COVINGTON — A 40-year-old Gallatin County woman who tried to hire a hit man to kill her rich, older husband will spend at least four to five years behind bars.

        U.S. District Judge Jennifer D. Coffman on Thursday sentenced Elizabeth “Liz” Furnish to seven years and three months in prison. After her incarceration, Ms. Furnish must report to a U.S. probation officer for three years.

Ms. Furnish

        “With (time off for good behavior) and the time she's served, she'll probably do between four and five years,” said Ms. Furnish's lawyer, David F. Fessler of Covington.

        Ms. Furnish's 81-year-old husband, Charles “Shot” Furnish, was not present at the sentencing.

        According to court documents, Ms. Furnish agreed in January to pay an undercover agent $4,500 to kill her husband of five months. Authorities said she told acquaintances the retired union carpenter was worth more than $1 million.

        In a plea bargain reached in August, prosecutors dropped a second count of murder for hire in exchange for Ms. Furnish's guilty plea on the initial count. The mother of four faced a maximum of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

        Before her sentence was handed down, a sobbing Ms. Furnish attempted to read a statement in which she apologized for her crime and said she had taken steps to change her life.

        Mr. Fessler said his client's dependency on drugs and alcohol impaired her judgment.

        Ms. Furnish became addicted to prescription drugs — including OxyContin, a strong prescription synthetic morphine that has been widely abused — after a fall in 1995, her attorney said.

        “When I first started representing her, she was so hooked on drugs that when I read the transcript of what she'd said to the undercover hit man, she just broke down,” Mr. Fessler said. “That's not the person she is. Since 1995, her life's spiraled downward with the drugs.”

        While incarcerated at the Kenton County Detention Center, Ms. Furnish has taken classes to earn her GED and is attending Alcoholics Anonymous. Ms. Furnish plans to undergo an intensive drug-treatment program in prison, her attorney said.

        The mother of four will serve her sentence in a facility in her native Massachusetts, where relatives are caring for two of her three under-age children.

        She also has a 20-year-old and a 3-month-old baby boy — now with Catholic Social Services — who was born while she was in custody, her lawyer said.

        After her arrest, Ms. Furnish told an informant “she was six weeks pregnant with the baby of another individual, (and) that once Mr. Furnish found out the baby was not his, she would be cut out of the will.”

        “All I can tell you is that the baby is not Mr. Furnish's,” Mr. Fessler said.

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