Nancy Mancuso Gelber could face up to life in prison after she was arrested Friday and charged with attempting to hire a hit man to kill her estranged husband. Unfortunately for the 53-year-old Bryan woman, the man she thought would deep-six her husband was an undercover Brazos County Sheriff's deputy.
According to a police report summarized in the Bryan-College Station Eagle, Gelber met the undercover in downtown Bryan Wednesday night near the LaSalle Hotel.
After "verifying" that the man was not a cop ('cause, you know, if you ask 'em, they totally have to tell), Gelber allegedly offered her wedding ring as a down payment on the job, with a $60,000 payoff coming after the demise of 54-year-old Joseph Richard Gelber. She is also said to have reportedly told the cop that the couple was having financial problems, and that Gelber had women on the side.
She elaborated extensively on the dawg theme on her Facebook page.
"I'm a good cook, I take care of my man, and I have a thing for pudgy men! I DON'T CHEAT OR DO CHEATERS!!! I am straight forward, to the point, polite, and Texan-bred friendly!" she writes there, and goes on to add this:
I'm going thru a divorce from a man I thought was my Santa Claus, (looked like him, too), smelt like Elmer Fudd, and who now thinks he is Tiger Woods! I have Essential Tremors, (an inherited shaking disease) that I am/was due to have brain surgery, but now I am going to court to force my soon-to-be ex-husband to put me back on his insurance. He dropped me from it 2 months before I was due to have the Deep Brain Stimulation surgery, because he needed the extra money to spend on all his other women.
She also claims that she is "one of the nicest people I've ever met & looking for a real man!"
She also uses her Facebook to tout Temporary Amnesia, her "police/crime/suspense novel," and apparently believes that writing books like that qualified her as an expert on police investigative techniques.
According to the Eagle's report, she told the undercover cop that she wanted to know as little about the killing as possible and wanted her husband's death to look like an accident. She also said she didn't want him to suffer. She is also alleged to have told the cop that she would keep mum if questioned by police -- and she said she knew she would be, as she was well aware that spouses are often the first ones grilled when their husbands or wives meet violent ends.
When the cop asked for pics of her hubby, she left and returned ten minutes later with two. She also is alleged to have told the cop that she once believed that she was going to heaven, but knew then that she was headed to hell.
According to her Facebook page, Nancy Mancuso Gelber is a Houston native and graduate of Klein Oak High School and the University of Houston. She claims to have worked for several years in the late 1970s and early 1980s for Fulbright & Jaworski and to have known Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski and legendary defense attorney Percy Foreman, whose services would very much come in handy for her right about now.
According to Brazos County records, Nancy Mancuso Gelber has made her $75,000 bond. She is charged with first-degree felony solicitation to commit capital murder. If convicted, she will likely have a long time to consider the verisimilitude of The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption, two movies she cites as faves on Facebook.