CAMDEN — By TAMMY FRAZIER
Managing editor
A document from the United States District Court’s Western Division of Arkansas on Wednesday shows that John Wayne Kinley Jr. and Marion Diane Kinley - co-defendants in the fraudulent-will case involving the late Matthew Seth Jacobs - have requested a change-of-plea hearing.
The Kinleys were scheduled for a jury trial later this month.
The jury trial has been canceled, and a plea hearing is set for 10 a.m. on Monday, April 30, in federal court in El Dorado, the Western District’s website states.
Court documents show that Matthew Seth Jacobs, who was a survivor of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010, died in a car accident on Jan. 19, 2015.
He left an estate worth around $1.7 million from lawsuit settlements relating to the Deepwater Horizon incident.
A second superseding indictment stated that co-defendant Donna Christina Herring drafted a fraudulent last will and testament after Jacobs’ death that named her daughter/co-defendant Jordan Alexandra Peterson as the executor and majority beneficiary of Jacobs’ estate.
The ‘will’ left Jacobs’ son $50,000 for his education, and the remaining assets to Herring’s daughter.
It has been reported that Peterson and Jacobs had dated, but that Jacobs was involved with someone else at the time of his death.
Jacobs’ family contested the will and pursued the suggestion that Herring had created a fake will, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation was contacted.
The indictment states that the Kinleys participated in Herring’s scheme to defraud the estate when they signed the forged will as witnesses at the direction of Herring, who is Marion Kinley’s sister.
In January of this year, Herring pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud, while her Peterson, pleaded guilty to willfully providing “material fiction” to FBI agents in regard to the whereabouts of Jacobs’ cell phone.
In late March of this year, Marion Kinley requested that she be given a separate trial from her husband.
And earlier this month, attorneys for the couple asked for the exclusion of statements regarding Jacobs’ intent for the divestment of his estate and the exclusion of any conversations Jacobs had with his son because these issues were considered to be “irrelevant to this trial and, instead, are likely to induce jury nullification.”
However, no ruling was made about these motions due to the Kinley’s new request for a change-of-plea hearing.