Ex-Mogul Sentenced For Murdering Wife To Score Life Insurance Proceeds In Last Ditch Effort To Save Mansion From Foreclosure, Real Estate Empire From Financial Collapse

In San Mateo, California, The Daily Journal reports:

• The Woodside man convicted of shooting his wife twice in the head and staging the bloody bedroom of their foreclosed mansion to look like a suicide to activate more than $30 million in life insurance policies that eradicated a mountain of debt was sentenced [] to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
  
  But before Pooroushasb “Peter” Parineh, 67, received the sentence, he read a lengthy handwritten letter to his three grown children, by turns telling them the monetary value of family items, describing his wife’s facelift and blaming them for what he said was his wife’s suicide.

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• Jurors deliberated nearly full four days in May before convicting Parineh of first-degree murder with the special allegation he did so for financial gain. Prosecutors opted against seeking the death penalty but the sentence imposed Friday means Parineh will die behind bars.

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• Parineh, who testified in his own defense, steadfastly maintained his innocence in his wife Parima Parineh’s April 13, 2010 shooting. Defense attorney Dek Ketchum told jurors Parima Parineh, 56, killed herself because she was bipolar, depressed and making a last-ditch effort to stave off the collapse of the family’s fortune while her life insurance policies were still valid. Ketchum also introduced evidence that she had overdosed on pills just six weeks before her death.
  
  Prosecutor Jeff Finigan built a case focused on the Parineh family’s financial collapse, from real estate empire to five properties in foreclosure — including the Fox Hill Road mansion where the crime happened — a commercial building that had been taken over for lack of payment and a legal judgment.
  
  The life insurance policies on Parima Parineh wiped out the debt, put an extra $600,000 in his pocket and deposited the rest in his three grown children’s trust from which he immediately tried to borrow, Finigan said.
  
  Finigan also informed jurors about Parineh’s remaining close friendship with a former mistress and questionable behavior after his wife’s death like avoiding the memorial service, staying in a hotel with the former paramour and hounding his children about the money. Jurors also learned that the March 2010 suicide attempt was possibly a pact with her husband in which he didn’t hold up his end of the bargain, Finigan said.

For more, see Life in prison for wife’s murder.