A jury on Tuesday found a Plattsmouth, Nebraska, man guilty of trying to have his wife in Iowa killed.
A man Robert Harden thought was a hit man turned out to be an FBI agent, who told the jury in Omaha that Harden was clear about what he wanted. He asked the man to kill the wife who’d left him to go live with her parents in Iowa, and he also wanted the parents killed.
The informant says the 36-year-old Harden gave him their pictures, told how to get to their house in the small community of Mallard in southern Palo Alto County, and even gave the man a map of the house. Though Harden told the court he was enticed into ordering the hit, was just kidding, and only said it because he was under stress, his conviction this week for conspiracy to commit first-degree murder will carry a sentence of up to fifty years.