TOPEKA, Kan. — A woman at the center of a deadly love triangle was released from prison Wednesday morning.
Melinda Raisch was convicted of murdering her husband, David Harmon while he slept in the couple’s Olathe home in 1982.
The case went unsolved for two decades, but then charges were filed in 2003 against Raisch, who by then was remarried to an Ohio dentist and had two daughters.
Prosecutors say that in 1982, Raisch, then 24, met Mark Mangelsdorf at her job at MidAmerica Nazarene University and began an intimate relationship that ultimately resulted in the decision to kill her husband.
In 2000, prosecutors reopened the case and filed charges against Raisch after they say she changed her story about what happened that night.
She had claimed intruders broke in and knocked her out and killed her husband.
When a jury convicted her of first-degree murder, prosecutors agreed to downgrade the charges to second-degree murder if she’d testify against Mangelsdorf. That led to Mangelsdorf’s admission to second-degree murder.
Both were sent to prison in 2006 and now, serving less than nine years, Raisch is being paroled at the age of 57.
