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Ogden • For the past nine months, Dennis Chamberlain has kept a copy of his wife's obituary inside his Weber County jail cell.

He talks to Jean Chamberlain's picture, the 75-year-old man told a judge Thursday. He tells her he's sorry and that he loves her. He tells her smiling photo that he hopes to be with her again one day.

"I did love my wife very sincerely," a shackled Dennis Chamberlain said Thursday during his sentencing hearing in 2nd District Court. "I still love my wife. I will love her until my dying day. I wish she was still here."

More than a year ago, however, Dennis Chamberlain killed his ailing 70-year-old wife. In her final days, prosecutor Teral Tree said, the husband taped his wife to her wheelchair, where she sat in her own excrement.

And on Feb. 16, 2014, the defendant put a plastic turkey roasting bag over Jean Chamberlain's head and fed helium into the bag through a plastic tube, Tree told Judge Joseph Bean.

She died before she was ever able to say goodbye to her five children or her grandchildren, Tree said.

"This is not a right-to-die case," Tree told the judge. "This is a case where the defendant, on his own, made the unilateral decision to end the life of his wife. This was not a compassionate choice, but a choice driven by control and greed."

The defendant's attorney, Ronald Yengich, told the judge Thursday that his client was part of the Hemlock Society — a right-to-die organization — but said that Dennis Chamberlain accepts that he violated the law by ending his wife's life, and realizes he may spend the rest of his life in prison for it.

"He took care of [his wife,]" Yengich said. "He cared about her and he did the best he could for her under a very difficult circumstance. This wasn't done so that he could have free time or that he could do other things. This was done because he watched his wife suffer daily, hourly and every minute."

Bean sentenced Dennis Chamberlain to spend at least three years and possibly up to life in prison.

The defendant — originally charged with first-degree felony murder, which carries a sentence minimum of 15 years and up to life — pleaded guilty months ago to first-degree felony attempted murder. Tree said after the sentencing that the plea deal was formulated in this way to give the elderly defendant the opportunity to be released some day.

A possible release from prison was what many of his children wanted, they told the judge Thursday.

"I believe my father is a good man who made a very bad decision," said son Jason Chamberlain. "There's no doubt that a debt needs to be paid. [But] I believe that without a light at the end of the tunnel, there's no hope for reformation."

Jason Chamberlain said he still loves his father — despite the choice he made to end his mother's life.

"If she could speak from the dust," he said, "I believe she would forgive Dennis."

Daughter Sonya Balling said that her mother was in "quite good" physical and mental health before her death — her only physical limitations were due to a previous stroke that resulted in loss of movement on her left side. The woman used a wheelchair to avoid falling, Balling said.

The daughter said it was most upsetting to find out that her father had been planning and researching ways to end her mother's life for years.

"Our father is a very, very smart man," she said. "He knew this was an illegal act. ... I don't feel like he's had a change of heart. Never once has he admitted to me that what he did was reprehensible."

Before Jean Chamberlain died at her Roy home, prosecutors say, her husband had amassed a small library of suspicious titles: "The Peaceful Pill Handbook," "The Final Exit" and "If You Go Into a Nursing Home, Will Your Spouse Go to the Poor House?"

The books and articles provided arguments for assisted suicide, warnings against nursing homes, and ways to kill a person without being caught — for instance, suffocation with a helium-filled bag. The techniques in the publications were punctuated with handwritten notes such as, "Excellent," "How to do it" and "Silence is your best protection."

At an August preliminary hearing, Cindy Hadley testified that her father told her he had taken his dog for a walk one February day, and returned to find his wife had died. He claimed to have performed CPR, but Hadley said her mother's body was reclined in her wheelchair at a height that would not allow CPR. Chamberlain said he had called his Mormon bishop, a doctor, to come to the house and pronounce Jean Chamberlain dead, Hadley testified.

But Hadley said the bishop later told the Chamberlains' children that he had never been at the home on the night Jean Chamberlain died.

The daughter said that Jean Chamberlain had wanted to go to a nursing home as her health worsened, but her father had objected.

A search history on Dennis Chamberlain's computers revealed information on how to commit suicide, how to get doctors to sign death certificates, and specifics on "certain medications, chemicals and poisons," according to charges.

A suicide manual owned by Dennis Chamberlain had been marked in the section pertaining to the use of nitrogen gas and making of a so-called "Exit Bag" — a plastic bag with a drawstring to put over one's head, charges state.