Loraine Alison Hunter, from Moreno Valley, California, was convicted of first-degree murder on August 21 in the death of her husband Albert Thomas
A 62-year-old woman could be put to death for the 2009 murder of her husband after evidence was presented in court suggesting he was not the first she has killed.
Loraine Alison Hunter, from Moreno Valley, California, was convicted of first-degree murder on August 21 in the death of her husband Albert Thomas.
At that time the jury also learned that Hunter killed Thomas for financial gain and that it was something she’d been planning for months.
Hunter is expected to be sentenced on December 8, according to KTLA.
Thomas was found shot to death in the sleeper section of his semitruck on November 4, 2009.
The truck, which he drove for work, was parked in a dirt lot off of a busy intersection in Moreno Valley.
Thomas was found shot to death in the sleeper section of his semitruck on November 4, 2009. The truck, which he drove for work, was parked in a dirt lot (pictured) off of a busy intersection in Moreno Valley
Hunter was prevented from collecting his life insurance, but prosecutors claim she was aware of more than $1million available in policies under his name at the time of his death.
When deciding her sentence the jury was shown evidence that another husband of hers was murdered in Inglewood in 1996.
In that case no one was ever charged and she collected roughly $312,000 in life insurance.
Hunter was interviewed immediately after Thomas’s death, but wasn’t arrested until 2011.
Briuana Hunter, the defense’s 23-year-old daughter, told the jury that she and her mother spent months planning Thomas’s death, the Riverside Press-Enterprise reported. She spoke to the court after accepting a plea deal
Initially she claimed she didn’t know of any life insurance policies, but investigators found that she’d spoken to the trucking company that employed her husband and learned of two policies totaling $225,000.
Those policies, police found, would double if Thomas was murdered instead of dying from a natural cause or as a result of an accident.
‘The administrator at the trucking company told detectives that Hunter, prior to Thomas being found dead, had personally been told about the polices and that they doubled in the case of a murder,’ the District Attorney’s office said in an official release.
Briuana Hunter, the defense’s 23-year-old daughter, told the jury that she and her mother spent months planning Thomas’s death, the Riverside Press-Enterprise reported.
‘She told me, “We need to figure something out,”‘ the young woman told the court after accepting a plea deal.
‘She said that we needed the money. At first I didn’t know what she meant, but later on it became clear.’
On top of the $450,000 available through her husband’s life insurance policy, Hunter forged his signature in an attempt to secure another more lucrative policy of $750,000 just six months before his murder.
She was never able to collect any of the money because she never obtained a death certificate.