John T. Carlin III and Mechele Hughes, who lives in Olympia, Wash., and is also known as Mechele or Michele Linehan, were charged with first-degree murder in Anchorage court last week.
Authorities say Carlin, a 49-year-old Department of Transportation worker from Elmer, N.J., flew to Alaska after learning of the warrant for his arrest and turned himself in at the Anchorage courthouse. Tuesday night, authorities were looking for 33-year-old Hughes.
The tale laid out by prosecutors in newly unsealed court documents paint a Hollywood-style story of money, jealousy and deceit in the death of 36-year-old Kent Leppink, who was found dead in the woods off the Hope Highway in May 1996, shot three times with a .44-caliber Magnum.
New witness statements and changes in computer forensic technology allowed investigators to break the cold case and cement the charges, prosecutors said.
According to court documents filed by prosecutors, Hughes, a longtime exotic dancer in New Jersey and Anchorage, met Leppink, a Michigan man from a well-to-do family who came to Alaska to try commercial fishing, shortly after he moved to Anchorage. The couple were engaged within a month.
Carlin was a steelworker and friend of both who had recently won a $1.2 million judgment in a lead-poisoning lawsuit. Hughes and Leppink occasionally lived with him in or around Anchorage. Unbeknownst to Leppink, Carlin was also engaged to Hughes.
Prosecutors say Hughes purchased a $1 million life insurance policy on Leppink a month before his death. She persuaded him to put his real estate and his commercial fishing boat in both their names, and to write a will naming her as the beneficiary.
Prosecutors say Leppink began to unravel the deception before he was killed. He tore up his will and changed the beneficiary of his life insurance policy to his father.
Prosecutors say that Hughes may not have known the policy was changed when Leppink was shot.
Days before Leppink was killed, he sent a package to his father with two letters, one containing instructions and the other in a sealed envelope, prosecutors said. The instructions told his father to put the sealed envelope in his safety deposit box.
"I talked to you about 'insurance policies.' This is mine. ... It's not funny to talk about getting killed, but in today's world you have to expect anything. ... If you think anything fishy has happened to me, then you can open up the other envelope I've sent.' "
According to the court documents, the sealed letter said, "Use the information enclosed to take Michele (Hughes) DOWN. Make sure she is prosecuted." It also names three possible suspects in his murder: Hughes, Carlin and a third man who was not charged but was also engaged to Hughes.
A month after Leppink's death, Hughes and Carlin bought a recreational vehicle together and moved to Louisiana, prosecutors say.
Prosecutors in the cold case unit of the Alaska State Troopers say breakthroughs in the case came in recent years when Carlin's son told them he believed his father killed Leppink. At the time of Leppink's death, Carlin was able to prevent investigators from talking to his son, who was a minor.
But in 2004, investigators contacted the son, who was then 26. He told them that shortly after Leppink went missing, he saw his father washing a handgun in the bathroom sink and that his father told him bleach was good for removing evidence from guns.
New computer technology also enabled investigators to retrieve old e-mails off Leppink's laptop, which had messages between the couple that contradicted Hughes' previous statements.
Hughes and Carlin were indicted Thursday in Anchorage.
Carlin is at the Anchorage Jail with bail set at $500,000.
Reached Tuesday night in Michigan, Leppink's mother, Betsy Leppink, read a prepared statement: "After 10.5 years, we are very happy to have this take place and are eager for the process to continue."
Daily News reporter Megan Holland can be reached at mrholland@adn.com.
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