Wife's Murder-for-Money Plot Backfires After Major Oversight

Uloma Curry-Walker wasn't the beneficiary on husband's life insurance policy
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 10, 2017 9:46 AM CDT
Updated Jul 15, 2017 12:51 PM CDT
She Had Her Husband Killed. That Wasn't Her Only Mess
Uloma Curry-Walker appears at a hearing last month in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court in Cleveland.   (Cory Shaffer/Cleveland.com via AP)

An Ohio woman who'd been married for just four months before her husband died was found guilty of his murder Friday, and she could get life in prison without parole for her crime, the AP reports. Uloma Curry-Walker, 45, was convicted of aggravated murder, conspiracy, and other charges surrounding the 2013 death of firefighter William Walker, with prosecutors painting her during the trial as having fallen into financial straits and approaching her 17-year-old daughter and daughter's boyfriend with a deadly plan: Find someone to take out her husband, William Walker, so she could collect his life insurance money, which Cleveland.com notes was contained in a $100,000 policy. Curry-Walker handed over a $1,000 down payment to her daughter's boyfriend, Chad Padgett, to find a hitman, which precipitated a chain of events leading to her husband's slaying.

But what William Walker's death didn't bring to his widow was the life insurance money, as he had never named his wife as the beneficiary after they married. Who did get the money: his ex-wife, who was still named as the beneficiary on the plan. Padgett, Curry-Walker's daughter, and two men who tried to kill William Walker (one of them was the successful hitman) took plea deals in exchange for testimony against Curry-Walker, who had said in her initial confession that her husband had abused her. Her daughter, the only one involved who won't go to jail (she'll spend a month in a juvenile detention center), said during the trial her mother had informed her: "No one would believe I would hire a bunch of kids to kill someone when I know people that could." Sentencing is Aug. 8. (A woman accused of hiring a hitman at Olive Garden killed herself.)

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