As always, thank you for hanging out and remembering Jake Merfeld with me today.

In April 2013, Julia Merfeld, a 21-year-old newlywed from Muskegon County, Michigan, was arrested after attempting to hire a hitman to kill her husband, a plot that turned out to be a police sting operation.

Merfeld had contacted a man she believed could arrange the murder, offering $50,000 in life-insurance money to have her husband killed. What she didn’t know was that the man was cooperating with police. In a recorded meeting, she calmly discussed how she wanted the killing carried out and how she planned to collect the insurance payout afterward.

When officers arrested her at the scene, the case quickly made national headlines. Merfeld later admitted to planning the murder, though she claimed she never intended for it to actually happen.

In 2014, Julia Merfeld pleaded guilty to solicitation of murder and was sentenced to at least 20 years in prison. The case became one of the most widely discussed examples of a murder-for-hire plot uncovered through an undercover operation.