Palm Beach socialite shot ex-husband, son, 20 years apart

Jose Lambiet is a gossip columnist in South Florida. His online column can be seen at gossipextra.com. He is a guest blogger this week for Crimesider on the case of Linda Cooney, who is the subject of Saturday's 48 Hours: Mommy Dearest.

If she was indeed a cold-blooded killer, Linda Cooney hid it well when I met her in a Las Vegas restaurant in 2004 - seven years before her son Kevin was shot.

It took months and dozens of phone calls from Florida for me to convince Cooney to sit down for an interview.

But I sensed she wanted to tell members of Palm Beach society, which pushed her out in 1993 when she was found not guilty of killing one of their own two years earlier, that she and her two children were just fine without them.

What had been in doubt back then at her trial in West Palm Beach was not whether Cooney killed her respected attorney ex-husband Jim on Feb. 7, 1992. It was whether she planned it and carried it out to get rid of him, or whether she was protecting herself from what she claimed was a knife in his hand.

In time, jurors decided she was defending herself from a sometime violent man as one of their two children, Kevin, then 11, testified his father had an object with "a glary shine" in his hand when he came down the hall - before his mother fired a gun.

After the trial ended, Cooney took her two boys, Kevin and Christopher, to Sin City. The boys were the beneficiaries of Jim's million dollar life insurance policy.

"This is a good place to start over," she said between bites of jumbo shrimp.

She was charming and, unlike many of her friends in Palm Beach, wasn't using plastic surgeons to stay fresh. Kevin came, too, and he may have been the most polite and well-mannered young man I'd met.

While Cooney didn't have a paying job, she'd become a Republican Party volunteer. She said she'd recently worked a fund-raiser at crooner Wayne Newton's place and was headed to D.C. for the second inauguration of President George W. Bush.

Cooney claimed she wasn't well off, which is probably why she picked the fanciest place at the Mandalay Bay for our "date" and the most expensive fish on the menu.

She and Kevin, 23 at the time, and Christopher, 21, lived in a two-story, $200,000 home in Summerlin and drove modest cars. The boys, she said, work several jobs to help her make ends meet. And she cashed the Social Security checks that started after her ex's death.

What happened to the $1 million?

Gone by the year 2000, Cooney said, partly because she didn't get a job so that she could raise the boys full-time.

"We bought the house and cars, paid for moving expenses, some mental health expenses for the boys and legal fees."

At home, Cooney said her life revolved around her adult sons, with whom she made a point of not talking about Jim's killing.

"What is there to talk about," she asked. "I shot a guy who was going to kill me. I felt nothing. No sadness. No remorse."

Looking at Linda across the table and Kevin to my right, I couldn't help but feel that Kevin seemed to have an unnatural devotion for his mom. She made it clear neither of the boys had a girlfriend.

Kevin said he and Christopher spent quite a bit of time with their gun collection, which included the .357 Magnum that their mom used on their dad.

"What happened with my mom gave me a lot of respect for guns," Kevin said. "They saved our lives."

Almost 10 years after that interview, the only one that Linda Cooney said she ever did with a reporter, she was sentenced to 13 to 40 years in prison for shooting and partially paralyzing Kevin.

She used the same .357 Magnum.

See a preview of Saturday's 48 Hours: Mommy Dearest