ANCHORAGE, Alaska — An Anchorage strip club owner has offered to bail out Mechele Linehan while the former dancer faces a second murder trial.
Terry Stahlman is offering his downtown Big Timber Motel to cover the $250,000 bail.
He told the Anchorage Daily News he has never met Linehan and expects nothing in return. As a club owner he said he knows dancers and has a strong feeling Linehan is innocent.
The 37-year-old from Olympia, Wash., is accused of conspiring to kill a man she met while strip-dancing. Prosecutors say she plotted with a man in love with her at the time in 1996, inspired by the movie, "The Last Seduction."
An appeals court overturned a 2007 conviction.
A date for the second trial has not been set. Linehan is held at the state women's prison and welcomes Stahlman's offer.
"It's really sweet. I'm really grateful," she said from prison. "It's just so big to me."
In addition to the hotel, Stahlman, 67, owns rental properties in Anchorage as well as the Showboat "bikini" clubs in Fairbanks and Anchorage.
"Knowing dancers the way I do know dancers - I've had 5,000 of them work for me over the last 20 years - I have a strong gut feeling that this woman is innocent of murder," he said.
"She's one of those dancers that I've had - they are 18, 19, 20 years old, and they do what they do, then they grow out of it. And they go back to being themselves. And who Mechele Linehan is, is that she's a doctor's wife and she's got a kid."
Prosecutor Pat Gullufsen said he won't oppose the proposed property bond, but it's rare that the court agrees to take property collateral in lieu of cash.
May 6, 2010
Yikes! Raises the bar for "pathetic loser" rather dramatically.