The horrific murder of a woman in front of her two-year-old quadruplets that was instigated by her millionaire ex-husband shocked the nation back in 1997.
Sheila Bellush was 35 when a hitman hired by Allen Blackthorne broke into her home, shot her in the face and cut her throat before her teenage daughter came back from school to the bloodied scene.
Sheila's daughter from her first marriage, Stevie, then 13, called 911 in tears as she discovered her mother's body.
The gruesome murder has been portrayed in numerous books, series and true crime documentaries.
Today, Sheila and her six children's ordeal has resurfaced as CNBC's true-crime series "Blood & Money" featured the murder in episode 2, "The Millionaire's Defense," which aired last week.
Born Sheila Leigh Walsh on October 19, 1962, in Topeka, Kansas, the tragic woman married Allen Blackthorne in 1982.
Together they had two daughters, Stevie and Daryl, but their marriage broke down in a non-amicable divorce in 1987, with each accusing the other of abusing their children.
Sheila won custody of their two children and then went on to marry Jamie Bellush in 1993, with whom she had quadruplets two years later.
But Blackthorne was stalking Sheila since they split up.
He tracked her down after she and Jamie moved to Sarasota, Florida, using a private investigator and plotted to hire a man to beat her up.
Blackthorne hired a hitman named Jose Luis Del Toro to do the attack for $14,000, and on November 7, 1997, Del Toro travelled to Sarasota to assault Sheila.
Del Toro broke into Sheila's home and shot her in the face with a .45 calibre gun and slit her throat in full view of the quadruplets.
Sheila's body was found a few hours later by Stevie when she returned from school.
"My mom is dead," she cried to the 911 dispatcher. "There's blood all over the phone, and there's a cut on her neck."
"I found my mom laying on the floor in the doorway of the kitchen," she told prosecutors. "She was covered in blood. I could see her throat was slit. There was blood everywhere."
She bent down. "Mom? Mom?" she asked. "I thought she was playing a trick on me," Stevie Bellush said.
The girl had also testified at the time that her father, Blackthorne, had told her he hated her mother and wanted her dead.
"There was an incident with Allen when he beat me up pretty badly," Stevie told jurors. "I had bruises on my back, on my arm, on my face."
Del Toro, who fled to Mexico after committing the murder, was extradited to the US in July 1999.
He pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and armed burglary charges in 2000 and received two consecutive life sentences.
Blackthorne was convicted of federal charges of interstate conspiracy to commit murder and interstate domestic violence and received two concurrent life sentences without the possibility of parole.
Two more men who helped him murder his ex-wife were brought to justice. Samuel Gonzalez pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder in June 1998 and was sentenced to 19 years in prison.
And Daniel Alex Rocha was convicted of first-degree murder in January 1999 and received a life sentence.
Blackthorne was nearly killed during an attack by a prison gang in 2001 and was eventually transferred to a Florida facility.
He died on November 18, 2014, at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
