Woman pleads not guilty in husband’s death

NEW BRITAIN, Conn. – A St. Leonard, New Brunswick, woman extradited to Connecticut in July entered a plea of not guilty Monday to charges of being an accessory to murder.

Nicole Pelletier, 40, entered the plea in New Britain Superior Court after Judge Bernard Gaffney found enough evidence to hold her for trial on the charge of accessory to murder in the 1989 beating death of her husband, Olidor Pelletier, according to Mark Dupuis, communications officer with the Chief State Attorney’s Office, on Wednesday.

Chief State’s Attorney John M. Bailey is prosecuting the case for the state of Connecticut

Nicole Pelletier faces 25 years in jail if convicted of the charge. She is being held in jail in lieu of $500,000 bail.

Twelve years ago, Olidor Pelletier, 31, was beaten with a baseball bat in the Pelletier home in Plymouth, Conn. Jose Rubert, an alleged boyfriend of Nicole Pelletier, pleaded guilty to murder in 1990 and was sentenced to 30 years in jail. He implicated Pelletier in her husband’s death and a warrant was issued for her arrest in July 1996.

During the preliminary hearing, “Rubert testified that on the day of the murder, Nicole Pelletier drove him to the Pelletier home and provided him with a house key,” Dupuis said. “After entering the house, Rubert retrieved a baseball bat, which Nicole Pelletier had left for him under a sofa, and ambushed Olidor Pelletier when he returned home after driving the children to school,” Rubert testified, according to the communications officer.

Claud Chong, an attorney with the Public Defender’s Office in New Britain, Conn., representing Nicole Pelletier, did not return telephone inquiries Wednesday.

Within a month after the death of her husband in November 1989, Nicole Pelletier moved from Connecticut back to her hometown of St. Leonard.

The Pelletiers had been married about 10 years, police said. Olidor Pelletier, a machine operator, was out of work on disability at the time of his death. He originally was from the St. Leonard area.

Nicole Pelletier had been fighting extradition from Canada since 1996. She was held in jail by Canadian authorities at St. John, New Brunswick, from July 13, and turned over to the Plymouth city police on July 20. She was arraigned July 23 in Bristol, Conn., Superior Court.

St. Leonard is a small border community of 3,000 people. Pelletier had been living with her two sons at 9 Soucy St. in St. Leonard, within half a mile of the U.S. border crossing at Van Buren, for the past 12 years.