Christy Albea, 28, received a jail sentence of 19 years nine months to 24 years six months after pleading guilty to second-degree murder.

Albea stood accused of shooting John Kauthchick, brother of her boyfriend, Ronald Kauthchick, at the mobile home the three shared at 140 Austin St.

Rowan County Sheriff’s Detective Tracey Wyrick read Albea’s signed confession in court Monday morning.

Confined in the Rowan County Detention Center since Oct. 8, 1998, Albea contacted investigators April 26, 1999, to offer a confession.

The statement described the events of Oct. 6, 1998, when Albea used a Taurus .44-caliber Magnum to shoot John Kauthchick in the head.

She got the gun from James Garrett, the father of her children. While staying with their children at his home, she said, she took the gun from under his waterbed without telling him.

In her statement, Albea said she had been in the home with John Kauthchick and her two children the afternoon he died. She put her two children in the car, she said, grabbed the gun off the floorboard, “stuck my foot in the house” and fired once.

John Kauthchick was sitting in a recliner, she said. Albea wrote in her confession that she didn’t even look to see whether she hit him.

Albea went back to the house of her children’s father, put the revolver back under his waterbed and then took her daughter to a store for Cheerwine slushies, Wyrick read from the statement.

Albea was arrested Oct. 8, 1998, after a co-worker, wired by detectives, taped a conversation with Albea in which she made reference to being involved in the murder.

At that time, Detective Wyrick said, Albea was taken into custody at a Kauthchick relative’s home in Denton. The family was preparing to leave the next day to attend John Kauthchick’s funeral in Pennsylvania.

When she was first arrested in 1998, Albea said she shot Kauthchick because she believed he was molesting her daughter.

In the April 1999 statement, Albea told detectives she shot John Kauthchick solely because she did not want to go back to jail for forging the checks.

In the mid-1990s, Albea served two years eight months in prison after she was convicted of maintaining a place for a controlled substance, a felony, and two misdemeanor counts of possession of marijuana, according to the Department of Correction Web site.

She was released from prison in October 1996.

During Monday’s hearing, District Attorney Bill Kenerly introduced into evidence three checks Albea had forged on John Kauthchick’s account.

One, for $1,500, served as a down payment on a mobile home Albea and Ron Kauthchick were purchasing. Albea also forged a check for Ron Kauthchick’s car payment and a third for her car payment.

Detective Wyrick said investigators conducted a voice-stress test on Ron Kauthchick to determine whether or not he knew his brother would be murdered.

“The test showed he was truthful on all questions except check questions,” Wyrick said.

Wyrick testified John Kauthchick had told Ron Kauthchick about the missing checks, though neither of them knew at the time that Albea had stolen and forged the checks.

And the day before he was killed, John Kauthchick went to First Union Bank and filed affidavits of forgery, still not realizing it was Albea who had stolen the checks. Ron Kauthchick and Albea met John Kauthchick there.