Best & Worst: Enron's ugly end game: Skilling's sentencing, Lay's untimely death

This post is written as part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst of 2006. Vote for it as the Money Story of the Year or check out the other nominees in the category.

The demise of Enron will likely turn out to be the biggest business story of the decade -- maybe even the century. The once $60 billion market cap energy trading giant dissolved into worthlessness in an ugly morass of accounting fraud and human greed in late 2001.

But 2006 was the year in the long, sad saga that some justice was finally meted out to Enron's top executives. Former chief executives Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling were both convicted in the spring on charges including securities fraud, making false statements, and conspiracy. Enron's former chief financial officer Andrew Fastow was sentenced to six years in jail after he pleaded guilty to several charges of securities fraud and agreed to testify against his former bosses.

But the Enron story continued to provide shocking twists, even at this stage. Ken Lay died suddenly of a heart attack in July. BloggingStocks readers not only doubted that he had died of natural causes (many suspected suicide), but others doubted he had died at all.

Lay's conviction was vacated in October because he died before his sentencing. That seems to have preserved his wealth for his heirs.

Jeff Skilling was sentenced to 24 years in jail in late October. When we wrote about the sentence, 64% of readers responding to a poll said the jail time was too short. Skilling, at his sentencing, continued to profess his innocence.