WATERVILLE (AP) – A District Court judge Wednesday set bail at $1 million in property or $500,000 cash for a Somerset County Jail inmate accused of hatching a murder-for-hire scheme targeted at his pregnant wife.

Victor Frascone, 29, of Fairfield allegedly offered to pay the hitman in prescription drugs for killing the woman, the unborn child and another man, preferably on Halloween night. Authorities said the plot unraveled when the purported killer turned out to be an undercover police detective.

Frascone was arrested at the jail, where he is serving six months for domestic assault on his wife. If found guilty of the new charges, which include solicitation to commit murder, he could face up to 60 years.

Police said Frascone was angry that his wife had obtained a permanent protection-from-abuse order against him and he thought she was seeing another man.

The murder plot was allegedly arranged through telephone calls late last week with Detective Lt. Carl Gottardi II of the Somerset County Sheriff’s Department, who posed as the hit man.

One of the charges against Frascone, solicitation to commit elevated aggravated assault on a pregnant person, is new to Maine, Gottardi said. Its language is similar to that of the so-called “Laci and Conner’s Law,” the federal statute that followed the murder of Laci Peterson in California around Christmas 2002.

The federal law was signed last year by President Bush and is formally known as the Unborn Victim of Violence Act. It stipulates that a fetus that is in utero when death or bodily injury is committed on the mother can be treated as a separate individual and the assault as a separate crime.

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Information from: Morning Sentinel, http://www.onlinesentinel.com/

AP-ES-11-03-05 0215EST

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