Cheerleader’s Mother Guilty in Murder Plot : Verdict: Prosecutors said she schemed to demoralize her daughter’s rival. The defense saw a post-divorce frame-up.

A jury on Tuesday convicted a woman of trying to further her daughter’s high school cheerleading prospects by hiring a hit man to murder the mother of one of her daughter’s rivals.

After a week of sensational testimony, the eight-man, four-woman jury found Wanda Holloway, 37, guilty of attempting to hire someone to kill Verna Heath. Holloway could be sentenced to life in prison.

As the verdict was read, Holloway put her head on the table and wept, while friends and relatives attempted to console her. The jurors will return today for the sentencing portion of the trial.

Prosecutors contended that Holloway thought Verna Heath’s death would cause Heath’s daughter, Amber, to be so distraught she would drop out of the cheerleading competition, thereby ensuring that Holloway’s daughter, Shanna, would make the squad.

Defense lawyers did their best to discredit the testimony of the state’s key witness, Terry Harper, Holloway’s former brother-in-law, painting him as a man who could not be trusted and who may have engineered the scheme to hire a hit man.

On six occasions, Harper recorded conversations with Holloway about going through with Heath’s murder. It was apparently those tapes that did the most damage to Holloway, who appeared confident throughout the trial.

In his closing argument to the jury, prosecutor Casey O’Brien replayed several segments of the tapes and said that Holloway’s voice wasn’t that of a woman who was frightened. The defense contended that Harper had threatened Holloway in an attempt to keep her from backing out of the deal.

“You listen to that tape. You don’t hear fear in her voice,” said O’Brien. “You hear hate. She’s consumed with hate.”

At one point, Harper asked Holloway if she wanted to back out of the murder scheme, to which she replied: “It’s not that I don’t want to do it, I just have to get the money.”

She eventually gave Harper a pair of earrings worth $1,995 as a down payment on Heath’s murder.

At another juncture, prosecutor Mike Anderson told the jurors, “This is not about cheerleading, folks. This is about a woman who hated two other people so much that it gnawed at her day and night. It gnawed her to the point of obsession.”

The defense, meanwhile, played on Harper’s seven marriages, the fact that he had held 15 jobs in the last three years and his wife’s testimony that he had planned a frame-up with Holloway’s former husband, Tony Harper.

“Terry Harper is unbelievable. He’s a liar,” defense lawyer Stan Schneider said in his closing arguments. “Without Terry Harper, Wanda Holloway is innocent. They can’t substantiate Terry Harper.”

Marla Harper, Terry’s wife, said her husband was trying to use the hit scheme as a way of returning to the good graces of the family, and that he had repeatedly said he was going to “burn that bitch.”

When Holloway took the stand last Friday, she said she at first thought Terry Harper’s suggestion of having Verna Heath killed was nothing more than a joke, but she became frightened when the joke started to become a reality. Yet she also said she never told anyone, not even her present husband, what was happening.