Man gets 100-year term in murder of teacher in oil boom town

Michael Keith Spell, 25, sits in state District Court in Sidney, Mont., Friday, April 17, 2015. He awaits sentencing for the 2012 murder of a 43-year-old local teacher in the booming Bakken oil patch of Montana and North Dakota. Spell, who is mentally disabled, pleaded guilty to killing teacher Sherry Arnold when he attempted to abduct her as she was jogging. (AP Photo/Matthew Brown)SIDNEY, Mont. (AP) — A man was sentenced to 100 years in prison Friday in a Montana teacher's murder — a case that local officials say robbed the victim's rural hometown of its innocence amid an oil boom that's swept across the Northern Plains.

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Former U.S. Marine charged in 2011 murder of companion in Panama

By Marty Graham SAN DIEGO (Reuters) – A former U.S. Marine was charged on Friday with murdering a woman who went missing in 2011 after traveling with him to Panama and whose dismembered remains were found in the remote jungle two years later. Brian Brimager, 37, is accused in a federal grand jury indictment of killing and dismembering 42-year-old Yvonne Baldelli and then engaging in an elaborate cover-up of the crime that included sending emails from the dead woman’s account to her friends and family members. Family members of the slain woman said after the hearing that they were grateful to prosecutors for “finding a way to charge” Brimager with the murder. “He put a lot of effort and energy into getting away with this,” Baldelli’s sister, Michelle Faust, told Reuters in an interview.

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