Crime writer Nancy Mancuso Gelber was arrested in Texas for attempting to hire a killer to do away with her cheating husband.
The novelist, 53, is being held at Brazos County jail on $75,000 bond, charged with solicitation to commit capital murder.
Sheriff’s investigators were tipped off last week that Mrs. Gelber was looking for a hired gun to kill 54-year-old Joseph Richard Gelber, Jr. An undercover investigator, posing as a hit man, contacted the woman on Dec. 7, and they agreed to meet later that evening. Police were able to gather enough evidence to make an arrest.
The couple were planning a divorce, but still lived together in their home in Bryan, located 80 miles southeast of Waco.
Gelber recently took her marital plight to Facebook, “Thank you all for your support during my horrible surprise of coming home from Houston to find to my husband cheating … I wish the pain would go away and so could I from this hell I’m living in.”
A friend close to the novelist said, “Nancy was not the same person after that. She was totally different and was not the same Nancy at all. She was someone I did not even recognize or know. It was a total transformation, and she just carried on about him. It was all about him.”
Nancy Gelber wrote Temporary Amnesia, a 362-page work of fiction published in August 2010. The plot details a jail break by a man who uses a team of prostitutes to pull off several brazen bank robberies.
Photo Credit: Brazos County Booking Photo