CIRCLEVILLE – A former fashion model convicted of trying to hire a hit man to kill her husband’s ex-wife has been sentenced to seven years in prison.
READ MORE: In The Columbus Dispatch
Tara Lambert rolled her eyes and impatiently drummed her fingers on the table. She shrugged her shoulders and shook her head, “no, no, no” as prosecutors said she deserved to be in prison. She interrupted the judge as he spoke.
And when the husband of the woman she had hired a hit man to kill stood up and told a judge of how dramatically his family’s lives have changed, Lambert turned to her attorney and said, quite clearly, “That’s bulls—.”
So it should have come as no surprise that Pickaway County Common Pleas Judge Randall Knece let his frustration show Wednesday as he pegged Lambert as a lifelong manipulator and con woman, and then sentenced her to serve seven years in prison on a first-degree felony charge of conspiracy to commit aggravated murder.
“You’re out of control. You’ve been out of control since the eighth grade,” Knece told Lambert, referring to her own trial testimony that she had lived with her first boyfriend at that age.
Knece said that even Lambert’s own therapist noted in a report that she was exaggerating in an attempt to scam the doctor during a personality test.
“This is probably the first time in your life that you’ve come before someone who said, ‘No, you’re not going to do that,’” Knece said. “And, well, the old adage ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ comes home to roost.”
Following a two-day trial in January, a jury deliberated just 45 minutes before convicting Lambert, a 33-year-old former model, of hiring someone to kill Kellie Cooke, the mother of her two teenage stepdaughters. Lambert had paid a man who turned out to be an undercover Franklin County deputy sheriff a $125 down payment to do the job.
She also gave him a photo of Cooke with typed information on the back that included Cooke’s address, vehicle descriptions and directions on how to track her movements.
Lambert’s attorney said she was mentally fragile and argued that the undercover officer baited her into the murder agreement.
Kellie Cooke and her husband, Shawn, raise the two teenage girls, as well as have two young children of their own. (Tara’s husband, Brandon, is the teenage girls’ father, and the Lamberts had been arguing over their visitation schedules for years, prompting long court battles.)
At the sentencing, Shawn Cooke told Knece that the kids used to fear an imaginary bogey man; now they fear a real one.
“This demon wanted to take innocent children’s mommy away from them, punishing children who had never done anything wrong to this horrible person,” he said, crying. “Their loss of innocence can never be restored. Tara Lambert is cold-blooded. She is evil.”
Lambert, who a psychologist testified was abandoned by her parents as a child and has a long history of eating disorders, body-image issues and alcohol and prescription-drug abuse, told the judge that she wishes she had gotten help for her problems earlier.
“I am not the monster portrayed in this trial,” she said. “I never meant this situation to get so out of control but it did.”