Financially Strapped Homeowner Admits To Hatching Plot To Abduct Attorney, Hold Him For Ransom To Score At Least $30K To Save Home From Foreclosure

In East St. Louis, Illinois, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports:

• A man trying to avoid foreclosure on his home acknowledged in federal court Tuesday in East St. Louis that he hatched a plan to abduct and hold a lawyer, living in Granite City, for ransom.
  
  But the defendant, Brett L. Nash, 46, refused to admit what prosecutors claimed earlier this year — that he had considered various murder plots, including a hot-tub electrocution that he would blame on the victim’s cat.
  
  As part of Nash’s guilty plea to a charge of solicitation of a crime of violence, prosecutors agreed to drop other charges, which included murder-for-hire.
  
  Nash spent several months, beginning in late 2011, trying to persuade his wife to help him, court documents say.
  
  The intended victim, whom Nash considered wealthy, had a romantic interest in Nash’s wife, a former dancer he had known for several years and who had a key to his house.
  
  Nash needed at least $30,000 to avoid losing the couple’s home, near Pontoon Beach, to foreclosure, his plea says.
  
  But his wife refused to help, despite the arguments and physical violence it spawned, the document says.
  
  He admitted pulling out some of his wife’s hair and threatening to leave it at the crime scene.
  
  So Nash turned to a fellow union member and barge deckhand who also had a criminal record, officials said. That man notified authorities.

For more, see Man admits scheme to abduct Granite City lawyer.