A prominent businessman on Western Australia's south coast has been sentenced to eight years and six months in jail for attempting to hire a hitman to murder his estranged daughter-in-law. Brian Vincent Attwell paid $10,000 to an undercover police officer who had posed as a hitman in September last year. The court heard the 74-year-old was angry over legal action after his son's divorce and he was motivated by "sheer hatred" of Michelle Attwell. The trial was played recordings of the businessman saying his daughter-in-law had cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he wanted her "strangled and buried".