LITTLE ROCK — A Little Rock woman and her ex-husband were arrested Tuesday and charged with first-degree murder in the 1996 disappearance and death of the woman’s mother.
Goldie Thornsberry, 65,was last seen about noon on Jan. 15, 1996, at the Ralsh Medical Clinic in Fayetteville.
Police say Reta Kay Douglas Flowers, 41, and Raymond Robert Lee Douglas, 41, killed Thornsberry in Fayetteville and disposed of her body in a dry well off Cantrell Roadin west Little Rock’s Pankey community.
Police declined to discuss a motive in the slaying.
The woman’s skeletal remains were discovered in July 2000, not far from Douglas’ Rightsell Road home, but weren’t identified until earlier this month.
Flowers and Douglas, who divorced and live separately in Little Rock, were arrested Tuesday morning, said Little Rock Detective Greg Siegler. Police arrested Douglas at an apartment in Benton and Flowers at her home on Dickens Lane in Little Rock, he said.
Flowers was transported to Fayetteville. Douglas remains at the Pulaski County jail.
In July 2000, engineers surveying property in the 13900 block of Cantrell Road discovered the skeleton inside a brick-lined structure that looked like a filled-in well.
“I looked down the hole and saw what looked like the top of a skull,” Kevin Yates, a Development Consultants Inc. engineer, said then. “I used a stick to uncover more of it, and when I saw it was obviously a human skull, we called police.”
The Pulaski County coroner and his employees excavated most of a human skeleton from the structure. The bones were sent to the state Medical Examiner’s office in west Little Rock, where they remained Tuesday.
Chris Edwards, coordinator of unidentified remains at the office, said DNA from two of Thornsberry’s daughters was compared with the skeleton’s mitochondrial DNA at the University of North Texas to determine identity.
Arkansas, Pages 7 on 06/23/2010