Mechele Linehan

Mechele Linehan was profiled on 48 Hours this past weekend. The segment was titled Love and Death in the Wild.

Mechele was a beautiful girl who knew the power of attraction, and she learned at a very young age how to use it. She had no problem attracting men so when she took a job as an exotic dancer at the age of 18 in Alaska, it would come as no surprise that the men encircled her off the stage as well.

48 Hours found several men with whom she dated, and who wanted to marry her. And supposedly she was engaged to three men at one time (or at least they thought they were). Each of the guys being much older than her. Two of the three talked to 48 Hours.

Read more The story is long and involved, but Linehan never married any of them men, and one of them, Kent Leppink, turned up dead during the time Linehan was seeing him. At the time of Leppink’s murder, however, Linehan was out of town.

With that, Linehan was never charged, and eventually moved on to Washington state, married a doctor, got a master’s degree and had a child.

Eight years would pass before a cold case unit picked up the case and followed up on it, and when they did, they narrowed in on Mechele.

Leppink left behind a letter from the grave professing his love for Linehan, but also said that if anything happened to him that looked suspicious to look at Michele or the other people in her life.

I am not going to detail all the events of the story as you can read all about it on 48 Hours website yourself, but I will tell you that Linehan was finally arrested, charged and convicted of the first degree murder of Kent Leppink yet she still swears to this day she had nothing to do with his murder.

Linehan’s husband and a friend appeared on 48 Hours to stand beside her in their belief she is innocent as did a handful of people who swore Mechele was a manipulative, deceitful liar.

With that, I wanted to share with you what I saw. Is Mechele a decent person whose life story is being twisted and used against her, or is she a mastermind deceiver?

First off, I think the facts don’t bode well for Mechele at all. I think most people will see logically her behavior and actions don’t add up to “love” as she led these men to think it was. The life insurance policy for Kent is exceptionally unusual. Most young 20-year-olds don’t think of taking out a life insurance policy on someone — let alone someone they now profess was likely gay (which I don’t believe for a minute). It defies logic. I find the timing of Mechele’s calls about Kent’s life insurance policy before his death is exceptionally odd, too. I see a whole host of red flags, and I could probably post an entire post about those, but putting all of this aside, what do I see?

Mechele plays the part of a sweet, innocent, demure women in the interview with 48 Hours. She is soft-spoken, and gentle (she reminds me a bit of Melanie McGuire in that sense). She softly weeps as she wipes the tears from her eyes begging for you to sympathize with her.

I find this classic deceptive behavior. When I see people talking really soft and demure, when they are a grown adult, no matter happy or sad, it is almost always a red flag for me. It’s unusual behavior for adults unless they are especially shy and reserved which clearly Mechele wasn’t, or she wouldn’t have stripped in a club for a living. Any time I see this mousy behavior, I go into high alert. It’s a big red flag.

Furthermore, Mechele’s emotions don’t jive for me. They are off, not on target, or as they should be. You can see her assessing the situation, and playing the interviewer. She even gets so brash as to say that if she cried in front of the jury, the jury would hold it against her, or if she didn’t, they would hold it against her. It was the manner, and way she said it that raised a red flag for me. Clearly, she was thinking how she could manipulate the jury. Unfortunately, 48 Hours didn’t load any video of Mechele for me to critique for you.

This case is about circumstances that are a too unusual, about a suspect whose stories don’t add up, and about a woman who was an incredible manipulator who I suspect learned to harness the power of sex in men who were lonely and longing to get what she craved: money.

I also don’t trust her other boyfriend or friend Carlin either. He makes my hair stand on edge.

I feel sad for Mechele’s husband, her daughter and her friend. They can’t see the real Mechele. She’s a cold, calculating woman who obviously had no problem using people and disposing of them to suit her needs–no matter how ruthless it was.