A 56-year-old Little Rock man who strangled the 77-year-old aunt who had befriended him after he was paroled from prison was sentenced to 30 years Thursday for her murder.
Houston Henry III, with four prior aggravated robbery convictions, will not be eligible for early release, meaning that he will be 85 when he qualifies for parole, senior deputy prosecutor Marianne Satterfield said.
Henry, represented by attorney Lott Rolf IV, pleaded guilty on Thursday to first-degree murder, reduced from capital murder, before Pulaski County Circuit Judge Wendell Griffin in exchange for the 30-year sentence. Prosecutors were prepared to seek a life sentence at his trial, which had been scheduled for next week.
Henry was arrested in Fort Smith in March, about three weeks after Joyce Marie McKee Taylor was found dead, fully dressed and submerged in her filled bathtub.
Henry had been paroled after serving 28 years in prison about seven months before Taylor's February slaying. Taylor's sister is Henry's mother.
The day Taylor's body was found, another of the woman's two sisters had asked sheriff's deputies to check on her after Taylor couldn't be reached by phone.
Her purse and 1997 Mazda Protege were missing, and sheriff's deputies learned that Henry had tried to sell the car in Fort Smith, according to court files. Cellphone records also showed he was in that area.
Five days after Taylor's body was found, surveillance video from a Conway bank showed Henry trying to cash a $460 check from the account Taylor shared with her sister.
After his arrest, Henry told investigators that he had found his aunt barely conscious in the bathtub the night before deputies were sent to the home, according to court files.
Henry said the doors and windows of the house were all open when he arrived, and the residence was in disarray.
He said he found his aunt clothed and sitting in the bathtub with the shower curtain on top of her. The woman was barely able to speak and when he asked what had happened to her, Taylor just told him to take her car and leave, which he did, without telling anyone.
He explained that he did not call for help for her because "it would look bad" if a felon like himself were in the house in this type of situation.
He said he had tried to forge a check when he ran out of money and pointed deputies to other people he said could be responsible for his aunt's murder.
Court files show that Taylor's niece had spoken to her on the phone the morning she was found and that Taylor's Neely Road home was neat, orderly and fully locked when deputies arrived.
An autopsy showed Taylor had been strangled with injuries to her throat that would have kept her from being able to speak.
When confronted by Deputy Drew Evans with those facts, Henry stopped talking and asked for a lawyer, according to court records.
The niece told investigators that the same day Henry said he found Taylor, her aunt had complained to her over the phone that Henry was pressuring her to give him money and that she had been trying to avoid him, court filings show.
Henry had briefly lived with his aunt after being released from prison before moving into a neighboring house she owned, court files show.
Relatives told authorities they believed Henry had started using drugs and that he had dropped out of sight around the time Taylor was killed.
In 1987, Henry was 26 years old when he was sentenced to 40 years in prison after pleading guilty to four counts of aggravated robbery for a series of armed robberies of Little Rock restaurants and convenience stores over two days in August 1986. Police reported linking him to six holdups in Little Rock and a seventh in North Little Rock.
Metro on 01/22/2016