Daughter testifies of matricide plot

Her father asked her to kill her mother for the insurance money, she says. Defense lawyers say she's lying.

By WILLIAM R. LEVESQUE

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 14, 2001

LARGO -- Andrea Hall said her father painted a bleak picture of their finances after her stepmom left him and moved to Miami in 1999.

She said her dad, Arnold Hall, told her they would be broke. But the 16-year-old said her father had a plan to pull them from the brink of financial ruin. He took her aside, Andrea Hall said, and suggested that she visit her stepmom.

Bring a knife, the daughter recalled him saying, and an extra set of clothes in case she became drenched in blood.

"He wanted me basically to kill her. His exact words," Andrea Hall testified.

Arnold Hall's trial on a charge that he conspired to kill his ex-wife, Indira Quintero, by soliciting the help of his daughter and her friends, opened on Tuesday in Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Court and is expected to conclude today.

Hall, 40, a former postal employee and Gulf War veteran from Palm Harbor, faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted.

Pinellas prosecutors Todd Miller and Frank Piazza told jurors that the elder Hall wanted to collect on a $25,000 life insurance policy he had on his wife. But he knew police would be focus on him if he killed her himself.

"He needed someone else to do the dirty work," Miller said.

Andrea Hall, who had been convicted of burglary and is now jailed on a probation violation, told jurors that her father told her to bring gasoline, too, to burn her blood-soaked clothes.

Hall, now 18, testified that she didn't intend to do the dirty deed, but played along. She wasn't sure her father really meant it.

Quintero and Arnold Hall met while Hall was stationed with the military in Panama, where she was a citizen. They married in 1990.

But Quintero, now a U.S. citizen, said the marriage soured and she filed for divorce in early 1999, draining $2,400 from a joint bank account and taking several hundred dollars out of her joint account with Andrea.

Arnold Hall was hospitalized with depression after the separation and was served with divorce papers while at a VA hospital, police said.

Police said they uncovered the plot after receiving an anonymous tip in March 1999.

Defense attorney Maura Kiefer said Andrea Hall is making up stories about her father to get attention.

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