No parole for Jennifer Reali, board will reconsider in 5 years - The Denver Post

No parole for Jennifer Reali, board will reconsider in 5 years - The Denver Post

The Colorado Parole Board today declined to parole a woman once called the "fatal attraction" killer.

A tearful Jennifer Reali told parole board members she is no longer the same person her boyfriend Brian Hood manipulated into killing his wife.

"He kept discussing that he wanted his wife dead," Reali told parole board members Wednesday morning. "He convinced me I was the one who should kill his wife...So on Sept. 12 (1990) I went to the place he said she would be and I killed her."

Two members of the parole board, Michael Anderson and Edward Thomas, took Reali's appeal for parole under advisement after questioning her for about an hour and hearing statements from her family and friends and listening as a letter was read from David Moore, the brother of her victim, Dianne Hood.

Ultimately they decided not to parole Reali, said Dr. Anthony P. Young, chairman of the parole board. He said the decision was based in part on the wishes of Dianne Hood's family.

Her next chance at a hearing is in five years.

Today's hearing was made possible when former Gov. Bill Ritter commuted Reali's sentence in the final days of his administration. In January, Ritter moved Reali's parole date from 2030 to this summer.

In 1990, Reali, at the behest of Brian Hood, shot his wife, Dianne, as she walked out of a meeting of a Colorado Springs support group for lupus sufferers.

Reali admitted to parole board members that she began an intimate relationship with Brian Hood, who sympathized with her about her marital problems. He told her he wanted his wife dead and she was the one to do it. He used Biblical scriptures to persuade her, she said. He got angry when she tried to back out.

El Paso County assistant district attorney Dan Zuck urged the board to defer Reali's parole, saying that in the 30 years he has been a prosecutor few cases have generated as much outrage as Dianne Hood's murder.

"She bought the gun herself. She bought the ammo... She lied in wait," Zuck said.