The way I read it was she was in the hospital when the murder went down
This article was very poorly written so I can see how you ended up with that idea. The first few pages of the NM Supreme Court filing, which you can read here, clear that right up. This woman and her husband independently admitted to murdering and dismembering the guy.
This woman isn’t walking free because she’s innocent because by her own admission she’s not. She’s walking free, literally getting away with murder, because the prosecutor in her case fucked up so bad.
I don’t think that’s a fair characterization of this crime. She told her husband to “kick [the victim]'s ass” (after the victim taunted her for being raped by a relative of his, because this whole story is just awful), her husband then strangled him to death while she watched and drove the car the strangulation happened in (she claims to have been in shock at that time). She then later helped her husband dismember the victim to hide his remains. For what it’s worth this all only came to light later on when her husband stabbed her multiple times but then brought her to the hospital (presumably out of some kind of remorse for trying to murder his wife while he was on a meth bender) where she was put in a coma to recover and police interrogated him (when he was presumably feeling that remorse and decided to confess every shitty thing he’d ever done, including this murder police had no idea they were a part of).
She should have absolutely done some been convicted of some crime for creating foreseeable risk of murder by telling her husband to kick his ass and doing nothing to stop the murder (also, abusing the victim’s corpse and further traumatizing the victim’s family), but I would personally call this some kind of manslaughter or second degree murder and would probably find an extremely heavy probation an appropriate sentence (like, wear a monitor, check in with your PO once a week and do ten million hours of community service and drug rehab heavy). I think this is less of a callous murderer and more of a person who’s made fatally awful decisions.
The court also noted the prosecution introduced “foul-smelling physical evidence” from the victim’s remains and the smell led the judge to adjourn the trial early during the second day. Ripol urged the jury in his closing statement to find Lensegrav guilty for the “stench of death that permeated this courtroom,” the opinion says.
This article was very poorly written so I can see how you ended up with that idea. The first few pages of the NM Supreme Court filing, which you can read here, clear that right up. This woman and her husband independently admitted to murdering and dismembering the guy.
This woman isn’t walking free because she’s innocent because by her own admission she’s not. She’s walking free, literally getting away with murder, because the prosecutor in her case fucked up so bad.
I don’t think that’s a fair characterization of this crime. She told her husband to “kick [the victim]'s ass” (after the victim taunted her for being raped by a relative of his, because this whole story is just awful), her husband then strangled him to death while she watched and drove the car the strangulation happened in (she claims to have been in shock at that time). She then later helped her husband dismember the victim to hide his remains. For what it’s worth this all only came to light later on when her husband stabbed her multiple times but then brought her to the hospital (presumably out of some kind of remorse for trying to murder his wife while he was on a meth bender) where she was put in a coma to recover and police interrogated him (when he was presumably feeling that remorse and decided to confess every shitty thing he’d ever done, including this murder police had no idea they were a part of).
She should have absolutely done some been convicted of some crime for creating foreseeable risk of murder by telling her husband to kick his ass and doing nothing to stop the murder (also, abusing the victim’s corpse and further traumatizing the victim’s family), but I would personally call this some kind of manslaughter or second degree murder and would probably find an extremely heavy probation an appropriate sentence (like, wear a monitor, check in with your PO once a week and do ten million hours of community service and drug rehab heavy). I think this is less of a callous murderer and more of a person who’s made fatally awful decisions.
Mexican Saul Goodman wow