The stripper and the steelworker

Life at Mechele Hughes's house in Wasilla, Alaska was getting very complicated, and a little crowded.

There was the fiancé, the traveling valve salesman Scott Hilke.

And there was the tall, lanky, commercial fisherman, Kent Leppink, or T.T. as they called him.

Honi Martin: There was something that definitely bothered me.

Keith Morrison, Dateline NBC: Something off.

Honi Martin: Something very off.

Something about Kent that unsettled the female guest, Honi Martin.

Honi Martin: An obsession. An obsessive way that he watched her around the house. And if she would move from room to room, you know, he couldn't take his eyes off of her.

Kent Leppink certainly seemed to need friends.

He'd grown up in Michigan. Loved hunting and fishing.

Like his brothers, he was expected to work in the family grocery stores.  But it simply wasn't for him.

And then his family discovered money was missing. Quite a lot of money. His parents, Ken and Betsy Leppink.

Ken Leppink: He caused some problems in the family business as we moved along. And decided that maybe some other occupation was gonna be a better program for him.

Kent left Michigan and drifted, picked up that nickname, 'T.T.,' and finally found something he truly enjoyed in Alaska.

Brother Craig had never seen him happier.

Craig Leppink: When he gets to Alaska and he's working on the fishing boats, which really is no glamorous job –

Keith Morrison: It's hard work.

Craig Leppink: Yeah. And fish guts up to his chest a lot of the time, sucking them out of the tender boats. He was in love with it.

And then a boat came up for sale. His dad lent him some money, and things began to fall together.

Ken Leppink: What he was doing just - he was just thrilled with it.

Betsy Leppink: He became what Kent really could be.

At the age of 33, Kent Leppink, T.T., was finally an independent man, with the help of some family financing. The fishing tender he ran here was successful. He'd spend weeks, or even months, on the sea off Prince William Sound. But fishing can be a lonely business. So when his family heard he'd found a girl, they were delighted. Of course, he didn't tell them where he found her.

Betsy Leppink: He did not tell us she was a dancer. He let her tell me that. But he was head over heels -- boom.

And so he was in love for the first time. He had never had a girlfriend before.

Betsy Leppink: He had girls who were friends. But my take is I think he had a complex. I think he felt a little inferior to be a boyfriend.

In the summer of 1995, Ken and Betsy, along with their son Ransom and his wife, went to Alaska to see Kent. And the young woman he said he would one day marry, they'd been hearing about it for more than six months by then, his romance with Mechele. 

It was on that trip when Ransom began to worry.

Ransom Leppink: He picked out an engagement ring but that was the ring that was OK for now but that later on he'd be buying a bigger ring because Mechele didn't like the small ring that he had picked out. And that-- immediately a little red light went on.

Ransom Leppink: It wasn't such a tremendous concern or terrible that my brother's dating a stripper. And then he's buying nice things for her. The greater concern was you don't seem to see that same feeling, that same caring coming back the other way.

Betsy Leppink: The feeling was not there with her. It just was not.

But then, there was so much the Leppinks didn't know.

They didn't know Mechele was actually engaged to that salesman Scott Hilke, and that she was to marry Scott in just a few months.

Nor did they know about her new friend, John Carlin, and how on the very night Carlin met Mechele that same summer at the Bush Company, he invited her on a trip to Europe. And she went!

Platonic, supposedly. But still.

Nor did Kent's family quite comprehend the arrangement that followed. 

Mechele needed some house repairs. Carlin invited her to move in with him.

Kent, as usual, followed.

About then, Scott moved back to California, to continue the relationship with Mechele long distance. So it was Kent, Mechele, Carlin. All together now.

John Carlin IV: It's not like there was orgies going on all over the living room. You know, everybody had their own bedroom.

For little John, or Carlin IV, it was, he says, a little like having a special aunt or an older sister move in.

John Carlin IV: I think that Mechele, by nature, just has a very outgoing and friendly personality. And I was kind of sucked up into that the same way everybody else was.

By then, you'd need a scorecard.

Scott and Mechele's marriage didn't happen. They broke up briefly in late 1995 but soon were seeing each other again.

Kent was still in the Carlin house, mooning over Mechele and planning his fishing season -- and his wedding. He'd even been putting together a "to-do" list.

And John Carlin III, in whose house they were living, was in love, and waiting in the wings.

John Carlin IV: I knew that my father was infatuated with Mechele. And I probably knew the same for Kent as well.

Ah, but three men in love with the same woman can get sticky. Somebody is apt to get hurt.

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