Jury Urges Execution for Nurse : Plot: The woman hoped to disguise the paid killing as a crime of passion and collect on a $100,000 insurance policy.

A Van Nuys Superior Court jury recommended Tuesday that a 42-year-old registered nurse die in the gas chamber for hiring a co-worker to murder her roommate so she could collect on a $100,000 mortgage insurance policy.

Maureen McDermott, a respected former nurse at County-USC Medical Center, showed no emotion as the jury recommended that she be sentenced to death for the April 28, 1985, murder of Stephen Eldridge.

Eldridge, 27, was stabbed 44 times and his penis was cut off in the Van Nuys home that he and McDermott owned. Prosecutors alleged that McDermott paid a former orderly at County-USC Medical Center, James Flores Luna, to kill Eldridge and mutilate his body in hopes that the police would mistake the murder for a homosexual crime of passion.

Eldridge’s mother, Marlene Eldridge, cried and embraced the prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Katherine K. Mader, after the verdict was announced.

“I think it’s great--and it’s not vengeance. I don’t want her doing it to somebody else,” said Eldridge, 57, who has commuted from Orange County to attend most of McDermott’s trial.

Mader called McDermott “one of the most vicious, sadistic, cold human beings that we will ever see in our lifetime.”

McDermott’s two court-appointed attorneys, Joe Ingber and Carl Burkow, slipped out a back entrance and were unavailable for comment. The 12 jurors also declined to discuss the verdict or the recommended sentence.

Judge Alan B. Haber set formal sentencing for June 8. He can accept the jury’s recommendation or give McDermott a lesser sentence.

On March 2, the same jury convicted McDermott of first-degree murder with special circumstances in Eldridge’s death.

The jury also found her guilty of attempted murder in a March 21, 1985, knife attack on Eldridge by Luna, arranged by McDermott.

After that attempt, McDermott comforted Eldridge while secretly plotting to try again to have him killed. Eldridge confided to a friend that he felt secure when McDermott was with him, Mader said.

Luna, 36, the key witness against McDermott, pleaded guilty to murder with special circumstances after being promised that prosecutors would not seek the death penalty. His sentence is pending. Two other men who helped kill Eldridge received immunity in exchange for testifying.