https://hotair.com/john-s-2/20...an-he-rented-n406169

bullet summary:

This story is from Louisiana

Lawrence Handley and his wife Schanda were married in 2006

They ran the Handley Family Foundation, which focused on fundraising for poor children, cancer patients and young professionals hoping to become more involved in the community

Handley founded the Townsend Recovery treatment centers. The drug treatment centers located across the South were doing so well that they sold in 2015 in a deal worth more than $21 million.

not long after their windfall, the marriage fell apart

Lawrence Handley filed for a restraining order claiming his wife had attacked him and that she’d hired someone to kill him

For her part, his wife claimed Lawrence had put spyware on her computer and was sending threatening messages to her.

that’s when Lawrence Handley hired two men to kidnap his wife.

Handley offered the men, Arsenio Haynes and Sylvester Bracey, gold bars if they would grab her from her home and bring her to a family camp.

The men agreed and on Aug. 6, 2017 they showed up at Schanda Handley’s home dressed in blue jumpsuits and carrying a carpet steamer. The men asked if they could come inside to demonstrate the device. Schanda said no at which point the two men forced their way inside with guns

Haynes and Bracey handcuffed Schanda’s 14-year-old daughter and a neighbor who also happened to be in the house at the time. They placed a hood over Schanda’s head and put her in the back of a van, leaving the other two women behind in the house

As the men were threatening, torturing and abusing the woman at the start of the hour-long drive toward Baton Rouge, their plan hit a snag when an overturned piece of equipment backed up traffic, prosecutors say.

The pair’s decision to drive on the shoulder of the road got the attention of police. When the van hit a dead-end road and got caught in a swampy area, the men ditched the van, and Schanda Handley, to try to escape police

The kidnappers thought they could escape by jumping into a canal to swim for it. Nearly a day later, both their bodies were found in the water where they had drowned

When authorities investigated the crime, they quickly discovered that Lawrence Handley had rented the van they used and had also purchased the handcuffs.

Schanda Handley was of course terrorized by the whole ordeal. She points out that the police officer who noticed the van she was in almost let it go. If not for the random traffic jam police would likely have never noticed it. She doesn’t know what Lawrence planned to do to her once she was taken to the camp but during their split he had sent her hundreds of threatening messages. She had reason to fear the worst.

Mr. Handley’s lawyer, Kevin Stockstill, said in an interview that his client had been using methamphetamine and cocaine for days when he hatched the plan to have his wife kidnapped. He said that Mr. Handley had planned to “come in as a hero” and rescue Ms. Handley in an effort to “win her back.”

“It was certainly not logical thinking, but when you’re doing a lot of meth and cocaine, I guess it seemed rational to him,” Mr. Stockstill said.

Because Lawrence pleaded guilty he was spared the possibility of a life without parole sentence, one he almost certainly would have received because of the overwhelming evidence against him. In addition to the van and the handcuffs, there was video of him hiring the kidnappers. Now he’ll likely get a sentence of several decades behind bars.

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Last week Lawrence Handley pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree kidnapping and one count of attempted second-degree kidnapping. Handley, 53, faces between 15 to 35 years in prison

Sometimes people apparently have it made, and then they do really stupid things

Some story. Reading it, I might have thought I were reading the script for a Coen brothers' movie.

As Rick James said, cocaine is a hell of a drug.