A former Ohio divorce lawyer has been charged with murder and kidnapping in the fatal stabbing of a client in what prosecutors called a brutal scheme to obstruct the start of her divorce trial.

The former lawyer, Gregory J. Moore, lured his client, Aliza Sherman, a 53-year-old in vitro fertilization nurse and mother of four from Beachwood, Ohio, to his office in downtown Cleveland on March 24, 2013, a day before her divorce trial was set to begin, prosecutors said.

As Ms. Sherman waited outside Mr. Moore’s office building, he or someone working with him stabbed her more than 10 times, prosecutors said. Ms. Sherman was pronounced dead at a hospital later that day.

Mr. Moore, 51, had intended to kidnap Ms. Sherman to prevent the judge in her divorce case from conducting the trial, prosecutors said. The goal was to have Ms. Sherman be “unavailable to attend the proceedings due to serious physical harm and/or death,” according to a grand jury indictment issued this month. The indictment did not explain why the authorities believe that he wanted the trial delayed.

But prosecutors said that Mr. Moore had also sought to avoid court dates by feigning illnesses, getting into a car crash and calling in bomb threats to courthouses in 2012. In 2017, he was sentenced to six months in jail on charges related to those bomb threats and for having lied to the police during the investigation into Ms. Sherman’s death.