Patricia Olsen looks up at her Lawyer, Leonard Cohen, after the verdict was read and said "I didn't do it" in BerkshireSuperior court, referencing the murder of her husband Neil Olsen Tue May 23, 2006 (GARVER) (Ben garver)
FRAMINGHAM She still wears the gold wedding band given to her 19 years ago by the man police and prosecutors say she helped to murder.
Patricia Olsen, 49, sits in the visitors' area of the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Framingham, a woman imprisoned for life for coercing her son to kill her husband in 2005 for her financial gain.
Olsen was convicted of first degree murder in Berkshire Superior Court in 2006 and was sentenced to life without parole. Her michael kors outlet online first appeal was denied by the state's Supreme Judicial Court two years later.
Still saying she wasn't involved in the murder "I'm innocent," she told The Eagle in an interview last month the former Lanesborough resident constantly writes letters looking for pro bono representation because she says she can't afford a lawyer for a second appeal.
"It's like a roller coaster," Olsen said. "You get excited writing all these letters, and then you start getting feedback about how the economy is bad and no one can afford to do pro bono [work]."
In May 2006, Olsen was convicted of murdering Neil Olsen, 48, under the theory of "joint venture with deliberate premeditation and extreme atrocity or cruelty."
Her son, Christopher Robinson, now 29, admitted shooting his stepfather in the head seven times with a .22 caliber rifle and beating his body with a metal rod after ambushing the victim when he went to feed his horse at the family's Lanesborough home on Jan. 9, 2005.
Robinson is serving a life sentence at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Norfolk but will be eligible for parole in 2021.
While Olsen didn't physically kill her husband, a jury of seven men and five women determined she was as guilty of the murder as her son was.
"Patricia Olsen was the murderer; Christopher was her weapon," Berkshire District Attorney David F. Capeless, the lead prosecutor in the case, told The Eagle earlier this month.
During the trial, which lasted three weeks, Capeless said Olsen had been trying to get her children to help her kill her husband for more than a year. Both Christopher and his sister, Amanda Robinson, took the stand against their mother.
The case has garnered media attention over the years and has found its way into at least one book and several tabloid television shows. In 2010 Olsen appeared on NBC's "Dateline" to state her innocence. The next year she was on "Facing Evil with Candice DeLong" on the cable channel Investigation Discovery. In 2012, the same channel aired another show on her case as part of its "Deadly Women" series. The episode was titled "Match Made For Murder."
Olsen said she did the interviews in the hopes that a lawyer would believe she doesn't belong in prison and take her case, which might be featured on TV again. A spokesman at Los Angeles based Gurney Productions said his company was working on a crime episode for A "Biography," but no air date has been scheduled.
While Capeless provided assistance to the producers on two shows, he declined to be a part of two others, including the latest. He said that in order to keep viewers interested, TV shows have to portray the case in an exciting way and tend to leave out a good deal of the evidence against Olsen.
"If you look at the facts as they occurred, it's not that entertaining," Capeless said. "It's interesting, but not entertaining."
He said the "real" facts were presented to the judge and jury at the trial. Capeless told jurors that Olsen, facing close louboutin Outlet to $60,000 in debt, had persuaded her son to carry out the murder in order to get Neil Olsen's money about $178,000 from a life insurance policy and retirement michael kors outlet savings.
Olsen told The Eagle she didn't believe she and her husband had as much debt as was alleged at trial. She did acknowledge she did a poor job of handling the couple's finances.
"I was foolish in not taking care of the bills better, but it's not like we didn't have the money," she said.
Olsen grew up in Shaftsbury, Vt., and attended Mt. Anthony High School, graduating at the age of 16. Her mother, Priscilla Hall, said she was an A student and very bright. Olsen said she intended to go to Boston University, but her then boyfriend convinced her to settle down.
Married at 18, she gave birth to Christopher when she was 21 and to Amanda 13 months later.
In 1989, divorced and commuting to Pittsfield from Bennington, Vt., for work as a bookkeeper at Lenco Industries, she met Neil Olsen, who did sign lettering from time to time for the company, which manufactures armored vehicles.
"It wasn't until March 1993 that he stopped at my desk to get payment for a job he had done there, and he said he needed to talk to me and he wanted me to come over to his house the next day," Olsen said.
That next day, Neil asked her to move in with him.
"He said he had always been attracted to me since the day he had met me years prior," she said, adding that they had never gone on a date, but "he knew in his heart he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me."
She moved in with him, and the following year they got married.
Olsen said that "three or four years later," when Amanda and Christopher cheap jerseys were entering the seventh and eighth grades, respectively, they moved in with her and Neil after a custody battle between Patricia and her ex husband.
While the new living arrangement went well in the beginning, she said, problems developed when the kids hit their teenage years.
"My son was kind of withdrawn; he just didn't seem to be interested in school," Olsen said. "Amanda lived a style I didn't want to realize, or I cheap red bottom shoes just kind of ignored it. Neil kept saying: up to something.' "