'Knoxville News Sentinel' Chronicles Tragic Story of Affair That Ended in Death

By: The aspiring teacher whose affair with a student led to his death at the hands of her husband told a newspaper the relationship grew out of her desire to help the troubled teenager and her own loneliness in a failing marriage.

Erin McLean now calls that relationship with 18-year-old Sean Powell "the biggest mistake of my life, and a regret I'll carry for the rest of my life."

McLean, 31, didn't testify when her now ex-husband Eric McLean, 33, was tried last month for murder in Powell's 2007 shooting death. But she talked to The Knoxville News Sentinel in a series of e-mails and telephone calls for an article published Sunday.

The jury convicted Eric McLean of a lesser charge of reckless homicide, essentially ruling there was no threat to harm when McLean pointed a gun at Powell to get him to leave the McLeans' home. The defense argued the boy grabbed the barrel, McLean pulled back and the gun fired.

Eric McLean is likely to receive probation at sentencing in November.

Erin McLean, who now lives in Austin, Texas, told the newspaper that in the fall of 2006 her 10-year marriage to McLean was on the brink and both she and her husband were emotionally troubled, pressured and increasingly distant as they tried to raise two sons, go to school and work.

'"Eric, you're never here, and none of my needs for, like, a friend or a relationship are being met at all,"' she said she told him.

Powell was one of Erin McLean's students that fall, when she was a student teacher at West High School. He was a troubled youth with writing talent and more worldly experience than her. After he was suspended that November for bringing alcohol to school, she wanted to help him.

She said Powell's adoptive mother, Scarlett Powell, warned her about getting involved and risking her teaching position. But Erin McLean remembered telling Eric that "I care more about being a human being than I do about a job."

Powell was sent to a substance abuse clinic in December 2006, but he and Erin McLean stayed in touch. Their telephone conversations became confessional, intimate and eventually sexual. Their affair began in January 2007 when he got out of rehab. She saw the affair as her own "way out."

Eric McLean testified he agreed to an open marriage because he loved her and she wanted it, but soon changed his mind and told her he couldn't do it.

Over the next several weeks, Eric McLean's suspicions grew. He finally caught his wife and her former student having sex. No longer a secret, the boy taunted the husband about the affair. "I really think he was trying to get Eric to kill him," Erin McLean said.

She also said she thought her husband planned to kill Powell before the fatal shooting on March 10, 2007. Prosecutors argued that motive at trial, but the jury didn't believe it.

Erin McLean said her memory was fuzzy about what happened immediately before Powell was fatally shot in his car outside the McLeans' home, waiting for her to join him. But she remembered what her husband said as she walked up to the car, looked inside at Powell's bloody body and began to scream.

She says he calmly said one word: "Congratulations."

Eric McLean's defense attorney, Bruce Poston, disputed several of the details in the account Erin McLean gave the newspaper, citing evidence introduced at the husband's trial describing her misconduct during the marriage and after the teen's slaying.