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Thursday, August 10, 2023

The Tim Lambesis Murder-For-Hire Case

     In 2000, 19-year-old guitarist Tim Lambesis, a graduate of a San Diego area Christian high school, formed a heavy metal band called "As I Lay Dying" (the title of a William Faulkner novel). The group's sixth album came out in the fall of 2012 prior to a tour of Asia. The band was scheduled to kick-off a U.S. tour from Oklahoma City on May 30, 2013. Many of the band's songs included Christian themes of forgiveness and struggle.

     In 2011, Lambesis and his wife Megan separated. According to divorce papers, she accused him of becoming emotionally distant from her and the three children they adopted from Ethiopia. She complained that he had become obsessed with bodybuilding and touring. Megan also accused her estranged husband of having a "string of women."

     In April 2013, the 32-year-old rock star, on two occasions, confided to a man who worked out at his gym that he wanted to have his wife killed. Lambesis told this man his wife made it difficult for him to visit his children. The man in the gym Lambesis reached out to reported Lambesis' homicidal wishes to the San Diego County Sheriff's Office. Shortly thereafter Tim Lambesis met with an undercover police officer posing as a hit man named "Red".

     In the recorded murder-for-hire meeting the heavy metal rocker handed Red an envelope containing $1,000 in cash, a photograph of his wife, the security gate code to the Encinitas, California estate and a list of dates in which Lambesis would have an alibi. According to court documents the murder-for-hire mastermind also gave the undercover sheriff's department officer instructions on how to kill Megan Lambesis.

    At two in the afternoon of Tuesday, May 7, 2013, San Diego sheriff's deputies arrested Lambesis as he shopped at a mall in Oceanside. The officers booked him into the Vista Jail on the charge of solicitation of murder.

     The day after his arrest at his arraignment, Lambeis pleaded not guilty to the murder solicitation charge. The judge set his bail at $3 million. Forty-eight days later Lambesis posted his bond. The judge required him to wear a GPS device.

     The murder-for-hire suspect's attorney told reporters that his client had been set up by the man in the gym. If convicted as charged, Lambesis faced up to nine years in prison. His fans and people who knew the entertainer expressed shock over the murder-for-hire accusation.

     On September 16, 2013, the Superior Court Judge, after hearing preliminary hearing testimony from the undercover officer and other prosecution witnesses, bound the murder-for-hire case over for trial.

     In February 2014 Tim Lambesis pleaded guilty in a Vista, California courtroom of soliciting an undercover officer to murder his wife. At his sentencing hearing on May 16, 2014 the former rock star's attorney said his client suffered brain damage as a result of using steroids. The deputy district attorney dismissed the claim. She called it a flimsy, illogical excuse for what in reality was a calculated plan to have a person murdered.

     The judge sentenced Mr. Lambesis to six years in prison.

     In December 2016, after serving just two years of his sentence Tim Lambesis was released from prison. Six months later in San Diego, California, the singer reunited with his band. 
     On December 12, 2020, at a holiday party outside his parents' home in Dan Diego, Lambesis, in starting a backyard bonfire, was burned over 25 percent of his body when the cap came off the flammable liquid container he used to start the fire. While recovering at a nearby hospital the musician on his Instagram page assured his fans that his "man parts" were not burned. 

2 comments:

  1. "a heavy mental band..."

    I think that's what we used to call a Freudian slip! Quite appropriate, I think.

    Mr. Fisher, you rock! Please keep on doing what you're doing!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oops. Thanks for the correction and the comment.

    ReplyDelete