Woman Pleads Guilty in Cheese Hit Man Plot

Woman Pleads Guilty in Cheese Hit Man Plot

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) - A woman pleaded guilty Monday to attempted murder charges for trying to hire a hit man to rob and kill four men for what she thought was cocaine, but turned out to be cheese.

Jessice Sandy Booth, 18, hatched the plot after she visited the home of the men, and mistook queso fresco - a white, crumbly cheese common in Mexican cuisine.

But the hit man she hired turned out to be an undercover police officer.

"They asked her numerous times 'Do you really want to go through with this?'" prosecutor Paul Hagerman said. "They gave her numerous chances to back out, but she said she was serious. She said she needed the money for modeling school."

Booth pleaded guilty Monday to four counts of attempted first-degree murder and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. She would be eligible for parole after serving 20 percent of her sentence, but it generally isn't granted on first request for violent crimes.

Booth planned to take part in the murders, and went with a police officer to buy a handgun. She told investigators that she planned to make sure all possible witnesses were killed.

"Then they would have been murdered, too," Booth said about children or other bystanders in her statement to investigators. "If they would have been babies they would not have been able to talk and then they would not have been murdered."