The Death Deal

Jeffrey Locker was a motivational speaker and author from North Woodmere on Long Island, married with three children. By 2009 his finances had collapsed. He was deep in debt and facing litigation tied to Lou Pearlman’s Ponzi scheme, and he held life insurance policies worth about eighteen million dollars. Rather than file for bankruptcy, he set out to arrange his own death and stage it as a street crime.

For weeks he approached strangers in Harlem with the offer. On July 16, 2009, he was found in his Dodge station wagon on a corner in East Harlem, stabbed seven times, his wrists bound with telephone wire. His ATM card had been used after he died. Police arrested Kenneth Minor, who told them Locker had recruited him, that he had held the knife steady while Locker lunged onto it, and that Locker had told him to take the card so the scene would read as a robbery.

A jury rejected the assisted-suicide account and convicted Minor of second-degree murder in 2011; he was sentenced to 20 years to life. On October 4, 2013, the Appellate Division overturned the conviction, holding that the trial judge’s active-versus-passive test had no basis in New York law. Facing a retrial, Minor pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in September 2014 and was resentenced that October to 12 years. He was granted parole in 2019.