After only four hours of deliberations, a federal court jury on Wednesday determined Ronald Epps killed his fiancee Angela Moss in 2009 in what prosecutors say was an elaborate scheme to collect on her life insurance policy.
It took six years of investigations by Orchard Park and Amherst police, along with ATF to pull together a string of crimes straight out of a detective novel.
Moss, a nurse at an Orchard Park nursing home, was found with a bullet wound to the back of her head on California Road on August 28, 2009. She was killed the previous night. Days later, Epps attempted to collect as the sole beneficiary on her $100,000 life insurance policy.
While Epps was not directly convicted of murder, U.S. Attorney William Hochul says he is a murderer because of all of the other crimes he committed to kill Moss.
"In order to prove the fraud, we had to prove the murder, as well. We will call him a murderer," said Hochul. "The jury would not have convicted him of the fraud unless they found that he was responsible for the death of Angela Moss."
A mix of sentences, some mandatory, likely means the 47-year-old Epps will spend the rest of his life in prison when sentenced in December.
