75-Year-Old Woman Receives Life Sentence For Killing Husband 40 Years Ago
A 75-year-old Missouri woman has been convicted of murdering her husband and burying his body in an abandoned Wyoming gold mine 40 years ago.
Alice Uden, of Chadwick, Missouri, was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of her husband, as Laramie County District Attorney Scott Homar had sought a minimum of 20 years in prison for her.
Uden, who was arrested a year ago, lived a peaceful life in Missouri after she killed her husband, Ronald Holtz, in 1974. She remarried soon after. In May, she was found guilty of second-degree murder.
The twist in the story, as if it wasn’t bizarre enough already, is that her new husband, Gerald Uden, was also convicted in 2013 of the 1980 killing of his ex-wife and her two young sons, and he was sentenced to life in prison.
According to prosecutors in the case against Alice Uden, she is alleged to have used a rifle to shoot her husband in the back of the head while he slept. Her defense attorneys claimed their client killed him after he flew into a rage and threatened to hurt her toddler daughter.
Reuters reported that the defense asked the court to consider what message it was sending to the public if they incarcerated an elderly woman suffering from physical ailments who killed her husband in self-defense.
Homar told the court, “The message we don’t want to send to society is that you cover up a crime long enough and you’ll get away with it with very little punishment.”
In 1975, Uden divorced her dead husband in a default judgement, as he could not be located by authorities. Law enforcement in Wyoming only recovered the remains of his body last month, revealing that he had died from a gunshot wound to the head.
