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Film's Murder Tale May Have Led To Alaska Killing

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By DAN JOLING, The Associated Press

Published: October 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 fiance 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 fiance, 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 fiance of Linehan's. Carlin was convicted in April of murdering Leppink.

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-mail messages 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. What she didn't know was that Leppink suspected evil afoot and changed the beneficiary to his parents days before he was murdered.

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.

Still, prosecutors did not have the evidence to make an arrest at the time.

She was living in Olympia, Wash., when she was arrested.

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