| This story surrounded the death of Terry Lee Finger. Finger was lured outside by a teenage girl who had been tricked by Michael Carl Kettman to lure Terry Finger outside so that he could kill him. At the time Michael Carl Kettman, from Cobb County, was 18 years old. At the time of the murder he told police that he was romantically involved with Mrs. Gambrel, then 36, but he denied that she was involved in the slaying. Kettmann was convicted of murdering Terry Lee Finger and received a life sentence, while the widow collected $110,000 in insurance payments and went about her life. She moved, remarried and apparently thought that the investigation had been closed. But then the Kennesaw beautician's one-time teenage lover testified that the woman badgered him into killing her husband. The murder trial of Mrs. Gambrel, 38, commenced in March 1989 and Michael Kettman testified that he lied at his 1986 trial but decided to tell the truth when the woman, who he claims nagged him into the slaying, found another man. Kettman,remained consistent in his allegation that she had encouraged and enticed him to shoot her husband. "I had totally decided to kill him after Jimmie Sue complained," said Kettmann. According to family members, Mr. Finger had admitted that he sexually molested one of his daughters, and he seemed violently obsessed by his own guilt and his wife's affair. (this was not portrayed in the movie) According to Jimmie Sue Finger Gambrel, she did not solicit the killing, but her affair was the cause of it. She claimed that she ended her sexual relationship with the youth a year before the 1986 shooting, but said she felt partly to blame for the slaying. She denied helping Kettman plan the fatal shooting of Mr. Finger, and said she was in bed with her husband when Kettmann and an accomplice came to their home that night. Mrs. Gambrel said she was sexually involved with Kettmann only during a three-month period. Jimmie Sue Finger was sentenced to life in prison and showed no reaction when the verdict of the all-male jury was read in Cobb Superior Court, but her daughters and new husband wept silently and her sister cried out in anguish. "Oh, God!" Michael Carl Kettman was released on parole in 1993 after serving 7 years of a life murder sentence due to his cooperation with police in helping to convict Jimmie Sue Finger. |
