The Alaska Court of Appeals has overturned the murder conviction of man charged with killing his romantic rival at the urging of the woman they both hoped to marry.

The court on Wednesday reversed the murder conviction for John Carlin III, who was convicted in 2006 of killing Kent Leppink on an isolated trail about in a small community south of Anchorage 10 years earlier. The case went unsolved until Alaska State Troopers reopened it in 2004.

Prosecutors had claimed he was coaxed into killing Leppink by the woman at the center of the romantic triangle, Mechele Linehan, an exotic dancer who lived with the two men in Anchorage.

Prosecutors maintained she was inspired by the 1994 movie, "The Last Seduction," in which a femme fatale coaxes her lover into killing her husband for money.

But just as the court did when overturning Linehan's conviction in 2010, the court ruled the state improperly introduced a letter from the grave during the Carlin's trial.

Before his death, Leppink wrote his parents saying that if he died under unusual circumstances, Carlin and Linehan would likely be responsible.