It was there, according to court documents, that she met a California man named Robert Acremant, who would spend up to $1,500 a night on private dances with her when he was in town and came to consider Wartenberg his "girlfriend." She describes their relationship, however, as "pretty platonic"; she went to dinner with him a couple of times and gambled with him once, but they were never intimate.

Prosecutors allege that Acremant's belief that Wartenberg was his girlfriend may have led to three killings. He was convicted of killing two Oregon women in 1995 in a robbery attempt gone wrong and of murdering a friend, Scott George, in California later that year. He was sentenced to die in both cases and is currently on death row in Oregon.

Wartenberg, now married with four kids, testified in the George case in 2002, describing her relationship with Acremant as friendly but little more than that. However, when he came to see her in December 1995, he became upset because "I never loved him" and drew a gun on her in her car. She testified that she told Acremant she did love him so that he would calm down, and that she didn't report the incident to police because she "didn't think he was capable of doing anything like that."

Wartenberg isn't the only "Apprentice" contestant this season with a racy past. One of the "Apprentice: Martha Stewart" hopefuls, Bethenny Frankel, had a brief acting career in the mid-1990s, playing a bisexual killer in an erotic thriller called "Hollywood Hills 90028."