COLUMN ONE : Contract Killings in Suburbia : Murder for hire no longer is confined to organized crime. Middle-class Americans are using hit men. Some cases end in tragedy, but many are foiled by police stings or conspirators’ bungling.

MIDDLETOWN, Ohio —  By small-town standards, Melissa Frances was something of a wild spirit, what with her asymmetric, auburn hairstyle and black, thick-heeled Doc Martens boots.

No amount of studied outrageousness, though, could explain why Frances and her ex-husband, Clarence Wilkinson, a high school principal in this southern Ohio community, wound up enmeshed in rival murder-for-hire plots that last December came apart like cheap shoes.

As Frances and a self-professed contract killer later admitted to Middletown police, she and Wilkinson allegedly hired the same 19-year-old hit man to murder each other--crimes aborted when police arrested the three.

“I’m not the kind of person who would do this kind of thing. Really, I’m not,” a penitent Frances said last month, the day before she was sentenced to six months in jail.

Long confined to the Machiavellian realms of organized-crime intrigue and gang vengeance, attempted contract killings are now a middle-class phenomenon as well. To some social critics and law enforcement officials, that spread is a worrisome sign of the increasingly coldblooded resolve of otherwise average Americans to tidy up disputes and domestic squabbles, and get what they want.

“What amazes is that the idea of hiring a killer is in the range of possibility for so many people,” said Dane Archer, a UC Santa Cruz sociologist and analyst of homicide rates. “There’s a threshold that doesn’t seem to exist anymore.”

This is America noir , a moral nether world plumbed by tabloid television and pulp fiction: Where a petulant suburban Chicago teen-ager is arrested for asking schoolmates to murder her parents in retaliation for being grounded. Where a suspected child molester in Pompano Beach, Fla., is indicted for trying to hire an undercover detective to snuff out his 5-year-old accuser. And, in a more highly publicized case, where Qubilah Shabazz, the daughter of slain Black Muslim leader Malcolm X, stands accused of paying an FBI informant in an attempt to assassinate her father’s archrival, Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan.

Statistically, contract killing attempts remain anomalies, not even catalogued by police agencies. Like serial murders, their numbers are dwarfed by the nation’s pall of domestic killings and drug and gang violence. But according to Louis R. Mizell Jr., a Bethesda, Md., security analyst whose consulting firm tracks 4,000 categories of crime, at least 1,039 murder-for-hire cases have been filed by authorities since 1988, a figure Mizell said “is on the rise.”

Responding to those numbers, legislators in eight states have moved in recent years to enact tougher laws for murder-for-hire solicitations, in some cases making the penalties stiffer than those for attempted murder. In Illinois, under a 1988 statute, someone convicted of solicitation could serve 20 to 40 years in prison.

“These cases were surfacing and we knew we didn’t have a clear legal offense to deal with them,” said Scott Nelson, chief of the felony trial division for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office.

Like many in law enforcement, Nelson cites the overwhelming presence of violence in the media and everyday life as factors nudging frustrated Americans toward the idea of hiring killers.

“Middle-class people see the availability of all this, “ he said. “With all the violence out there, it’s not much of a stretch to think you can find someone to take care of your problems.”

James Alan Fox, dean of Northeastern University’s College of Criminal Justice, echoes other social critics in blaming a national erosion of moral values.

“This society tells people: Don’t feel guilty, be assertive, get what you want,” Fox said. “If you want a person dead, have it done. You can put it on your charge card.”

Among conspirators like Melissa Frances, reasoning is rarely that abstract. She explains her decision to have Wilkinson killed as occurring in a “moment of panic.” The alleged would-be hit man, a cocky 19-year-old named Christopher Brown, had just told her that Wilkinson was plotting against her, she said. Wilkinson was fearful that she would tell police about an alleged sexual encounter with his stepson, she said.

“The only thing I thought about,” Frances, 43, said in an interview last month, “was that if it came down to me or my husband, I wanted to be the one left alive.”

Since he was charged in December with conspiracy to commit murder, Wilkinson has not commented on the case. Brown, who police said provided them with admissions and tape recordings, also was charged with conspiracy.

Like so many middle-class murder-for-hire plots, the Middletown case has spurred a recent visit by a tabloid television film crew. Such frenzied coverage has made household names out of those involved. For instance, Wanda Holloway of Texas faces a second trial on charges of hiring a hit man to try to slay the mother of her daughter’s rival on a school cheerleading squad.

Less publicized cases appear briefly, like clusters of fireflies, only to wink out, replaced by newer, equally seamy incidents. Many fall apart before a murder attempt can be made, and some unfold with the bungling antics of bad slapstick.

In south Tampa, Fla., the 1992 murder of Grady Stiles Jr., a pincer-handed circus performer known as “Lobster Boy,” led to the convictions last year of his wife and son, a sideshow attraction who was called the “Human Blockhead” because he could hammer nails into his skull. Weary of Stiles’ alleged emotional abuse, mother and son were accused of paying a teen-ager $1,500 to shoot him in the head.

In Grand Junction, Colo., in a case Eagle County Sheriff A.J. Johnson describes as a suspected murder-for-hire try, a man armed with a silencer-equipped pistol and wearing a wig and fake mustache collapsed and died of a heart attack last September while trying to kill Rita Quam. When his pistol jammed, the gunman over-exerted himself trying to beat Quam with a rock. She later recognized the assailant as a retired Chicago policeman who was a close friend of her ex-husband, who is reported to be a suspect but who has not been charged.

In Goshen, Ind., a contract murder scheme was scuttled last month when the alleged hit man fell asleep on the couch of his victim. Police said Sheri Hodges returned home to find a gunman, armed with a pistol, snoring in her mobile home. The man confessed to police that he had been hired by Hodges’ estranged husband to kill her, but had nodded off while lying in wait. Both suspects are in custody, charged with conspiracy to commit murder.

For the past year, Chicago and its suburbs have been a relative hotbed of murder-for-hire plots. At least nine contract killing attempts are under prosecution or on appeal in Cook County courts. A 10th indictment was filed this month against a landlord accused of paying an arsonist $10,000 to set a fire at a rental property. The fire killed seven members of a tenant family.

For obvious reasons, professional assassins are not easily located by middle-class conspirators. Rather, police say, people usually contact friends or family members they feel are trustworthy.

And many of those approached tip off police, law enforcement officials say.

The majority of murder-for-hire cases reaching the court system, law enforcement officials say, are foiled by police stings and undercover informants. Police agencies often base their cases on surreptitious tape recordings and trial testimony by undercover informants and detectives posing as hit men because such direct evidence has a strong impact on juries.

In South Florida and Southern California, for example, some police agents have fashioned mini-careers posing as hit men.

Ft. Lauderdale Police Detective Al Smith, an organized-crime investigator, has masqueraded as a contract killer in 13 solicitation cases and acted as a consultant on 50 others. He goes by the alias “Al Sinetti,” drives a black Chevy Camaro and wears ample gold jewelry and tight-fitting hustler’s clothes.

Few of his cases have underworld connections, but Smith plays up the stereotypical role of mob killer because “that’s the kind of hit man people see on TV and in the movies. I don’t want to disappoint them.”

In Orange County, Calif., Sheriff’s Detective Bill Davis, who has posed as a contract killer in more than a dozen cases, prefers a humbler persona. He dresses down for the part, taking care not to frighten off poorer conspirators.

The modest attire seems to work. Some of Davis’ conquests have offered to pay for their “hits” with as little as a few hundred dollars or small caches of narcotics. Others have promised an $800 coin collection, a motorcycle and sex as down payments.

At times, police posing as hit men have to haggle with conspirators over fees. One woman who approached Smith to kill her husband hesitated when the detective told her his normal fee was $5,000.

“She said she didn’t have enough money,” Smith said. “Not wanting to lose the case, I told her I’d do it for a small down payment. So she wrote me a personal check for $100.”

Law enforcement officials justify an undercover agent’s willingness to lower the price of a fake “hit” as necessary to ensure that conspirators do not take their business to a real contract murderer. But defense lawyers argue that high fees might lead some conspirators to give up the idea altogether. Dropping a murder fee to snare a suspect, they say, borders on entrapment.

“There’s no case if someone backs out, and if there’s any suggestion that police might be keeping a crime alive, that’s when the alarm bells go off,” said Douglas W. Thomson, a St. Paul, Minn., criminal lawyer who has defended several men charged with hiring contract killers.

Entrapment is the most typical defense in contract murder cases, although defense lawyers acknowledge it is only a marginally successful tactic. Yet even when prosecutors produce hours of tapes showing defendants engaged in murder conspiracy, criminal lawyers say the most crucial moment is the one early on when the plan is first discussed.

“It all comes down to who plants the seed of the crime. If it’s the police, or someone working for the police, it’s entrapment,” said attorney George H. Moyer Jr. The Nebraska lawyer won a landmark U.S. Supreme Court victory against postal agents who ensnared a farmer in a child pornography sting in 1984.

Such a pivotal early moment may determine the outcome of the federal murder-for-hire case against Shabazz. Despite more than 20 taped conversations, her lawyers contend that the most crucial meeting was the first contact between her and the government’s undercover witness, Michael Fitzpatrick.

Defense lawyer Larry B. Leventhal said that Fitzpatrick, a veteran federal informant, has a history of drug abuse and of egging on activists into criminal acts. He was the one, Leventhal said, who lured Shabazz into considering a death plot against Farrakhan. The first contact between her and Fitzpatrick, defense lawyers add, was not taped.

“It boils down to her veracity against his,” Leventhal said.

G. Robert Blakey, a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame and author of the RICO federal racketeering statute, cautions that the “entire range of evidence,” not the initial contact, determines when entrapment occurs. “To merely afford a person with temptation,” he said, “is not entrapment.”

The temptation to kill surfaced in both Frances and her ex-husband long before investigators became involved, Middletown police say. According to Detective John Terrill, in mid-December Frances learned from her 18-year-old son that he had sex with Wilkinson, his stepfather.

Frances, a former high school English teacher, said she complained to police and county social service officials, but was told nothing could be done because her son was a consenting adult. (Wilkinson has since been charged with 17 counts of gross sexual abuse.)

Hours later, according to investigators, Brown went to Frances’ apartment and told her that Wilkinson, afraid of exposure, had offered him $2,500 to kill her.

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According to Frances, Brown told her that if she paid the same amount, he would renege on the first deal and instead stab Wilkinson to death. Frances agreed “in a daze,” she said. Brown drove her, trembling, to a Kmart, where he bought a deer knife, a sharpener, gloves and a carton of cigarettes. “One-stop shopping,” she recalled acidly.

But as in so many attempted contract killings, too many people found out. Frances told her son, who told a social service worker, who in turn called police. By Dec. 22, Frances realized “the whole thing was crazy” and went to investigators.

The next morning, detectives rounded up all three. Wilkinson, 44, a nattily dressed principal whose arrest astounded teachers and students at Franklin High School, was charged with conspiracy to commit murder.

So was Brown, a drifter in Italian print shirts who, police report, confessed and gave them self-narrated tape recordings in which he fantasized about selling his story to Hollywood. A county grand jury is expected to consider their cases this month, said Maj. Bill Becker, deputy Middletown police chief.

Under Ohio law, Frances could be charged only with inducing a public panic, a misdemeanor usually applied to crimes by rambunctious teen-agers, because she backed out of the plot. She pleaded guilty, hoping for leniency. She muted the shade of her hair before sentencing and closeted her Doc Martens, finding a pair of sensible shoes. But it was no use.

“She conspired to commit murder,” Municipal Judge Mark Wall told the court as he gave her the maximum sentence. “It is not like she went out and broke a bunch of windows.”