Lawyer Gets 15 Years in Plot to Kill Husband

A Woodland Hills lawyer was sentenced Thursday to 15 years to life in prison for a murder scheme against her prosecutor husband that the judge compared to “a Kafka story with its darkness, with its twists and with its turns.�

Appearing ashen, Nicole Garza, 32, said nothing after San Fernando Superior Court Judge Judith Meisels Ashmann sentenced her for the attempted murder of her husband, veteran Los Angeles city prosecutor Jose Garza.

She must first serve at least six years for a voluntary manslaughter conviction in connection with the death of her sister, Lynette LaFontaine-Trujillo, 34, who died while trying to kill Jose Garza in the botched plot, which police say may have been prompted in part by financial problems.

Police and prosecutors say Nicole Garza masterminded the plan in which LaFontaine-Trujillo, disguised and lurking in the garage of the Garzas’ Sylmar home, was supposed to shoot Jose Garza. But the plan backfired, and the prosecutor, believing his sister-in-law was a burglar, shot and killed her instead.

Jose Garza declined to be interviewed, but a probation officer’s report released Thursday shed the first public light on Garza’s reaction to the tragedy.

Grasping for a reason his wife wanted him dead, Garza, 50, speculated that diet pills may have caused a personality change that prompted the murder scheme. Garza told the probation officer that his wife lost 60 pounds in the five months before the crime.

Relatives say the Garzas appeared to be a happy family and compared them to the “Brady Bunch� television family. In the probation report, Jose Garza describes his wife as a “good person� and a “law-abiding citizen.�

But police documents reveal a darker side. In handwritten notes pieced together by investigators, Nicole Garza gave her sister detailed instructions for the killing:

“First one to the back, which will hopefully knock him down. . . . Two in the back if he doesn’t go down with the first.�

Two weeks ago, Nicole Garza pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter and attempted murder. Under terms of the plea bargain, she will not become eligible for parole for more than a dozen years.

The case began Sept. 25, when Nicole Garza sent her husband to the garage to get ice cream from a freezer. Armed because he had heard the family dogs barking, Jose Garza shot and mortally wounded a hooded figure who had fired two shots at him. At first, he believed the person in his garage to be a burglar, but she turned out to be LaFontaine-Trujillo, who died nearly two weeks later.

As the police investigation continued, the sisters’ scheme came to light.

Nicole Garza’s motives for wanting her husband dead may never be fully understood. In other notes, she suggested that she was plagued by financial worries and complained that her husband had been controlling her and the couple’s three children, ages 18 months to 4 years.

Police and prosecutors have said that money played a role in the sisters’ plot to kill Jose Garza--a theory supported by Nicole Garza’s own written words: “Sitting . . . with stuffed shirts wanting to scream. Let me out of this bad life I’ve set up. Fresh start. Out of debt. I need to stop pretending I’m smarter than I really am.�