WARREN — A Trumbull County woman convicted in a 1988 murder case involving a love triangle and the beheading of her husband has died in prison, according to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction Office of Victim Services.

Marie Poling, 64, was serving a 24.5-years-to-life sentence for aggravated murder and murder at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville, and was denied parole five times for her crimes in Trumbull County.

The ODRC said Poling died May 20.

Upon learning of Poling’s death, Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins contacted surviving victims in the case. He also expressed gratitude to the police, experts, witnesses, judge, jury, and the many appeals courts and parole boards that upheld Marie Poling’s conviction and sentence.

“Cold-blooded hardly describes her,” Watkins said. “Metaphorically speaking, she had antifreeze running through her veins.”

Watkins credited the investigative work of the Howland Police Department, the Trumbull County Coroner’s Office, the Ohio Attorney General’s BCI office, and members of the Pennsylvania State Police for her arrest.

In January 1988, Poling, then 29 and a mother of three, shot her husband, Richard, a steel mill worker, as he slept on a couch in their Howland home. Prosecutors said she was driven by an affair with Rafael Garcia Jr., a co-worker at a nursing home. After the killing, Poling enlisted Garcia and another woman to dispose of the body. Testimony revealed Garcia rented an ax from a local Rent-a-Center, which they used to decapitate Richard’s body in the basement of Poling’s Niles Road SE home. The torso was dumped off Interstate 79 west of Pittsburgh, while the head was discarded in a plastic bag in a ravine further south.

The case, tried before the late Trumbull County Common Pleas Judge Robert Nader, captivated Trumbull County and the surrounding area and drew renewed attention recently from an Australian television producer.

Alyse Edwards of Beyond Productions, which produces “Deadly Women” for Investigation Discovery, interviewed Watkins and journalists for a segment on Poling that aired in 2021.

Edwards said the show explored the psychological motivations behind women who commit homicide to raise awareness of the broader impact of such crimes.

Poling was sentenced to 24.5 years to life, while Garcia, convicted of aggravated burglary, abuse of a corpse and obstruction of justice, served 13 years of a five-to-25-year sentence and was released in 2001.

Watkins, the lead prosecutor in the 1988 case, consistently opposed Poling’s parole, describing her in a recent letter to the parole board as an “extraordinary woman with deep character flaws” who planned the murder of her “faithful husband” who supported their three children.

Poling’s fifth parole bid was denied in 2022, with her next hearing scheduled for August 2025. She had served about 40 years at the time of her death. The cause of her death was not disclosed.