LITTLE ROCK — A 61-year-old Sherwood man arrested with an elderly woman’s blood on his shoes was sentenced to 50 years in prison Tuesday after he admitted to killing her and dumping her body.
Prosecutors reduced the capital-murder charge against Carter Neal Wilcoxson to firstdegree murder in exchange for his guilty plea to that charge and related counts of seconddegree forgery and theft by receiving involving the victim’s checks and car. Wilcoxson will be 95 by the time he qualifies for parole.
Chief deputy prosecutor John Johnson told Pulaski County Circuit Judge Leon Johnson at Wilcoxson’s plea hearing that 74-year-old Katherine Pearl Cleary and her car were reported missing Aug. 22, 2011, by her family. Sherwood police had responded to a burglar alarm at the woman’s Big Indian Drive residence earlier that morning but found nothing wrong, he said.
The next day, police arrested 52-year-old Rhonda Gale Glassburner-Strong after determining she had used Cleary’s debit card to buy a TV at a Jacksonville Wal-Mart store, the prosecutor said. She said she’d gotten the card from Wilcoxson, who had told her he’d dumped the woman’s possessions in the county.
Glassburner-Strong directed authorities to the site, a ditch on Boyd Road east of Arkansas 440 south of Jacksonville, where police found Cleary’s remains that evening. Wilcoxson was arrested that same day, four days before his 60th birthday, with two of Cleary’s checks in his pocket, the prosecutor said.
He was charged with killing the grandmother and greatgrandmother of six after DNA testing found her blood on his shoes, the prosecutor said. Wilcoxson had met Cleary while doing work on the home of one of her neighbors who had befriended him, John Johnson told the judge.
Police said they found cocaine and a syringe on Wilcoxson when he was arrested, but drug-related charges and a misdemeanor resisting-arrest charge were dropped as part of his plea deal.
Wilcoxson had been on parole about four months when Cleary was killed. He had never been convicted of a violent offense but, since 1991, had been sent to state and federal prisons at least six times. In that time, he has at least 21 felony convictions on charges including drug possession, forgery, credit-card abuse, hot checks and burglary from 16 criminal cases in Pulaski and Lonoke counties.
Glassburner-Strong and a woman arrested with her, 40-year-old Sonia Annette Bell of Jacksonville, are both charged with theft by receiving and debit-card fraud involving Cleary’s car and the bank card used in Jacksonville.
Arkansas, Pages 14 on 11/15/2012