US woman gets life term for killing ill husband

Santa Ana, California: On the night his cancer-stricken brother was stabbed to death, David Jessee knew his sister-in-law was somehow behind it. A few years earlier, Jessee said, his brother Jack told him that if anything ever happened to him, she would be to blame.

A gray-haired Sandra Jessee was sentenced on Friday to life in prison for having Jack Jessee, her third husband, killed in their Orange County home in 1998.

Prosecutors said she wanted to avoid paying for his cancer treatment and to eventually collect over $650,000 (Dh2.3 million) from the sale of their home and other benefits. Jessee, now 61, and her son Thomas Aehlert hired a hit man to commit the killing.

"She's just one of the most twisted defendants I've come across who would engage her own biological son in the murder of a man she's been married to for 15 years at probably the most vulnerable time in his life," Senior Deputy District Attorney Mike Murray said.