Prosecutor will appeal overturned conviction
With equal parts frustration and determination in her voice, the Pickaway County prosecutor said there’s no way she is going to let a woman who dreamed up a murderfor-hire plot and went so far as to pay a man to get rid of her enemy skate on a technicality.
Prosecutor Judy Wolford said Friday that she will ask the Ohio Supreme Court to overturn an appellate court decision handed down Wednesday that threw out the whole case and subsequent conviction of Tara Lambert, a 34-year-old former model who went to prison in February 2016 after a jury convicted her on a first-degree felony charge of conspiracy to commit aggravated murder.
The Fourth District Court of Appeals ruled that the original indictment Wolford filed when she charged Lambert was not specific enough in spelling out exactly what Lambert was accused of doing — in this case, paying a suspected hit man a $125 down payment and giving him photos of the intended victim and a list of her vehicles and schedules — to create the “conspiracy.”
Without such specifics, the indictment was “fatally flawed” and the case never should have been allowed to proceed to trial, the appeals court ruled.
Wolford, who has been with the prosecutor’s office for 23 years, said that even without certain wording, the paperwork was perfectly clear.
“The question here is did the defendant know exactly what she was being accused of and what she was being charged with,” Wolford said. “And she sure as hell did.”
Wolford said she hopes the high court will hear the case, the county will be successful and the conviction and Lambert’s seven-year prison sentence restored. If that doesn’t happen, she said, she will charge Lambert again.
A spokesman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction said that Lambert was to be released Friday from the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville.
Lambert’s case grabbed international attention. She had a longstanding feud with Kellie Cooke, the mother of Lambert’s two teenage stepdaughters. Things escalated in July 2015, authorities said, when Lambert met a man in a Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot in Circleville and gave him the down payment to kill Cooke. She suggested that he throw Cooke’s body in a wood- chipper.
The man turned out to be an undercover detective and the exchange was caught on hidden cameras in his car. Deputies arrested Lambert a few minutes later after she left a nearby Walmart with a cart full of bags.
It was what happened inside the courtroom, however, that caught the world’s attention. Lambert, a former model, came to court each day dressed in stiletto heels and tightfitting dresses. She played to the cameras and treated the courtroom like a stage. Her attorney, James Kingsley, made her looks a part of his defense.
Now, Lambert is suing him for breach of contract and legal malpractice. The lawsuit was filed in April in Pickaway County Common Pleas Court by Lambert’s new attorney, Sam Shamansky, and asks for standard damages of at least $25,000.
The lawsuit blames Kingsley, a former prosecutor, for not catching the paperwork error in the indictment. It also says that he took the more than $22,000 that Lambert paid him for her defense, but that included billing her for hours of work on motions that the appeals court later rejected because they were defective and for “research” that Shamansky said had no legal basis.
“The indictment language was an elementary error that anyone should have caught,” Shamansky said.
Shamansky said Lambert, whom he declined to allow to be interviewed, “is eager to ... have a chance to defend herself properly without a bunch of hair-brained ideas from an incompetent lawyer.”
Kingsley wouldn’t address the specific allegations in the lawsuit against him, but said that had he pointed out the error in the indictment before trial, prosecutors simply would have amended it with different language, the case would have proceeded and Lambert “would have lost forever.”
“Sly like a fox,” he said of Lambert. “This gives her another bite at the apple with the same facts.”