PORTLAND — Steven Brown, who was serving seven life prison sentences for killing two men in Lebanon and abducting his estranged wife in 1999, committed suicide in a federal prison last week.

Brown, 50, hanged himself at a medium-security facility in Jesup, Ga., on May 29, according to Wayne County Coroner Jay Fulton.

Brown, a former U.S. Marine, pleaded guilty in 1999 to all federal and state charges against him in the case, including murder, kidnapping, interstate domestic violence, interstate stalking and firearm offenses. He asked the federal judge to sentence him to death, but the judge refused.

Brown and a friend, Patricia Teeter, drove from his home in Newfield, N.Y., on March 29, 1999, to spy on his wife, Deborah Brown, who had moved to Maine from New York to escape their abusive 17-year relationship.

Deborah Brown, who had grown up in Kittery, had filed for divorce earlier that year and been granted full custody of their two children the previous week. She and the couple’s son and daughter had moved into a double-wide mobile home owned by her brother, Donald Wood, in Lebanon.

Steven Brown and Teeter hatched a plan to lure Deborah Brown’s brother and her boyfriend, 30-year-old Christopher Brouillard, out of the mobile home they shared on Lower Middle Road in Lebanon.

Teeter knocked on the door and told Wood she was having car trouble. When Wood came out to help, Steven Brown clubbed him, stabbed him to death, dragged him into nearby woods and covered his body with leaves.

Teeter went back to the home, told Brouillard that Wood needed help, and Steven Brown beat and stabbed him to death, too.

Teeter went back a third time to lure Wood’s girlfriend out of the house, but Deborah Brown came out instead, and spotted her husband. Steven Brown and Teeter forced her into their car and they drove back to New York.

Police launched a nationwide manhunt and received a tip that the three were in a hotel in the Albany area. About 30 hours after launching the manhunt, police burst into the rooms the three were staying in at a motel in Greenbush, N.Y., and found Deborah Brown in a room with her husband, who had a 12-gauge shotgun and an assault rifle next to him on the bed. Steven Brown and Teeter were arrested without incident.

The crimes were the subject of an episode of the Investigation Disovery series “Wicked Attraction” called “Till Death Do Us Part.”

Few details about the circumstances of Steven Brown’s death were available Thursday. Erin Chalfant, a spokeswoman for the Jesup facility, said no other information about his death would be released pending an internal investigation. She said Brown had been at the facility, which houses about 1,900 male inmates, since 2009. She said she could not release information about whether he had made previous suicide attempts or had disciplinary issues.

Brown tried to kill himself in the Cumberland County Jail in 1999, by slashing his neck with a blade from a disposable razor and then trying to hang himself by tying a sheet around his neck and knotting the other end to a railing and vaulting over it. The knot did not hold and he broke his ankle when he hit the cement floor.

Teeter, now 52, is serving a 20-year state sentence and a 29-year federal sentence concurrently. She is an inmate at a federal women’s prison in Danbury, Conn.

Staff Writer Ann S. Kim can be  contacted at 791-6383 or at:

akim@pressherald.com

Twitter: AnnKimPPH