An Indiana woman who poisoned the oatmeal of her child’s father and strangled him with his favorite tie has been sentenced to more than 100 years in prison.
Heidi Marie Littlefield, 42, was sentenced Friday to 60 years for murder and another combined 55 years for conspiracy to commit murder, according to records with the Hamilton Superior Court.
An attorney for Littlefield could not be reached Thursday.
After Francis “Fran” Kelley was discovered dead in January 2021, an autopsy determined that he had been strangled, the affidavit said. He also had fentanyl in his system, the affidavit said.
A search warrant was obtained for Kelley’s cellphone and iPad, which determined Littlefield, the mother of one of Kelley’s children, had been at his home days before he was found dead, according to text messages between the two.
“The two were in the middle of a custody battle regarding their 2-year-old child in common,” the affidavit said.
In one exchange, he questioned whether she had tampered with his oatmeal, according to the court document.
“Did you do something to the oatmeal that was in my fridge?” he asked her.
Officials say that Littlefield and her adult daughter and that woman’s boyfriend plotted to kill Kelley. The women laced his food with fentanyl, according to the affidavit.
They found Kelley unresponsive at his home, and Littlefield ‘”grabbed Fran’s ‘favorite tie'” and strangled him, the affidavit states.
She attempted to bludgeon his head, the daughter’s boyfriend told investigators, according to the affidavit.
When Littlefield was convicted of murder and conspiracy to commit murder, her daughter provided some of the most damaging witness testimony The Indianapolis Star reported in August.
The woman testified that she and her mother tried to poison Kelley three times. After the third time, they snuck into his home and found him facedown on the floor and gasping for breath, the newspaper reported. Littlefield asked her daughter to break Kelley’s neck, but she couldn’t, the daughter said, because he was too heavy.
Littlefield’s daughter pleaded guilty in March to conspiracy to commit murder and was sentenced to 26 years in prison. A murder charge against her was dropped in exchange for her testimony, the newspaper reported.
Her boyfriend pleaded guilty in May to conspiracy to commit murder. He was sentenced to 10 years, according to The Indianapolis Star.
Madelyn Urabe contributed.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
