A KILLER who was dubbed "Black Widow" by prosecutors for having her husband murdered has died in prison.
Susan Lee Russo was convicted in 1994 of paying her boyfriend $100 to murder her Navy officer husband.
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Russo was serving time at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla and had been receiving medical treatment at a local facility since Aug 16, according to a news release.
She was imprisoned after paying her boyfriend $100 to kill her husband David Russo so she could collect benefits as his surviving spouse, the Merced Sun-Star reported.
Russo let the boyfriend and an accomplice inside her home, where they shot her husband while the couple's children slept in another room, police said.
"I saw my father get shot. I heard the bullet go through the pillow,” the couple's daughter Jamie Guarino said years after the killing.
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The hired killers then disposed of the body of the US Navy chief petty officer, who was serving at Lemoore Naval Air Station south of Fresno at the time.
Prosecutors found that Russo was seeking to collect a nearly $1million insurance policy from her husband's death.
On October 15, 1996, the Black Widow was sent to state prison where she was sentenced to life without parole.
In 2012, Russo claimed that she had been battered by her husband in a clemency petition.
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"In my thinking, I was protecting myself and my children from an abusive husband and father," she wrote.
Former Governor Jerry Brown commuted her sentence in 2017 after finding that there was evidence that Russo was abused.
However, this claim didn't hold up even after a parole board revisited Russo's case in January 2018 and ruled in favor of freeing her.
Brown shot down that ruling, saying that Russo was still a public safety risk who had "more work to do."
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The convicted killer died in prison from natural causes at age 67.
Her official cause of death will be determined by the coroner's office.
