Attempted hit on ex-wife gets Louisiana man 10 years

MONROE, La. (AP) — A Louisiana man has received the maximum 10-year sentence for trying to hire a hit man to kill his ex-wife while he was jailed on charges of sexually assaulting her two young daughters.

U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty sentenced Steven Marcus Kelley, 48, of West Monroe, on Tuesday on a charge of using the mail to commission a murder for hire in December 2019, U.S. Attorney Brandon B. Brown said in a news release Wednesday.

Doughty also ordered three years of supervised probation after Kelley is released, Brown said.

Kelley was convicted in October 2021. At the time, his defense attorney said he could not comment because state charges were still pending.

The Ouachita Parish district attorney’s office never responded to an email asking about the state charges.

Kelley was in the Ouachita Parish jail awaiting trial on charges involving the rape and molestation of the girls, ages 8 and 12, prosecutors said in an October news release.

They said another inmate had recommended the person whom Kelley offered $10,000 to shoot his ex-wife. In a letter to the proposed hit man, Kelly wrote that the attack “HAS to look like a robbery” and he included a map, drawn in blue and black ink, of the area where she worked.

The person who had been recommended by the inmate brought the letter to the Ouachita Parish Sheriff’s Office on Dec. 11, 2019, the morning after it arrived.

Jail surveillance video from Dec. 5, 2019, showed Kelley sitting on his bed, using two pens to write a letter, prosecutors said.