Mechele Linehan was living the life she wanted in October 2006. She had a beautiful daughter and was thinking about having more kids. She and her husband, Colin, owned a cute house in Olympia, Wash., where family members and friends gathered on holidays. Colin had finished his Army obligation and was practicing medicine. They were excited about starting a business of their own, a medical day spa. The future was bright.

Then the police stormed their home with guns drawn.

Mechele Linehan, a 33-year-old suburban housewife, was under arrest in a 10-year-old murder.

Alaska State Troopers say Linehan conspired in 1996 to kill a man she was engaged to at the time. She and John Carlin III, also a fiance, were charged with murdering Kent Leppink, a commercial fisherman found dead in the woods near Hope.

Linehan was an exotic dancer at the Great Alaskan Bush Company, simultaneously engaged to Carlin, Leppink and a third man, say prosecutors, a gold digger who got Carlin to do her dirty work.

Evidence from the murder investigation supports a picture of her back then as a 23-year-old living the wild life and determined to get the most out of it, including the attentions of older men who lavished her with expensive gifts.

But looking at Linehan's life after she left Alaska, it's hard to believe that prosecutors and the people who know her best are talking about the same woman.

Could a person have changed that much? Which Mechele is real?

After her arrest last fall, Mechele and Colin Linehan re-mortgaged their house and paid $150,000 cash bail. They have piled up debt by hiring top private defense lawyers in Alaska and Washington. Now the suburban mom has returned to Alaska to confront her past with a jury looking on.

Jury selection is under way. The prosecution's case is circumstantial, but it was good enough to convict Carlin of first-degree murder this spring.

A FRESH START

After Leppink's body was found on May 2, 1996, troopers questioned Carlin and Linehan, who lived with him at the time, but no charges were filed. A month later, Linehan left the state.

Prosecutors say Linehan ran away. Her family says she wanted a fresh start in New Orleans. "She wanted to go forward with school ... She wanted to get on with her life. New Orleans was home," said Katie Linehan, Mechele's sister-in-law.

Linehan enrolled at Loyola University, preparing to study veterinary medicine while volunteering at a New Orleans zoo, said her longtime friend Ann Gassga, who met Linehan at college that year.

Linehan financed her studies by working at a strip club a couple of nights a week. The big tips enabled her to go to school full time during the day.

Gassga said Linehan, a longtime vegetarian, always had a menagerie -- five parrots, three dogs and a cat. She picked up stray dogs weekly. She'd make fliers with photos of the dogs and post them around New Orleans, trying to find the owners.

While taking classes at Loyola, Mechele met Colin Linehan, a handsome medical student in his last year at Tulane University. He wanted to be a family doctor. They were a good match, said Mechele's mother, Sandy McWilliams. "He's the calm one. And she gets excited easily."

Colin, an ROTC cadet, was so poor at the time he couldn't afford a car, Gassga said. He moved in with Mechele and she helped support him.

They married in the spring of 1998, a week after he graduated. Mechele paid for her own engagement ring, Gassga said. She also paid for the wedding. She stopped working in the strip club when she married Colin.

"She married a very poor medical student," Gassga said. "If she was out for the money, he was not a catch."

When the couple moved to Maryland for Colin's residency, Mechele gave up her dream of being a veterinarian, but she still worked on her undergraduate degree. She also taught Sunday school at a local Catholic church.

Their daughter was born in June 1999. Mechele waitressed at a steak house two nights a week so Colin wouldn't have to take on extra hours at the hospital and could spend time with the baby.

While in Maryland, Colin was arrested for shoplifting after walking out of a Nordstrom department store with $700 of women's clothes in his daughter's stroller. The charge was later dismissed and Colin explained while in court that it was an honest mistake: He and his wife were shopping and he was trying to exit the building quickly with a screaming baby.

In 2001, they moved to Olympia. Colin, still in the Army, was assigned to Madigan Army Medical Center. When he deployed to Iraq, Mechele finished up her master's degree at Evergreen State College and interned on the Washington state executive ethics board. She cared about poverty and injustice, her friends say.

"Her big thing is she doesn't like to see people taken advantage of," Gassga said.

Listen to her friends over the past decade and her life in Olympia sounds perfect. She'd be the first to bake cookies and bring them to your home if you just moved into her neighborhood. She volunteered at her daughter's Catholic school. She did 12-hour Friday night shifts at a local crisis center, counseling suicide and rape victims.

Bob Zeigler, a former coordinator of the social justice committee at St. Michael Church in Olympia, said he was struck by Linehan's sincerity and caring when she approached him several years ago to inquire how she could get involved with the church's social justice programs.

"She had called me to find out about what she could do to make a better world," Zeigler said.

Even a Thurston County, Wash., prosecutor who met Linehan when she was a victim of a home contractor theft said he was struck by her forgiving attitude as he prosecuted the criminal case.

"She was very compassionate, very understanding and very forgiving," said deputy prosecuting attorney Mark Thompson.

PICTURE IS PERFECT

She's a woman who likes to kayak, bike, say her friends, and show her daughter the world, even the not-so pretty sides like a homeless shelter where she took her to work in the soup kitchen one night. She has a house full of books. Loves to garden. Makes a mean enchilada. Throws the best backyard parties.

While Colin was in Iraq in 2005, Mechele re-connected with John Carlin IV. He is the son of John Carlin III and lived with Linehan, Leppink and his father at the time of the murder. Carlin IV is a key witness in the state's case against Linehan. He testified at his father's trial that he saw his dad and Mechele washing a gun in the bathroom sink shortly after Leppink's death.

Carlin IV looked up to Linehan, like a big sister, he testified at his father's trial. He stayed with Linehan in Olympia for several months, baby-sitting her daughter and helping around the house, he said.

"She has a joie de vivre like no one I have ever met," said friend Kristina Hermach. It sometimes threatens women, but when they get to know her, that usually changes, she said.

There's a storybook quality to the Mechele described by her post-Alaska friends. But there are shadows too. Allegations of extra-marital affairs came up in Carlin's trial. Scott Hilke, the third fiance from the Alaska years who claimed he was her true love, testified that he had several liaisons with Linehan in recent years. Prosecutors claim Linehan also had an affair with a doctor friend of the family while her husband was in Iraq.

Today, Linehan still has the striking good looks, the mysterious allure that draws every eye in the room to her. There was just something about her, said her old boyfriends, and she still has it.

But what does this all have to do with murder? Linehan's friends and family say prosecutors, lacking any hard evidence, hope to smear her into a guilty verdict.

Is she an evil, manipulative woman finally being called to account for murder? Or is she just a woman with a wild past who grew up and settled down?

The trial is expected to last at least a month.