Instead, he came face to face with the man Stacey had hired to murder him.
With Stacey, 38, the sole beneficiary of her fifth husband’s $700,000 life-insurance policy, police always had her at the top of their list of suspects, but it took months for investigators to gather enough evidence for an arrest.
With her work colleague Lynitra Ross acting as a go-between, Stacey hired Reginald Coleman to shoot and kill Richard.
Reginald, known as ‘Mr Results’ pocketed $14,000 for pulling the trigger – small change considering Stacey was anticipating being more than half a million dollars richer.
In court, Stacey at first claimed she had Richard killed because he’d molested her 14-year-old son.
‘I said, “I’m going to be the judge, the jury and executioner”,’ Stacey said. ‘And that’s what I did. And that’s disgustingly awful.’
However, her son denied any abuse at the hands of the man who had adopted him and his two siblings, and loved them as his own.
Stacey admitted she was having an affair and had plotted her husband’s murder.
To avoid the death penalty, Stacey testified against Lynitra and Reginald and all three were handed life sentences.
‘It was such a heinous murder,’ Richard’s sister Carol Fillingim told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. ‘Done to someone that did not deserve it at all.’
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