Crime

Wanda Webb Holloway may be the ultimate stage mother. Last week a Houston jury found the 37-year-old suburban housewife guilty of concocting a bizarre scheme to assure her daughter Shanna a place on the high school freshman cheerleading squad by killing the mother of her chief rival, Amber Heath. With flawed but cold-blooded logic, Holloway concluded that Amber would be too distraught over her mother's death to compete against Shanna for the coveted position.

When Holloway approached her former brother-in-law, Terry Harper, to find a professional hit man, Harper informed the police and secretly recorded 45 minutes of conversation in which Holloway planned the crime. On the tapes, she is heard instructing Harper to "go for it," as she handed over a pair of diamond earrings as a down payment, two days before her arrest. That evidence prompted the jury, after nearly three hours of deliberation, to sentence Holloway to 15 years in prison and a $10,000 fine for the attempted murder.