Diane Borchardt

Diane Borchardt was a former teacher's aide/study hall monitor at Jefferson High School in Wisconsin. She was convicted of hiring three of her students to murder her estranged husband, Ruben Borchardt, on Easter morning in 1994 [1]. The Borchardts were married in October 1979. Ruben had just lost his first wife (the mother of his two children) in a car accident earlier in the year. For the next 14 years, both Ruben and his children were living with Diane, and the Borchardts had a daughter together. He did not hit or abuse Diane.

Late in 1993, Ruben fell in love with a woman who had hired him to do some cabinet work for her and he decided that he wanted a divorce from Diane. During the divorce proceedings, Ruben won title to their home, and Diane was given one month to vacate the premises. Diane then began soliciting some of her students for the job of killing Ruben, offering them cars and $20,000 from Ruben's life insurance policy. One of them, Douglas Vest, eventually agreed to do it and enlisted a couple of friends to help him. On the eve of the murder, Diane deliberately picked a fight with Ruben and told police that she was leaving the house, thus giving herself an alibi.

The next morning, around 3:30 AM, as Ruben and his son prepared to go to the Easter Sunrise Service at their church, Diane's students broke into the house and shot Ruben twice with a sawed-off shotgun, just as he was going up the stairs to get his son out of bed. Ruben was taken to a hospital, where he died several hours later. Diane got away with the crime for almost six months, until one of the gunmen told 'the wrong person' about his involvement in the crime, and implicated Diane as the organizer of the plot.