It's over 16 years in prison for a DuPont family inlaw who shepherded the contract killing of a former prostitute who was involved with his stepson.
Christopher Moseley and three others were charged in the August 1998 murder of Patricia Margello in a motel near the Las Vegas Strip. Moseley was sentenced March 16.
Margello had been involved in a drug-addled relationship with Dean MacGuigan, the great-great grandson of a DuPont Chemical Company founder, and Moseley wanted to break it up, according to court testimony and documents.
Moseley ordered Margello's murder when all other efforts to quash the relationship failed, hiring former porn actress Diana Hironaga first to watch over MacGuigan and then to perform "step five" of his plan - Margello's death.
Moseley and Hironaga implicated Richard Murillo and Joseph Balignasa as the actual killers. Murillo was convicted of murder-for-hire and conspiracy last November and was given two life terms in the same court session as Moseley and Hironaga's sentencings. They had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder for hire. Balignasa pleaded guilty last December to second-degree murder and was sentenced to more than 15 years in prison.
Hironaga had cooperated with authorities in the case and testified during Murillo's trial last fall. She testified she met Moseley in a Las Vegas hotel playing video poker when he asked her to join the plot against Margello. She said she'd been paid $5,000 at first, to persuade MacGuigan both off his drug habit and out of his life with Margello.
When that failed, she testified, she then planned to trap Margello at a motel by telling her they'd each be paid $2,000 to escort a pair of gamblers.
But Margello smelled a rat and and called MacGuigan, who suggested she get a cab to the Las Vegas Hilton. That was the last he heard from her. Murillo and Balignasa killed her at the motel room. Hironaga testified they did methamphetamine, choked her, and put her body into trash bags, hiding it in an air conditioning duct.
Moseley is the husband of DuPont heiress Lisa Dean Moseley. He was arrested at his Delaware home a month after Margello's murder.
