LOS ANGELES : Woman Gets Life Term in Plot That Killed Husband

A former Los Angeles cleaning woman was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison without parole for the murder plot that killed her husband in 1991--after she tried for three years to have him murdered for insurance money.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge J. D. Smith imposed the maximum prison term on Lucia Colindres Bravo. He called the 58-year-old defendant deceptively charming.

“In 1988, you had your husband shot point-blank in the face,” Smith said at her trial. “He lived in fear from that point on. Then you had him shot on a lonely road . . . without a prayer.”

The Guatemala native was convicted earlier this month of murdering Miguel Bravo on June 7, 1991, to collect $700,000 in life insurance policies.

She also was found guilty of more than a dozen other felonies, including the attempted murder of her husband of 11 years.

The 38-year-old glass factory worker was fatally shot in the head as he sat in his van, having pulled off to the side of an abandoned Kern County road for a rest.

In the three years before that, his jaw was shattered when an unknown gunman shot him in the face, and he suffered mutilation of his buttocks and genitals when a pipe bomb exploded in his car.

Bravo has maintained her innocence since her arrest in Arizona in 1993.