A man who was convicted in a highly-publicized 1981 murder case in southeast Iowa has died in prison. Michael Lee Hood died Sunday of lung and brain cancer.

The 49-year-old was an inmate at the Iowa State Penitentiary in Fort Madison. He was serving a life sentence for first-degree murder from Wapello County. Hood and Sherryl Snodgrass were both convicted of killing her husband, Gregory Snodgrass, at the couple’s home near Ottumwa on September 21st, 1981.

Prosecutors said he was killed with a sawed-off shotgun and his body was dumped in the Mississippi River. Hood was 22 and Sherryl Snodgrass was 23 at the time. Hood testified Sherryl pulled the trigger, but she claimed it was Hood who was the gunman.

It took a Wapello County jury just four hours to return the guilty verdicts following a 10-day trial. After spending 20 years of her life sentence in Mitchellville, Sherryl Snodgrass was transferred to a prison in Oregon in 2002 to be closer to family. She remains in that facility and has made appeals to elected officials in recent years seeking a change to her sentence that would make her eligible for parole.