I first caught up with Dara Panasy a little over three years ago, not long after her fiancé, a wily and much maligned North Stonington businessman, was found shot to death in Thailand, where he made frequent visits for an importing business.

When I met her, Panasy was trying to collect rents at a couple of cottages on Route 2 in North Stonington owned by her recently departed fiancé, Jon LaChappelle.

She didn't seem especially grief stricken at the time and was not the least bit sympathetic to the tenants' excuses for being late on the rent.

She also wasn't very pleasant when I asked her whether she would inherit LaChappelle's estate.

"You're the reporter, you figure it out," she shot back, her quite beautiful face turning to a dark snarl.

It wasn't too much longer after that, just a few months, before Thai authorities concluded that Panasy had paid 300,000 bhat, or about $8,200, to have the 43-year-old LaChappelle killed, according to news reports in Thailand at the time.

Panasy is still a free woman here in the United States, though, and is serving as executor of LaChappelle's estate in North Stonington Probate Court. She's the sole heir.

She has moved out of the house on Billings Lake Road that she once shared with LaChappelle and now lists a North Easton, Mass., address in probate records.

Panasy, these three years later, might have thought her fiance's shooting death was long in the past, except for continuing efforts by LaChappelle's family to bring the case to a conclusion.

Indeed, U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, at the behest of the Rhode Island family, has written to both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder, asking that they help pursue the case against Panasy.

"It is my understanding that the Thai authorities have issued a warrant for her arrest, but have not yet pursued a formal request to extradite her from the United States for prosecution in Thailand," Reed wrote to Clinton and Holder.

"I respectfully request that you do all you can within your authority to urge the Thai government to properly complete this process."

It can't be too comforting for Panasy to know that a United States senator has just sicced the justice and state departments on her.

The murder victim for whom Sen. Reed now seeks justice was hardly a nice guy.

LaChappelle had a substantial criminal history, starting with the rape of his 16-year-old girlfriend when he was 19 and growing up in Rhode Island. When he was 24 he was charged in a fatal car accident in which police said he was drag racing his Corvette on Interstate 95 at speeds up to 100 mph.

His last arrest was just eight months before he was killed, when he was accused of stealing construction material from the North Stonington Highway Department.

LaChappelle was notorious for his flagrant disregard of town planning and zoning rules and bitter feuds with his neighbors.

One of them told me LaChappelle had threatened his life, within 10 minutes of their first meeting.

I thought that LaChappelle's family, in addition to justice, might also be seeking control of his estate, which, given the handful of properties he owned around North Stonington, might be substantial.

But North Stonington Probate Judge Teresa A. Pensis told me this week, after I reviewed the public file, that the estate has so many creditors there probably won't be enough to satisfy all their claims.

Most of the properties were heavily mortgaged and unpaid property taxes have been accruing. Two have been lost in foreclosure.

Other creditors include a woman who injured herself in a fall on one of the properties and is seeking a $300,000 settlement. Another is a former investor who put $50,000 in a business partnership with LaChappelle, money that appears to be long gone.

Even the family of an old contracting customer of LaChappelle's, also now deceased, is seeking $10,000 they claim he bilked from their mother.

Of course the declining real estate market hasn't been kind over the last few years to the value of the assets in LaChappelle's estate.

It's possible Panasy got other money from LaChappelle after he died, from joint bank accounts, for instance, or life insurance policies, which may not have been included in the public record of the estate.

With Sen. Reed now rounding up an extradition posse, Panasy may need whatever she got, because she's very likely going to have spend a lot of it on lawyers.

This is the opinion of David Collins.