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Ex-stripper gets 99 years in wilderness murder

A former stripper turned soccer mom, convicted of plotting with a South Jersey man to kill her fiance, was sentenced yesterday to 99 years in prison.

A former stripper turned soccer mom, convicted of plotting with a South Jersey man to kill her fiance, was sentenced yesterday to 99 years in prison.

Mechele Linehan, 35, was convicted of murder last year for orchestrating the murder of an Alaskan fisherman she had promised to marry.

In January, John Carlin 3d, a love-lorn steelworker from Salem County, was sentenced to 99 years for shooting Kent Lippink outside Hope, a tiny mining community an hour from Anchorage.

Linehan ordered Carlin to kill the fisherman, prosecutors said.

The exotic dancer believed she would be the beneficiary of a $1 million insurance policy if Lippink was dead, prosecutors said.

Anchorage Superior Court Judge Philip Volland called the 1996 crime premediated, cold and cruel.

Prosecutors said Linehan was inspired by The Last Seduction, a 1994 movie in which a woman coaxes her lover into killing her husband for money.

Linehan and Carlin continue to maintain their innocence. Through his attorney, Carlin said he flew to Alaska willingly in 2006 and had expected to be vindicated.

The judge yesterday said he could not hand down a sentence different from the one he gave Carlin.

"In my mind, I can find no principal distinction between the puppet who pulls the trigger and the puppeteer who pulls the strings," Volland said. "In my judgment, Ms. Linehan was the puppeteer who pulled the strings."

After the death of the fisherman, Carlin and Linehan went their separate ways.

Carlin, a Marine Corps veteran who last worked on the ongoing Collingswood circle project, returned to New Jersey and married a Russian bride.

Linehan married an Army doctor, gave birth to a daughter, and settled in as a homemaker in Olympia, Wash.

Their new lives began to draw to a close in 2004 when Alaska State Police formed a cold case unit.

The Leppink homicide was the new unit's first case. They called it "The Black Widow" investigation.

The case unraveled thanks to a yellowing piece of newsprint. A state trooper found a three-line ad in a local newspaper for a Desert Eagle pistol, a gun of the same caliber that killed Leppink. Trooper Linda Branchflower tracked down the seller, who told her he had sold the gun to Carlin.

Now reopened, detectives worked night and day unraveling the saga.

Linehan worked as a stripper at one of Alaska's top night clubs. She met Carlin in 1996 after the death of his wife.

Carlin, 51, had traveled from Elmer to Alaska in 1994 so his ailing wife could see the aurora borealis before she died. Two years later, he buried her.

Mechele Linehan, originally from New Orleans, also arrived in Alaska by way of New Jersey. When she was 14, she took her sister's ID and found work in a strip club in Brick Township, Ocean County. When she turned 21, she left the Garden State and moved to Anchorage, where she became a star attraction.

She was 23 in 1995 when Carlin stumbled into the Great Alaskan Bush Co.. Inside the strip club, Carlin hired her for a lap dance and became instantly captivated.

He fell in love with her lithe beauty and piercing blue eyes. He showered her with expensive gifts: a $3,200 fur coat and an $11,000 diamond ring he buried in an ice cream sundae.

Carlin could afford the extravagances. Days after the death of his wife, Carlin received a $1.3 million insurance settlement in a lead-poisoning case, prosecutors said. His attorney, Clifford Van Syoc of Cherry Hill, had successfully argued that Carlin suffered brain damage from exposure to lead paint while repairing the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.

Lenehan gleefully took Carlin's presents. They traveled to Amsterdam. Carlin proposed on Christmas Day 1995. She accepted.

She failed to mention that she was already engaged to at least three other men, prosecutors said.

One of those men was Leppink, a transplant from Michigan who was building a fishing business in the wilderness.

After their engagement, Leppink named Lenehan as the prime beneficiary of his $1 million life insurance policy.

Less than a month later, Leppink was found dead along a desolate wilderness trail near Hope. He had been shot in the head back and chest. Three .44-magnum casings were recovered nearby.

Linehan didn't receive a dime of the insurance policy.

Just before he died, Leppink had discovered his fiance was romancing at least two other men. He had stormed into his lawyer's office, torn up his will and made his father the beneficiary of his estate.

A certified letter to his father detailed Leppink's suspicions.

"Since you're reading this, assume that I'm dead. . . Use the information enclosed to take Mechele DOWN. Make sure she is prosecuted," he wrote.

Leppink named Linehan and Carlin as "the people, or persons, that probably killed me."

"Make sure they get burned," he wrote.