.

Furthermore, Mechele’s emotions don’t jive for me. They are off, not on target, or as they should be. You can see her assessing the situation, and playing the interviewer. She even gets so brash as to say that if she cried in front of the jury, the jury would hold it against her, or if she didn’t, they would hold it against her. It was the manner, and way she said it that raised a red flag for me. Clearly, she was thinking how she could manipulate the jury. Unfortunately, 48 Hours didn’t load any video of Mechele for me to critique for you.

This case is about circumstances that are a too unusual, about a suspect whose stories don’t add up, and about a woman who was an incredible manipulator who I suspect learned to harness the power of sex in men who were lonely and longing to get what she craved: money.

I also don’t trust her other boyfriend or friend Carlin either. He makes my hair stand on edge.

I feel sad for Mechele’s husband, her daughter and her friend. They can’t see the real Mechele. She’s a cold, calculating woman who obviously had no problem using people and disposing of them to suit her needs–no matter how ruthless it was.