NEW YORK (CNN) — The widow of Richard Ricci, the one-time handyman who has been a focus for investigators looking for missing Utah teen Elizabeth Smart, said she is "at peace" with the decision to take Ricci off life support and allow him to die.

"His mother and his sister and his brother and myself consulted with the doctor, after we saw the MRI, realized that Rick was completely brain dead and would never regain consciousness," Angela Ricci said Wednesday on CNN's "Larry King Live." "There was no recovery for him."

A memorial service is scheduled for Friday at a funeral home in Magna, Utah. Ricci's body has been cremated.

Angela Ricci continued to defend her husband, saying she is confident he had nothing to do with Smart's abduction.

"We believe in his innocence," she said. "We know he didn't do anything like this."

Ricci, 48, suffered a brain hemorrhage last week at the Utah State Prison, where he was being held for a parole violation. He was taken by helicopter to the University of Utah Health Sciences Center but never regained consciousness.

Angela Ricci said that despite his condition, her husband was kept in shackles at the hospital.

"They didn't undo the shackles until after he died," she told King.

She said her husband, who suffered from high blood pressure, was under a "great deal of pressure" in prison and was kept in isolation in an area near death row until just days before his collapse. He was not allowed to make phone calls or receive visitors and ate sack lunches and boxed dinners rather than hot food, she said.

Police officials have said Ricci's death last Friday was a blow to the investigation into Smart's disappearance because they do not believe he told them all he knew about the case. But Angela Ricci said that had he lived, investigators would not have learned anything else from her husband.

"He did tell them everything that he knew. He gave them everything he had. He just didn't give them what they wanted to hear," she said.

She also read from a letter her husband sent her from prison before he died:

"I guess the only thing I would like the public to know would be I really don't know anybody who would kidnap a child. I don't have many friends, just family. I had nothing to do with the abduction. I don't know how a child abductor thinks. I just can't believe it."

Elizabeth, 14, was abducted at gunpoint from her family's Salt Lake City home June 5. Ricci became a focus of the investigation because he had worked in the Smart home as a handyman and had a 30-year criminal record.

Angela Ricci told police that on the night the girl disappeared, her husband was home in bed with her. She said Wednesday that the FBI told her she passed a lie detector test in which she reiterated that alibi, but she said investigators still kept trying to convince her that her husband was involved.

"They're trying to make me think he's a cat burglar that sneaks out at night," she said.

Ricci was never charged in connection with the Smart disappearance, but, after being jailed for violating his parole, he was charged with stealing items from the Smart home and another home in the same neighborhood.