Appeal by woman tied to killing denied
STOCKTON -- A legal bid for freedom for a former college student implicated in the 2001 murder of a flamboyant Sacramento attorney was denied Monday, when a judge refused to reduce Sarah Dutra's prison term because she acted with "unparalleled callousness."
"Larry McNabney knew he was being murdered," San Joaquin Superior Court Judge F. Clark Sueyres said of the 52-year-old lawyer, who was poisoned by his wife and took at least a day to die.
Dutra helped the wife after McNabney was poisoned, including taping shut a refrigerator when McNabney's body nudged open the door, and was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to 11 years in 2003.
Investigators said the two were after McNabney's money, but defense attorneys have shown that McNabney, who once spent $50,000 a year on television advertising, had a bank balance of $141 when he died.
Earlier this year, Dutra, 27, won an appeal on the sentencing portion of her trial that sent her case back to San Joaquin Superior Court under a new judge, who was ordered to reconsider whether she should have gotten the full 11 years or a lesser term of six years.
Imprisoned since her 2002 arrest, Dutra could have gone free if her sentence had been reduced.
Instead, she will stay in prison for at least four more years.
Dressed in an orange jail jumpsuit with her hair pulled back in a ponytail, Dutra smiled at her parents and sister and other relatives in the courtroom, then sat almost motionless during the three-hour hearing Monday.
She was an art student at California State University, Sacramento, when she went to work part time in McNabney's office on Howe Avenue. There, she met McNabney's wife of six years, a 36-year-old con artist who had drummed up a rap sheet of theft and scam crimes in her home state of Florida that stretched to 113 pages, Dutra's attorney said.
The two women became friends, forging a high-living relationship revolving around horse shows, sports cars and nonstop shopping -- financed by McNabney -- and executing a bizarre murder that generated books and a made-for-TV movie.
The wife, Laren Sims Jordan, used the alias "Elisa" while she was married to McNabney, but she had used at least several dozen names during her life. After several months on the lam, she hanged herself in a Florida jail cell in 2002 before she could be returned to California to face murder charges.
McNabney seemed to live on the edge at times, balancing a successful law career and alcohol addiction, testimony has shown. He had been through several marriages when he hired newly divorced Sims Jordan to work in his Las Vegas office. The two married after a brief courtship.
McNabney had a history of abruptly disappearing, once fleeing to a commune in the Pacific Northwest and another time walking out on a prominent Nevada trial in the middle of the case. Because of his past behavior, his absence from his office in September 2001 was explained by his wife as another experimental life change.
On the evening of Sept. 10, 2001, Sims Jordan and McNabney joined other friends for dinner while they were attending a quarterhorse show in the Los Angeles area. That was the last time anyone spoke to him.
This story was originally published December 4, 2007 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Appeal by woman tied to killing denied."