Mechele Hughes was a 23-year-old stripper who was involved with three men at once — Kent Leppink, a 36-year-old commercial fisherman who proposed to Hughes after knowing her for a month, Scott Hilke, and John Carlin III. For a few months, Hughes, Leppink, and Carlin lived together until Leppink’s dead body was found with three gunshot wounds to the head. Ten years had passed before Mechele Linehan (formerly Hughes) was found guilty of conspiring in Leppink’s murder with John Carlin. Both were sentenced to 99 years in prison.
[Prosecutors said Mechele Hughes was inspired by the film, The Last Seduction
While in jail, both Linehan and Carlin appealed the verdicts. There was no evidence linking them to the murder. In 2008, while serving the first year of his sentence, 48 Hours aired an episode featuring Carlin as a murderer. From Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward, Alaska, Carlin wrote to a journalist that after the show aired, he was beaten in jail. “… some people here didn’t like the way I looked, so I got a prison makeover of sorts,” he wrote. Later that month, Carlin was attacked again in jail and “died from some sort of blunt-force trauma.” He was 51. 48 Hours will air another special on Linehan on Saturday, December 26 at 9pm on CBS.
