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Prosecutors on Friday dropped the criminal case against a Lincoln woman accused of helping convicted killer Aubrey Trail in a murder-for-hire scheme to extort money from a prison nurse.

At a hearing Friday in Lancaster County Court, Judge Timothy Phillips dismissed the extortion charge against Samantha Al-Rekabi on a motion by the Lancaster County Attorney's Office. 

Chief Deputy Chris Turner said the state and Al-Rekabi had entered into a plea agreement where the office agreed to dismiss the charge if she paid $25,000 in restitution to the victim.

"Ms. Al-Rekabi paid the restitution in full and so the case was to be dismissed per the agreement this morning," he told the Journal Star.

According to court records, the investigation into the extortion began in March 2021, when an intelligence captain in the prison got information from an inmate alleging that Trail had compromised a female medical staff member at the Nebraska Diagnostic & Evaluation Center, now known as the Reception and Treatment Center. 

After she smuggled contraband into the prison for him, including a cell phone and chewing tobacco, he tried to pressure her into smuggling in a firearm in 2021, about six months before he was sentenced to death for the murder and dismemberment of Sydney Loofe.

The nurse abruptly quit her job instead.

In an FBI interview in late 2021, she admitted she had confided details with Trail about her troubled relationship with her husband, and Trail later told her he had hired a hitman and made a $2,400 down payment on her behalf to have her husband killed.

To stop the murder, Trail told her she needed to give him $25,000, which she did through Al-Rekabi, who was planning to write a true-crime book about Trail and his crimes.

A State Patrol investigator said officials don't believe there ever was a plan to pay to have the nurse’s husband killed, but that Trail, with the help of Al-Rekabi, manipulated the woman into believing it to get money from her.

In an interview last year, Al-Rekabi said she had been pulled into Trail's manipulations, at first acting as an intermediary between him and his co-defendant, Bailey Boswell. She later feared Trail would turn her in for it or have her and her son killed.