The former college student implicated in the 2001 murder of Larry McNabney, a flamboyant Sacramento attorney, has been released from prison, officials confirmed today.
Sarah Dutra, 31, was released this morning from the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla and is now on active parole in Solano County, said Luis Patino, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Dutra was sentenced to 11 years, and she served almost eight-and-a-half, Patino said. Violent offenders in the state of California typically serve 85 percent of their sentence, and Dutra got credit for time served prior to her conviction, Patino said. (Earlier today, the CDCR incorrectly reported that Dutra had served her full 11-year sentence).
Dutra will be on parole for three years, Patino said.
He said she was released to Solano County "so she could maintain strong family ties." Her parents live in Vacaville.
The 52-year-old lawyer was poisoned by his wife and took at least a day to succumb. Dutra helped the wife dispose of the body and did not alert authorities as he was dying.
Dutra, then 21, helped McNabney's wife after he was poisoned, including taping shut a refrigerator when McNabney's body nudged open the door, and was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to 11 years in 2003.
Investigators said the two were after McNabney's money.
Dutra was an art student at California State University, Sacramento, when she went to work part time in McNabney's office on Howe Avenue. There, she met McNabney's wife of six years, a 36-year-old con artist who had drummed up a rap sheet of theft and scam crimes in her home state of Florida that stretched to 113 pages, according to Dutra's attorney.
The two women became friends, forging a high-living relationship revolving around horse shows, sports cars and nonstop shopping -- financed by McNabney -- and executing a bizarre murder that generated books and a made-for-TV movie.
The wife, Laren Sims Jordan, used the alias "Elisa" while she was married to McNabney, but used at least several dozen during her lifetime. After several months on the lam, she hanged herself in a Florida jail cell in 2002 before she could be returned to California to face murder charges.
Bee staff writer Kim Minugh contributed to this report.
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