CHEYENNE, Wyo. — A judge in Wyoming sentenced a 75-year-old Missouri woman to life in prison on Monday for killing her husband with a rifle in the mid-1970s and throwing his body down the shaft of an abandoned gold mine, where it remained for nearly 40 years. Defendant Alice Uden wore wire glasses, a court-supplied hearing aid and a blue suit as she sat quietly in her wheelchair before speaking at the hearing. She sobbed gently as she addressed the court about the death of her third husband, Ronald Holtz, then 25.
"I've tried to atone for it," Uden said. "I wish that I never would have met him so that none of this ever would have happened. He was a very frightening man." Jurors in Cheyenne didn't buy Uden's argument that she shot Holtz in the head to defend her toddler daughter from him. In May, they found her guilty of second-degree murder. Uden killed Holtz in late 1974 or early 1975 in Cheyenne, where he was living with her and her 2-year-old daughter. Uden testified that she shot him with a rifle after he flew into a rage over the girl's crying and was inches away from attacking her in bed.
IN-DEPTH
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