Strange twist in murder for hire case.

We recently had a thread about a guy who hired a man to kill his estranged wife. This is an update, but I couldn’t find the original thread.
The wife, a nurse, came home and when attacked, got the best of the would be killer and strangled him to death. The man’s daughter has now put up $100,000, on a million dollar bond, to get her father released pending trial. Details are sketchy, but these don’t appear to be wealthy people. The story implies that the daughter used a bailbond service, so I’m assuming that the hundred grand is a non-refundable fee. This struck me as strange from several aspects.

Say you have a million dollar bond. You either pay 100% of the bail yourself to the Courts (which will be refunded when you show up) OR you contract a bail bond agency, which will issue you an “insurance policy” for the entire amount in exchange for a premium, which is generally 10% of the bail. The premium is non-refundable. (You don’t get a refund for your car insurance if you didn’t have any claims the prior 6 months.)

Now if you don’t show up for your trial, a bench warrant will be issued for your arrest and the clock will start counting down. If you don’t surrender to the court during that “grace period” (e.g. 180 days), you, or your Bail Bond Agency, will forfeit 100% of the bail. Agencies don’t like to lose money on transactions, let alone a million bucks, so they’ll employ “Bounty Hunters,” whose job it is to track you down before the grace period expires.

If they don’t find you, the Bail Bond Agency will have to pay the entire million bucks. If they were smart enough to demand collateral from you, and your friends and/or relatives were stupid enough to offer up their property, cars, etc. on your behalf, the Bail Bond Agency will seize those assets in order to satisfy debt they incurred when you skipped town.

In the case above, if the daughter paid the $100,000 premium that was non-refundable no matter what. If she offered up her home as collateral, and her dad is not found within 6 months, she will lose her house.

I’m aware of the procedure, however the reported details in this instance are vague. It was stated that the daughter present a $100,000. check at the the county jail, there was no mention of a bondsman being involved, that’s part of why I said it seemed so strange. She brought the check in on friday morning, but they wouldn’t release the guy until next tuesday because they say they need time to set up some kind of monitoring.There has been no clarification of whether she is also the victim’s daughter, or why she chose to put up the money. It was reported that the police have no plans to provide any special protection to the wife. As I mentioned, none of these people seems to be wealthy, so I would think the money would be better used to hire a lawyer. I just find the whole thing confusing and the reporting is very sparse. Reporters haven’t even said that the involved parties refused to talk.

Clearly, the family isn’t talking, so the reporters have nothing to report. Most of the gaps can be explained by that.

The daughter could have gotten the money from a bail bondsman, or from anywhere else, but I’ve never seen any article that went into the mechanics of how the defendant or family got the money to post bail. Not really an important part of the story.

If she’s giving the money to the court, then it’s bail money and she will get it back when the case comes to trial. She may have paid a bondsman for the money, but that really doesn’t matter much.

I guess what puzzles me is that this kind of story usually gets much more attention and even speculation by reporters. For example, it shouldn’t be difficult to find out if the daughter is a stepchild to the mother. That might explain some of it, and why would the police publically state that they’re not going to any special lengths to protect the wife when the husband is released? If anything I’d expect them to deline comment. It should be a pretty sensational story when a woman manages to overcome and kill her attacker, especially when she does it w/ her bare hands. The intended killer was an associate of the husband and there’s been no hint that things happened any way other than how the wife describes it. The bail was set at 2 million, but was lowered to 1 million last week and they were very specific about the fact that the daughter presented a check for 100K.
Still seems very curious to me.

Here are links to the stories, from the oldest to the latest, if anyone’s interested. They’re fairly short articles.
http://www.katu.com/news/local/3874802.html
http://www.katu.com/news/local/3924156.html
http://www.katu.com/news/local/4237111.html
http://www.katu.com/news/local/5036716.html

The bail bond company only initially puts up 10% cash with the courts with assurety that they’d pay the million if the defendant fails to appear. Perhaps there is a way for a private person to do this. In other words, maybe she has $1m worth of assets, but they’re not easily converted to cash…

The latest says nothing about anyone posting bail. Where did you get that information?

Sorry, I thought I had linked all the stories, I missed the latest one. Here it is:
http://www.katu.com/news/locaSl/5037881.html

And here’s the latest story, I promise:
http://www.katu.com/news/local/5040776.html

Holy crap!

“Kuhnhausen faces charges surrounding an attack on his wife in September. When Susan Kuhnhausen arrived home from work, an intruder attacked her with a hammer. She fought the man off and strangled him to death with her bare hands.”

A.R. Cane, I think you wanted this thread: Nurse Ratchet Smackdown!

Jim

Yeah, that was the one I tried to find. The CNN story has expired though. Thanks.

Are you sure she didn’t kill him with a pair of scissors? I’m sure that I’ve seen the\is movie before. :smiley:

this movie