Hope your family is not like this

[Dr. Jack]

Mount Dora couple charged in hitman plot to kill own grandkids

By Erin Cox
Orlando Sentinel

TAVARES -- The 32-year-old husband and father faced the rest of his life in prison, charged with multiple counts of sexually abusing his two girls, even raping one at gunpoint.

So he turned to his parents for help. And they agreed, authorities said -- even if helping meant killing their three grandchildren to prevent them from testifying against him.

Lake County deputies Tuesday arrested the couple -- she's 59, he's 64 -- and charged them with plotting to hire a hitman to kill their son's wife, 10-year-old daughter, his 16-year-old stepdaughter and 14-year-old stepson and the family dog.

"You don't think it's real," the wife said Wednesday from her Mount Dora home. "You think it's a nightmare. It's insane."

The Orlando Sentinel is withholding the names of the grandparents and parents to protect the identities of the children. The newspaper generally does not publish the names of the victims of sex crimes, especially children.

Deputies and the distraught wife spun a bizarre story of a desperate man whose parents helped finance an escape to Georgia after the girls accused him of molesting them. Since that day in October, according to the wife, the parents have mortgaged their Tavares home to help pay their son's attorney bills and -- deputies say -- pay for a hitman.

Acting on a tip from another inmate, deputies warned the wife two weeks ago what her husband and his parents were plotting.

Then they set up the sting.

In a Tavares Best Western hotel room Tuesday, the grandmother unwittingly offered an undercover deputy a $100 incentive to kill "all" of them, according to the arrest report, while the grandfather waited in the car because he "was too scared."

Each was arrested on four counts of criminal conspiracy to commit murder. They are being held without bail in the same jail as their son, who authorities say orchestrated the hit.

"He is the mastermind behind the entire thing," sheriff's Sgt. Christie Mysinger said.

This was the grandparents' most recent effort to help since November, authorities said. That's when deputies issued a warrant for their son on more than 50 charges, including 48 felony counts of sexual battery -- he is accused of raping his stepdaughter since she was 12 -- and one felony molestation charge of abusing his 10-year-old daughter.

That total was reduced to 23 charges, including 15 sexual-battery counts that carry a combined 450-year sentence. A trial date has not been set.

The 16-year-old said in a written statement that she let the abuse continue because her stepfather threatened to kill her and told her "he would rather go to jail for murder than child molestation." She told authorities her stepfather held a gun on her several times when he raped her through the years.

According to court records, the grandparents told deputies they were outraged by their son's behavior.

But they helped him flee to Dublin, Ga., in early November and provided him with money and documents that allowed him to assume the identity of his dead brother.

"They are his financiers," his wife said. "They paid for his lawyer. They mortgaged their house to help him."

The grandfather came out of retirement and took a job as a truck driver to make the mortgage payments, she said.

The grandparents called their son frequently and tipped him that police had traced his phone card during the month he was a fugitive, records show.

A cousin arranged for the fugitive to stay with a couple in Dublin. But reports say they became suspicious when he kept changing his hair color and his story about being estranged from his wife -- especially on nights he had been drinking.

The couple found his Florida drivers license when they searched his belongings, and a newspaper article online revealed that he was wanted on sex-crime charges.

They turned him in on Thanksgiving Day.



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"I just can't believe [he] would want her and her kids dead," said neighbor and friend Kathie Kirshcenman, 37. "When they moved in, they seemed like a perfect family."

That picture eroded when the younger daughter reported the abuse to her mother, 41.

"We've [she and her husband] always had a good relationship, inside the home and outside the home," the wife said. "You can never completely know someone. You think you do, but everyone has got their inner minds and their inner demons."

The couple met 11 years ago when he was working as a plumber in her house, and they married three years later.

After his arrest in Dublin, she visited him in the jail. He begged her not to let their children testify.

"That's the last conversation I had with him," she said. "He told me he was sorry. He told me he loved me."

But, she said Wednesday, "I believed he was capable of killing us."

Detectives told her that her husband gave a Lake County inmate a detailed, hand-drawn map of the inside of his Mount Dora home to help the would-be killer.

She said she never considered stopping her daughters from testifying about the abuse.

"I'm just going to keep on going," she said. "I don't know what else to do . . . I can't collapse. I'm a mother."