Woman Gets 33 Years in Bilking, Killing of Widower

A Maryland woman who swindled an elderly widower out of his savings was sentenced yesterday to 33 years in prison for killing the 76-year-old man to prevent him from calling police and ending the scheme that she had been running for years.

Nancy Jean Siegel was in her 40s and twice divorced when she met Jack Watkins in the early 1990s and told him he was going to be her next husband. Instead, she took him for everything he had, bought a BMW and tried to have her fiance committed, prosecutors said. When that effort failed, they said, she killed Watkins and dumped his body in a Loudoun County park.

The killing took place in 1996. For almost seven years, the body was unidentified. But after investigators learned the identity in 2003, using a database of veterans, it didn't take long to zero in on Siegel, who was collecting Social Security payments that had continued because no one knew Watkins was dead.

In a tearful, labored statement in federal court in Baltimore, Siegel, now 61, said that some of her actions had been despicable, but challenged the government's theory of how Watkins died. She said she cared for Watkins and would not have killed him.

"Nothing could have made me take another human being's life," Siegel told U.S. District Judge Andre M. Davis. "I would have killed myself before I would have killed someone else."

Not a day goes by, she said, that she does not think of Watkins. "I did care for Jack," Siegel said, standing next to her attorneys, Andrew D. Levy and Thomas J. Saunders. "I loved him. I loved him as a fellow human being and as a person."

Abandoned by her mother as an infant, Siegel was a teenager when her father died, and later in life she developed an addiction to gambling, stealing to support her habit, Saunders told the judge.

"Something in her was broken," the attorney said.

One of the victim's stepdaughters told the judge that Siegel preyed on a wonderful, caring man, who quit his job to care for his ill wife before she died and who tried to make the most of his life after her death. "He had his health, his garden, his music and many friends," Cheryl Jenkins said during the sentencing hearing.

Reading from a piece of white paper, Jenkins told Davis that Siegel had taken all of that and more away from Watkins, stripping him of dignity, selling off the Maryland home he had made with his wife, and with it mementos and memories of that life, Jenkins said.

"Jack was such a mild-mannered man who wished no ill will on anyone," Jenkins said, dabbing her eyes with a tissue.

The lead prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tamera L. Fine, asked for a life sentence.

When it came time for Davis to pronounce Siegel's fate, he made clear his feeling about the evidence in the case. "You are a murderer," he said.

He did not impose a life sentence but indicated he expected the prison term, in effect, to amount to one for Siegel, who has been in custody since 2003.

"It is highly unlikely that you will come back to the community, and there is justice in that."