Woman may avoid death row

A new jury will decide the fate of Virginia Larzelere, who was convicted of hiring a man to kill her husband in 1991.

DAYTONA BEACH -- A woman convicted of first-degree murder more than a decade ago for hiring a man to kill her husband may not die for her crime.

A recent court ruling overturned Virginia Larzelere's 1993 death sentence, bouncing the case back to the penalty phase for a new jury to decide her fate.

In a case that garnered national attention, including interviews by Geraldo Rivera, Larzelere -- now a middle-aged woman with a shady past -- was convicted of masterminding the death of her husband, 39-year-old dentist Norman Larzelere in 1991.

Prosecutors argued that she hired Jason Larzelere, her son from a previous marriage, to gun down her husband in his office while a patient sat in the waiting room. They said she stood to gain millions in insurance money from her husband's death.

Jason Larzelere, who was 18 at the time of the murder, was acquitted. He accepted a $75,000 civil settlement in 1994 and gave up his rights to any more of his adopted father's insurance money.

Virginia Larzelere maintained her innocence, saying before her arrest that she and her husband had a good relationship, including "some hanky-panky going on when there were not patients in the office." The couple had two children together, and Norman Larzelere had adopted Jason and his sister Jessica.

Volusia County Circuit Judge John Watson, who presided over Larzelere's 1992 trial, signed an order last week that was released Monday saying Larzelere's lawyers did not present important evidence during the original penalty phase. That included information about her sexual abuse as a child and mental-health factors. The order also said the attorneys did not spend enough time preparing for the penalty phase.

In 1992, Larzelere waived the right to have experts testify about her state of mind on the day her husband was killed.

"I wish her the best," attorney John R. Howes, one of the lawyers who represented Larzelere in the early '90s, said Monday. "Any time someone gets a death sentence overturned, God bless them. I don't want her executed. God bless her."

In the next two months, attorneys will discuss when a new jury will hear arguments for a new sentence.

When Larzelere was sentenced to die, the jury vote was 7-5. The recent court ruling said it was impossible to tell whether at least one juror would have been swayed if Larzelere's attorneys had presented other mitigating evidence.

Gabriel Jack Chin, a law professor at the University of Arizona, said it is very common to see death sentences overturned because of ineffective counsel, new evidence or bad jury instruction. He said death-penalty cases can be tricky and they don't necessarily pay well. Mistakes are likely to occur. Also, many defense attorneys focus their energy on the trial and don't put enough time and thought into the penalty phase, he said.

Chin said a new penalty phase often is good news for a defendant.

"It frequently favors the defendant, because you know what didn't work before and so you can run a different strategy," he said. "You can run Plan B, and you know what the other side has to say. Now if you're really dealing with a monstrous repeat offender, it may not make any difference."

Larzelere lost an appeal in the Florida Supreme Court in 1996.

Police reports showed Larzelere had been plagued by trouble for years before the murder case:

Polk County deputies dropped the investigation of a murder attempt against her first husband, shot four times by a stranger in 1975, when neither he nor Larzelere would cooperate.

Larzelere's second husband, a Florida Highway Patrol trooper, divorced her after Polk County deputies urged him to read the shooting report about her first husband.

In 1985, the owner of a Daytona Beach construction company filed suit alleging Larzelere bilked him of more than $30,000 while working as his bookkeeper. Larzelere paid the firm $34,000 in an out-of-court settlement and embezzlement charges were dropped.

Larzelere's attorneys and family members could not be reached for comment Monday.

Lisa Emmerich can be reached at lemmerich@orlandosentinel.com or 352-742-5926.