KANSAS CITY (AP) — A Missouri jail nurse who allegedly wanted to marry a man convicted of killing a lottery winner has been charged with poisoning her husband and setting their home on fire, according to court records.

Amy Murray, 40, is facing charges including first-degree murder and arson in the Dec. 11 death of her husband, Joshua Murray. Investigators said he was found dead in the master bedroom of the couple’s burned-out home in Iberia, and that his wife later told the prison inmate in a recorded phone call that they could get married because her husband was “out of the picture.”

An autopsy determined her husband was poisoned by a chemical in antifreeze and likely died before the blaze started.

Amy Murray remained jailed Monday on a $750,000 bond. Her attorney didn’t immediately return a phone message Monday seeking comment from The Associated Press.

Murray reported finding the home ablaze when she returned from taking the couple’s 11-year-old son and two dogs to a McDonald’s, a Miller County sheriff’s detective wrote in a probable cause statement released last week. She told investigators she couldn’t get inside the home because the house was filled with smoke.

But investigators said they found a McDonald’s sandwich on the kitchen counter at the house in Iberia, which is about 140 miles southeast of Kansas City.

Murray worked part-time as a nurse at the Jefferson City Correctional Facility, where she had a “romantic relationship” with inmate Eugene Claypool that had been ongoing “for some time,” according to authorities and charging documents. Claypool, who isn’t charged in the case, was sentenced to life in prison for fatally stabbing an elderly man in 2000.

In recorded phone calls at the facility, Murray told Claypool she wanted to divorce her husband. Following the fire, she allegedly told Claypool they could get married because her husband was dead and “out of the picture,” according to court documents. She and Claypool also discussed getting an attorney so Claypool could be released from prison early.

Claypool and another man pleaded guilty to killing 72-year-old Donald Hardwick, who was attacked in his home on Christmas Day in 2000. Hardwick, who couldn’t walk without using a walker, won a $1.7 million Missouri Lottery jackpot in 1998. Investigators said Claypool and his co-defendant targeted Hardwick believing he had $10,000 stashed in his Springfield home.

Investigators said Claypool repeatedly stabbed Hardwick, whose wife later found him dead with a Bible on his chest.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — The alleged ringleader of a foiled plot to massacre Somali Muslims in southwest Kansas is appealing his conviction and prison sentence.

The attorney representing Patrick Stein on Monday filed a notice of appeal to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Stein was among three militia members convicted of plotting in 2016 to blow up a mosque and apartments housing Somalis in Garden City.

A judge last month sentenced Stein to 30 years in prison for conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction and 10 years for conspiracy against civil rights. The sentences will run concurrently.

Stein will return to federal court on Feb. 22 for a change-of-plea hearing and sentencing in a separate indictment alleging possession of child pornography. The material was discovered during searches in the bomb case.

By STEPHEN KORANDA

Republican leaders in the Kansas Senate are forging ahead with plans to plow millions into tax relief that would largely benefit big business. Some Democrats and more moderate Republicans suspect it’s also a strategy to deprive the governor of the money to fund her priorities.

Carving out chunks of the state savings account now could send lawmakers scrambling to fund schools and other services with the cash that’s left when they’re knitting up the budget later this spring.

“When we get to the end of session, then we are stuck,” Democratic Rep. Cindy Holscher said.

Republicans say there’s urgency to tackling tax relief, and that the state can afford it.

The year started with a financial picture rosier than many forecasts in recent memory. After lawmakers in 2017 reversed the tax cuts then Gov. Sam Brownback had pushed for in 2012, Kansas has seen tax collections rebound. A revenue estimatefrom November showed the state would have $900 million in the bank at the end of the current fiscal year.

But, a bad monthly revenue report for January prompted Gov. Laura Kelly to reiterate her feeling that the state needs to be picky about what it spends money on.

“We must make wise, financial prudent choices to ensure the future is bright for our children,” Kelly said in a statement.

The governor said she favors investments in schools, roads, and fixing what she points to as the “damage done” during the Brownback years.

The Senate on Thursday approved a tax relief bill that the state department of revenue estimates would cost more than $400 million over three years. That includes around $190 million this year, cutting into that projected ending balance.

Democrats in the Senate, who all voted against the bill, said the state can’t give up the revenue while staring down a Kansas Supreme Court order to adequately fund schools.

“We can’t afford this unless we do something drastic to our budget,” Democratic Sen. Tom Holland said as a committee worked on the bill before it went to the full chamber. “We have to fund our schools.”

Sen. John Skubal was one of two Republicans who joined the Democrats in voting “no.” He criticized the bill for focusing too much on corporations.

“They have had tax breaks long enough,” Skubal said after the vote. “I think we need more money right now to take care of the core functions of government.”

Republican Senate President Susan Wagle said lawmakers don’t have to choose between tax relief and funding schools.

She calls the money in question a “windfall” — an unexpected boon to the state resulting from changes to the federal tax code.

“If we don’t pass this bill,” Wagle said during committee work on the plan, “Kansas individuals, families and businesses will all have a tax increase this year.

If lawmakers do nothing, the federal tax cuts passed in 2017 could result in some corporations owing more state taxes on foreign income and some individual Kansans would owe more because they would no longer be able to take itemized deductions.

Wagle said concerns about the cost of acting to let Kansas taxpayers keep that money may be overblown because staff aren’t fully confident in their estimate of the fiscal impact.

“It’s a shot in the dark,” she said.

The Senate president and other Republicans argue too that not providing the tax relief could be detrimental to Kansas if it prompts large companies to leave the state.

“Then we’re going to lose a bunch of jobs,” Sen. Julia Lynn said. “That’s my issue, pure and simple.”

Some lawmakers expect Kelly would veto the bill should it pass the House and make it to her desk. The governor has voiced strong opposition.

“I can’t imagine why anybody who was here in 2012 and lived through the Brownback tax cuts and the experiment would even consider voting for that bill,” Kelly told reporters. “It is a redo.”

At the same time Republicans are pursuing  tax relief, they’re also showing little interest in a Kelly’s idea to give the state more spending flexibility.

The governor has proposed refinancing the debt of the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System. Her proposal would stretch out the payoff schedule. That would lower the annual payments and free up money for other priorities, such as education or expanding health coverage through the state’s Medicaid program.

But ultimately it would add billions of dollars to the state’s pension liabilities.

“This whole budget is built on a house of cards,” Republican Senate Majority Leader Jim Denning said of the proposal last month.

Since then, opinions from Republican leaders haven’t improved. The chairman of the House pension committee, Steven Johnson, believes the plan is likely dead in the water for this session.

Democrats agreed to spend $115 million to make up for a missed payment to KPERS. That legislation, passed with a unanimous vote in the Senate, is heading to the House.

The governor said Kansas can afford that payment now, but insists the state has to refinance its pension debt to keep the payoff schedule manageable in the long term.

“It really is a fiscally sound thing to do,” Kelly said.

Stephen Koranda is Statehouse reporter for the Kansas News Service. Follow him on Twitter @kprkoranda.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Budget negotiators will meet Monday to revive talks over border security issues that are central to legislation to prevent key parts of the government from shutting down on Saturday, but an air of pessimism remains after talks broke down over the weekend.

They collapsed over Democratic demands to limit the number of migrants authorities can detain, and the two sides remained separated over how much to spend on President Donald Trump’s promised border wall. A Friday midnight deadline is looming to prevent a second partial government shutdown.

Key negotiators plan to meet on Monday, Democratic and GOP aides say, but for now the mood is not hopeful.

Rising to the fore on Sunday was a related dispute over curbing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, the federal agency that Republicans see as an emblem of tough immigration policies and Democrats accuse of often going too far.

Trump blamed Democrats in the migrant detention dispute, tweeting, “The Democrats do not want us to detain, or send back, criminal aliens! This is a brand new demand. Crazy!”

The fight over ICE detentions goes to the core of each party’s view on immigration. Republicans favor rigid enforcement of immigration laws and have little interest in easing them if Democrats refuse to fund the Mexican border wall. Democrats despise the proposed wall and, in return for border security funds, want to curb what they see as unnecessarily harsh enforcement by ICE.

People involved in the talks say Democrats have proposed limiting the number of immigrants here illegally who are caught inside the U.S. — not at the border — that the agency can detain. Republicans say they don’t want that cap to apply to immigrants caught committing crimes, but Democrats do.

Democrats say they proposed their cap to force ICE to concentrate its internal enforcement efforts on dangerous immigrants, not those who lack legal authority to be in the country but are productive and otherwise pose no threat. Democrats have proposed reducing the current number of beds ICE uses to detain immigrants here illegally from 40,520 to 35,520.

But within that limit, they’ve also proposed limiting to 16,500 the number for immigrants here illegally caught within the U.S., including criminals. Republicans want no caps on the number of immigrants who’ve committed crimes who can be held by ICE.

Trump used the dispute to cast Democrats as soft on criminals.

“I don’t think the Dems on the Border Committee are being allowed by their leaders to make a deal. They are offering very little money for the desperately needed Border Wall & now, out of the blue, want a cap on convicted violent felons to be held in detention!” Trump tweeted Sunday.

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, in appearances on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and “Fox News Sunday,” said “you absolutely cannot” eliminate the possibility of another shutdown if a deal is not reached over the wall and other border matters. The White House had asked for $5.7 billion, a figure rejected by the Democratic-controlled House, and the mood among bargainers has soured, according to people familiar with the negotiations not authorized to speak publicly about private talks.

“You cannot take a shutdown off the table, and you cannot take $5.7 (billion) off the table,” Mulvaney told NBC, “but if you end up someplace in the middle, yeah, then what you probably see is the president say, ‘Yeah, OK, and I’ll go find the money someplace else.'”

A congressional deal seemed to stall even after Mulvaney convened a bipartisan group of lawmakers at Camp David, the presidential retreat in northern Maryland. While the two sides appeared close to clinching a deal late last week, significant gaps remain and momentum appears to have slowed. Though congressional Democratic aides asserted that the dispute had caused the talks to break off, it was initially unclear how damaging the rift was. Both sides are eager to resolve the long-running battle and avert a fresh closure of dozens of federal agencies that would begin next weekend if Congress doesn’t act by Friday.

“I think talks are stalled right now,” Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., said on “Fox News Sunday.” ”I’m not confident we’re going to get there.”

Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., who appeared on the same program, agreed: “We are not to the point where we can announce a deal.”

But Mulvaney did signal that the White House would prefer not to have a repeat of the last shutdown, which stretched more than a month, left more than 800,000 government workers without paychecks, forced a postponement of the State of the Union address and sent Trump’s poll numbers tumbling. As support in his own party began to splinter, Trump surrendered after the shutdown hit 35 days without getting money for the wall.

The president’s supporters have suggested that Trump could use executive powers to divert money from the federal budget for wall construction, though it was unclear if he would face challenges in Congress or the courts. One provision of the law lets the Defense Department provide support for counterdrug activities.

But declaring a national emergency remained an option, Mulvaney said, even though many in the administration have cooled on the prospect. A number of powerful Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have also warned against the move, believing it usurps power from Congress and could set a precedent for a future Democratic president to declare an emergency for a liberal political cause.

As most budget disputes go, differences over hundreds of millions of dollars are usually imperceptible and easily solved. But this battle more than most is driven by political symbolism — whether Trump will be able to claim he delivered on his long-running pledge to “build the wall” or newly empowered congressional Democrats’ ability to thwart him.

Predictably each side blamed the other for the stall in negotiations.

“We were, you know, progressing well,” Rep. Tom Graves, R-Ga., said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” ”I thought we were tracking pretty good over the last week. And it just seems over the last 24 hours or so the goalposts have been moving from the Democrats.”

House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth, D-Ky., countered by saying on the same show, “The numbers are all over the place.”

“I think the big problem here is this has become pretty much an ego negotiation,” Yarmuth added. “And this really isn’t over substance.”

___

SALINE COUNTY— One person died in an accident just before 12:30p.m. Sunday in Saline County.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol reported a 2002 Kia Sportage driven by Erica E. Jones, 36, Sweet Springs, was northbound on MO 127 just north of 245 Road.

The vehicle began sliding on the slush covered road. It traveled off the left side of the road, struck a sign post, became airborne and overturned.

A passenger in the vehicle Sherri L. Jones, 55, Sweet Springs, was pronounced dead at the scene. Sweet Springs Ambulance transported Erica Jones to Fitzgibbon Hospital. They were not wearing seat belts, according to the MSHP.

JACKSON COUNTY —Law enforcement authorities are investigating a Kansas man on child sex allegations.

The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office started the investigation after allegations were reported to the Sheriff’s Office in November of 2018. The Sheriff’s Office served search warrants on Hackathorn’s Facebook and Snapchat accounts, according to Sheriff Tim Morse.

On Thursday, the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office arrested Phillip James Hackathorn, 34, of Holton  on the Jackson County District Court warrant for indecent solicitation of a child and electronic solicitation of a child.

Bond on Hackathorn was set at $50,000. Hackathorn posted bond and was released, according to the sheriff.  Hackathorn is expected to make a court appearance later this month.