Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, BENEFITS NEWS—‘Killer’ wife will not be paid late husband’s retirement benefits from his job at Intel, (Jun 17, 2026)

By Brandi O. Brown, J.D.

Regardless of whether Oregon, California, or federal law applied, the Ninth Circuit explained, the result was the same—she could not benefit from killing her husband.

After a federal district court in Oregon agreed with an estate representative that a deceased employee’s wife was not entitled to his retirement benefits, the wife, who had been convicted in state court for his second-degree murder, appealed to the Ninth Circuit. Her husband had been a longtime employee of Intel Corporation, which was the ERISA plan administrator. According to her state court conviction, the wife shot and killed her estranged husband in 2019.

In a brief unpublished decision, the appeals court rejected various arguments by the wife, including among others that she had been erroneously estopped from relitigating whether she murdered her husband and that her Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights had been violated.

Slayer rule. As for which law applied, court explained that it “need not resolve whether Oregon or California law applies, or whether their state slayer statutes are preempted by ERISA, because there is no triable factual dispute that Ms. Cloud is Mr. Cloud’s slayer and is therefore not entitled to his ERISA benefits. Under both California and Oregon law, a person’s killer is not entitled to benefit from the decedent’s pension, see Or. Rev. Stat. § 112.515; Cal. Prob. Code. § 252, and a final judgment of conviction for a felonious and intentional killing is conclusive as to whether an individual is a slayer, see Or. Rev. Stat. § 112.555(1); Cal. Prob. Code. § 254(a).” She was not entitled to his ERISA benefits under either state law.

Moreover, even if those state statutes were preempted, the court explained, federal common law also “refuses to allow a person to benefit financially from a murder she has committed.”

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