Entertainment

First words from motivational speaker Jeffrey Locker’s killer in bizarre ‘murder-for-hire’

THAT’S LIFE: Kenneth Minor at his 2011 sentencing for the murder of self-help guru Jeffrey Locker.

THAT’S LIFE: Kenneth Minor at his 2011 sentencing for the murder of self-help guru Jeffrey Locker. (Steven Hirsch)

THAT’S LIFE:Kenneth Minor at his 2011 sentencing for the murder of self-help guru Jeffrey Locker. (
)

Have you heard the one about the murder victim who kept backing into the knife?

Well, that’s almost Kenneth Minor’s story and he’s sticking to it — and, in a weird way, it may in fact be true. Because even though Minor is serving 20-years-to-life for the murder of Long Island motivational speaker Jeffrey Locker, it was Locker who solicited Minor to murder him.

Tonight’s “48 Hours Mystery” focuses on the stranger-than-fiction case in an episode titled “Death Wish,” featuring The Post’s own crime reporter, Laura Italiano.

Back in 2009, Locker — who made a big living giving motivational “you can have whatever you want” speeches to Wall Street moneymen, and who already had more than anyone should want — decided to hire a hit man for the $12 million insurance money.

Locker didn’t want to go the usual route and have his wife killed, he wanted someone to kill him. Turns out Mister Big Shot had lived well above his means in Nassau County’s posh North Woodmere — especially after racking up $300,000 in debt from a Ponzi scheme. But Locker didn’t die in the tony Five Towns where he lived. He died behind the wheel of his car on the streets of Harlem. Unlike other insurance scammers, the motivational speaker went looking for a discount on his death.

Tonight, for the first time, his “murderer,” Minor, speaks out (he didn’t testify at his trial), telling how Locker solicited him for “a Kevorkian” — and how all he did was hold the knife through the steering wheel of Locker’s parked car, on Paladino Avenue in East Harlem, as Locker repeatedly lunged forward into the knife.

The segment lays out, step-by-step, Locker’s hunt for a discount hitman in Harlem. First guy he hit up was a homeless con man named Melvin Flemming, who tells the show’s Richard Schlessinger that he didn’t kill Locker — but that he did manage to take him for $7,000.

On the second night, Locker happened upon Minor, a drug abuser — whose story that Locker lunged himself into the knife, Italiano says, caused the courtroom to break out in “unanimous guffaws.” It seemed like a robbery gone bad, until detectives went to Locker’s home to deliver the horrible news, and his wife and kids didn’t seem either shocked or overly upset (the couple’s young daughter simply said, “I’m going back to bed”).

Minor, quite eloquently, says that, “I just happened to be the building he jumped off of … I was kind of privileged [that he chose me]. Nobody will ever see you again but me, and you chose me.”

Locker’s family didn’t collect the $12 million insurance money.