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Woman indicted in murder of Schuylkill jeweler

Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro’s office on Thursday secured a murder indictment against a Tennessee woman accused in February of stabbing to death a well-known Schuylkill County jeweler in a Treme hotel room.

Magen Hall was charged with armed robbery, obstruction of justice and with the second-degree murder of 62-year-old Patrick Murphy in the three-count indictment handed up by an Orleans Parish grand jury. The defendant’s name also is spelled Megan Hall in some court records.

Hall, 25, faces a mandatory lifetime prison sentence if convicted of the murder charge, a release from Cannizzaro’s office says.

An armed robbery conviction carries a penalty of 10 to 99 years in state prison, while obstruction of justice in a homicide investigation is punishable by up to 40 years.

A housekeeper discovered Murphy’s body at 11:41 a.m. inside a room registered to Hall at the Empress Hotel.

New Orleans police homicide detective Patrick Guidry testified at a preliminary hearing in March that the owner of Murphy Jewelers in Pottsville had been killed by three stab wounds, one to his neck and two to his abdomen.

Video surveillance cameras at the hotel showed Murphy and Hall arriving to the hotel together at 2:10 a.m. Hall was seen exiting the hotel room alone and briskly walking out the front door at 3:42 a.m., believed to be leaving with some of Murphy’s possessions.

No one else was seen entering or leaving the room until the housekeeper eight hours later, Guidry wrote in his arrest affidavit.

Two witnesses staying in an adjacent room reported hearing a man and woman loudly arguing inside the room that Hall rented around 3:30 a.m., followed by sounds of a struggle that lasted about two minutes.

Hall has remained jailed since her March 3 arrest, in lieu of a $750,000 bond set for the murder allegation.

Criminal District Judge Camille Buras left that bond unchanged after the indictment was read. She deferred setting bond on the two additional charges brought by the grand jury for the judge to whom Hall’s case gets randomly allotted.

Hall has a history of prostitution arrests from New Orleans, Nashville and Houston.

Assistant District Attorney Inga Petrovich presented the case to the grand jury.

This undated photo released by the New Orleans Police Department shows Megan Hall. New Orleans police are looking for a 25-year-old woman named Megan Hall suspected of killing a Pennsylvania jeweler, 62-year-old Patrick Murphy, whose body was found in a hotel near the French Quarter, on Thursday, Feb. 28, 2019. (New Orleans Police Department via AP)
In this June 13, 2012 photo, Patrick Murphy, owner of Murphy Jeweler, poses at The Promenade Shops in Center Valley, Pa. New Orleans police are looking for a 25-year-old woman named Megan Hall suspected of killing Pennsylvania jeweler, 62-year-old Patrick Murphy, whose body was found in a hotel near the French Quarter, on Thursday, Feb. 28, 2019. (Denise Sanchez/The Morning Call via AP)