PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) - A Portland man has been sentenced to 10 years for hiring a hit man to kill his estranged wife, who in turn killed her attacker.

Susan Kuhnhausen fought off an intruder in her southeast Portland house last September. The man was armed with a claw hammer. A struggle ensued and she strangled him with her bare hands.
     
Michael Kuhnhausen was in a Multnomah County courtroom Friday to hear his sentence. He pleaded guilty to solicitation to commit aggravated murder.
     
Susan Kuhnhausen, then 51, ran to a neighbor's house to report the intruder, identified later by police as 59-year-old Edward Haffey.
     
Haffey was about 5 foot 9 inches tall and 180 pounds. Susan Kuhnhausen weighed about 80 pounds more than her attacker.

In dramatic court testimony on Friday, Susan Kuhnhausen displayed a photo that showed her injuries following the attack.

In remarks before the court, she said she felt as though she is serving three life sentences, one for the man she had to kill in her home, another for knowing the man she loved tried to have her killed and yet another for the worry she will continue to have about a repeat attack as long as Michael Kuhnhausen remained alive.

At one point, Susan Kuhnhausen rebuked Michael and his attorney for not paying attention and smirking while she testified before the court. She spoke for an hour and 10 minutes and detailed her struggle with her attacker, whom she strangled to death.

She also said that she had invited her husband to witness her work as a nurse in an emergency room, where she was trained to handle violent, explosive people. He apparently never came to visit her there.

"I blame him [attacker Edward Haffey] in some measure for what he did," Susan Kuhnhausen said at one point, "but I blame you more. You took advantage of a desperate person to do a desperate thing that you were too cowardly to do yourself." 

Susan Kuhnhausen then leaned forward toward her estranged husband and coolly spoke, saying, "If I ever, ever believed that you deserved to be dead, I would of at least had the balls to kill you myself."

Following Susan Kuhnhausen's dramatic testimony, Michael Kuhnhausen rose before sentencing and tearfully told the judge "I've hurt a lot of people in the last year, and I'm sorry. That's all I can say."

Following that statement, Susan Kuhnhausen laughed loudly in court, and then began to weep.
     
(Compliled from KATU and AP Reports.)