Eager to confess to his killings, Gerald Uden quickly waived extradition back to Wyoming.
His mission was to reassure anybody who'd listen that Alice had nothing to do with the slaying of Virginia and the boys. He alone—or so he said—had planned and executed three merciless murders and then secretly disposed of the corpses twice without his wife's knowledge, inspiration, or help. He wanted to control the dubious narrative that Alice was utterly innocent. In his mind, the faster he could blurt it all out and get to prison, the less likely cops would delve deeper.
Less than two weeks after his arrest, Gerald was in the Fremont County Jail in Lander, playing spades and dice games with his fellow inmates, watching television, and generally impatient to get his day in court.
Back in 1980, Gerald's original plan was to tell only one lie so as to avoid getting tangled up in a web of his own deceptions. But growing, thirty-year-old deceptions required regular feeding, so his lies multiplied geometrically. What was one more?
When a local defense lawyer named Sky Phifer—retained by Eliza with Gerald's pension money—came to see him in jail, Gerald retold the same story he'd told the agents, including the warped saga about how he'd deep-sixed their bodies in the bottomless Pacific Ocean off the Oregon coast. When he finished, Phifer said he planned to discuss a deal with prosecutors: in exchange for the whole truth and nothing but the truth, would they take the death penalty off the table?
Gerald hadn't expected a plea bargain, but why not? At seventy-one, any lesser penalty he might get for one count of first-degree murder—never mind three—was a life sentence, so it didn't matter much to him. He just wanted to tell his Alice-less story as soon as possible.
Phifer worked fast. A day later, he returned to the jail with good news. Gerald wouldn't be executed, but he must tell a judge exactly what he did. If he lied about anything, the death penalty would be back in play.
Oh, shit. One lie too many.
He had planned to die without ever telling the truth about where he really dumped Virginia and the boys. Or that he'd killed them at all. But he'd spilled those beans. A man's word was his bond, and Gerald felt a queer compulsion to come clean. After all, he was about to shake on it. For the man who'd lied about everything for so long, honesty was now all-important.
Instead of the Oregon coast, he told his lawyer he'd heaved them into the glacial abyss of Fremont Lake.
Phifer was livid with Gerald, but the deal stood. Gerald, Phifer, and county prosecutor Michael Bennett signed the plea bargain on October 24, 2013, just twenty-seven days after his arrest in Missouri. At the earliest moment, he'd tell a judge what he'd done and take what was coming to him before going straight to prison.
But before he went to court, Gerald's sister Linda visited him in jail. She, too, was livid. He tried to calm her by explaining why he'd killed three people and never told her or anyone else. He begged her not to worry about him and made light of his extraordinarily evil situation.
“One nursing home is as good as another,” he told her.
A week later, Linda died of a stroke in her sleep. The sheriff asked Gerald if he wanted to attend her funeral, but the embarrassing prospect of appearing in shackles and an orange jumpsuit eclipsed his grief.
On November 1, 2013—thirty-three years and six weeks after he'd massacred three people who'd once loved him—Gerald Uden walked into District Judge Norman Young's courtroom to tell his story again and accept his punishment. The gallery overflowed with fifty or more spectators, including some friends of Claire.
First, the judge asked Gerald if he was guilty or innocent.
“Guilty, Your Honor.”
The judge then invited Gerald to explain his crimes. Point by horrid point, Gerald recited, in a chillingly confident voice, what he'd done, from the ruse that brought Virginia and the boys to “the corner” on September 12, 1980, to sinking their decaying corpses in Wyoming's Fremont Lake—not the Pacific Ocean—seven weeks later.
“When you met Virginia and the boys at ‘the corner,’” Judge Young asked Gerald directly, “was it your intention to take them out and murder them?”
“Yes.”
“And it was basically over the child support and visitation?”
On that, Gerald wanted to split hairs.
“It wasn't about the money, per se, because I had the money to do that,” he said. “It was the fact she was trying to break Alice and I up. It wasn't that Alice said, ‘Look, you got to choose’…but her actions were giving me a lot of grief at home. I had to get rid of the grief.
“I finally wound up having to make a choice because Alice was giving me a hard time about it and Virginia was giving me a hard time about it, so I made a choice. I decided I would love Alice, and Virginia was intolerable.”
“And your solution to that problem was to get rid of Virginia?”
“Yes.”
“The two boys as well?”
“Yes.”
A chill fell across the silent court. The prosecution had nothing to add that could have possibly made Gerald look more wicked than he made himself look, and the defense couldn't make him look any better. So Gerald himself burnished his own wickedness.
“I don't know whether the court wants to know,” Gerald interjected, “but Virginia is buried in Fremont Lake, at the bottom. And I could not go to the lake to point and say where, because it was dark. But that's where they are.”
After a few minutes of legal throat-clearing, the judge asked Gerald if he had anything to say before his formal sentencing that would most assuredly imprison him for the rest of his life, however much time he had left.
“Once upon a time, I was in the navy,” Gerald calmly told the judge. “When asked a question, there were only three proper responses: Yes, sir; no, sir; or no excuse, sir. I will accept the third response. There is no excuse.”
“I agree,” the judge said tersely.
Judge Young explained that court rules required him to consider probation, “but it is as obvious as it ever will be that it is not appropriate in this case.”
With the death penalty off the table, the judge affirmed the plea agreement, accepting Gerald Uden's guilty pleas to three counts of first-degree murder and sentencing him under 1980 laws to three concurrent life terms, $150 to the state's victim compensation fund, and twenty bucks in court costs. No fine or restitution was assessed.
In Wyoming, then and now, life was life. Under Wyoming law, lifers are never eligible for parole unless the governor commutes their sentences, and it was unlikely Gerald would live long enough to see that kind of mercy.
Was there more?
Fremont County Undersheriff Ryan Lee, a young Riverton native who could trace his law enforcement pedigree back to his coroner grandfather, feared local law enforcement might never know some of the details of Gerald Uden's killings if he disappeared into the prison system before somebody asked. So he got permission to spend a few days driving around with Gerald, revisiting the key sites and hearing some of the lesser-known details, just a couple guys on a road trip. Maybe, he thought, it would shake loose some overlooked memories that might lead to the still-missing bodies of Virginia and her boys…if Gerald would do it.
So Lee met with Gerald in the jail and proposed his expedition. It'd take a few days, he said. Gerald would be shackled, but he could wear civilian clothes and pick any lunch place he wanted (as long as it had a drive-up window). Lee would pick up the tab.
Lee was playing an old cop's game. He wanted Gerald to see him as a new friend helping him through a tough time in his life.
Gerald happily agreed. “Show and tell,” he called it. He didn't need civvies, and he understood the shackles. He didn't care. It'd likely be his last breath of free air, and he knew it.
“You can't offend me,” the confessed triple killer told his new buddy. “Ask anything you want.”
A day later, Lee showed up at the jail in his three-quarter-ton, unmarked pickup. A deputy helped him load Gerald into the passenger seat, and they headed out to Pavillion for their first stop: Gerald and Alice's place, which was never much to look at but now was as forlorn as a scab.
On the way to Williams Road, they chatted like a couple of drinking buddies. Gerald was a bottomless spring of information. He knew every neighbor, every fence line, every dry creek, every crossroad…everything. Lee made a mental note about how vivid Gerald's recall seemed to be.
Gerald pointed out where the houses and sheds once sat. A dirt two-track still meandered onto the parcel but just stopped out in the scrub. As old men do, he told a few stories that had nothing to do with anything except whatever strange movie looped in his brain.
Then they drove out to the murder site, the wide spot where a lonely dirt road crossed an irrigation canal. Gerald got out of the truck and walked to the spot where Virginia and the boys came to their end. He made a gun with his fingers and coolly acted it all out. Pow, one shot in the back of Virginia's head…pow, one shot behind Richard's ear…and pow, one shot in Reagan's screaming little brain.
Lee asked a few questions, but mostly Gerald told his story as calmly as if he were remembering a pleasant outing with his family, not a methodical slaughter.
“Ten seconds,” Gerald crowed. “They didn't suffer. But I had no idea the human body contained that much blood.”
They backtracked toward town and Gerald pointed out the dusty creek bed where he buried the fancy stock of the murder gun. Still shackled securely, he kicked the dirt where he said it was, and Lee rooted around but found nothing. It might be nearby, Lee thought, or Gerald might be lying, but they didn't have time to waste digging holes.
Back in town, Lee kept his promise to buy lunch anywhere Gerald chose. He picked Wendy's, his favorite burger place.
That was it for day one. It had exhausted Lee to pretend to be unfazed while listening to Gerald maunder about his life and demonstrate his bloody crimes so casually. He never interrogated Gerald, just let him tell his stories. Some of his tales were exaggerated, and some were exceptionally self-centered at times, but on the whole, Gerald was mostly credible, Lee thought.
On day two, they drove to the Hidden Hand mine, an hour into the middle of nowhere, “the perfect hiding spot” where Gerald said he first stowed the bodies.
Again, Lee was struck by Gerald's nearly photographic memory. He knew every bend in the highway, the mile markers, the unmarked boundaries between federal and state land, which shacks were new, which gates were bastards to open. At one point, he immediately recognized that the road had been moved slightly by the Highway Department. A couple times, the old trucker even told Lee how to drive. He might be lying about everything else, Lee thought, but when he was talking about details, he wasn't BSing.
His memories about the bodies were slightly more frayed. Gerald was fairly sure, but not absolutely certain, it was the Hidden Hand mine where he'd stuffed them. He couldn't recall which boy had worn green tortoiseshell glasses (or what he'd done with them). He wasn't terribly clear about how he'd gotten into the mine or out of it.
But some details came into sickening focus. Gerald remembered that when he returned to retrieve the decaying bodies, they were sunken, gnawed, and rotted. At the time, Gerald had never learned to back up a trailer, so he had a hitch on the front of his truck, which he used to hoist the bagged remains out of the hole. The desiccated bodies were much lighter in death than in life and easier to compact into his barrels. And they wouldn't float because the decomposition gases had long ago dissipated.
Lee was sickened by it, but he showed no reaction. His only goal was to find the victims, and he didn't want Gerald to stop talking. The actions Gerald described would be difficult, but not impossible. The behavior was hard to believe, but the known parts of his story were hard to believe too.
When they were done, Lee drove Gerald back to town, where they could grab a McDonald's meal at the drive-through before returning to jail. They talked all the way about paltry things. Out there on the road, Gerald teared up a couple times for a strange reason: It was Ryan Lee himself, his new friend. It saddened Gerald that they'd never see each other again.
Lee outwardly palavered and prattled with Gerald, but was inwardly troubled…maybe even pissed that he was no closer to finding Virginia and the boys.
The third and last day of Gerald's tour would be Fremont Lake. First, he was transferred to the Sublette County jail in Pinedale, much closer to Fremont Lake. The next day, Lee and a fellow deputy drove Gerald out to the lake, where they met Special Agent Tina Trimble and several members of a local search and recovery team. They asked Gerald to lead them to the approximate spot where he'd tossed the bodies over the gunwale into the water.
First, Gerald directed them to the landing where he vaguely thought he'd shoved off. Past the marina. No, too far. Back down. Near that bay…
At the ramp, they shackled Gerald, then bundled him in an exposure suit and enough life preservers to save four drowning people. They didn't want him to fall or jump overboard and cheat the warden.
It was mostly fruitless from the moment they pushed off.
It had been pitch-black that night. Gerald had no reference points, no reliable lights in the distance. He'd merely motored out far enough in the darkness to a spot where his sounding line stopped dragging on the bottom, then stopped the boat, dropped the rope into the water, and pushed the barrels overboard—just like he told them. Gerald had no idea where he was at the time.
“Are you BSing me?” a frustrated Lee asked.
“No bullshit,” Gerald responded. “I want to be right with God, so I have to tell the real truth. This is where the bodies are. No bullshit here.”
So they puttered around out there, dropping some search equipment in the cold water to no avail. The local searchers marked a few interesting blips on their sonar, but after a few hours in the sharp wind and cold, they gave up, promising to come back for a more intensive search next summer after the lake thawed.
After loading up for the short trip back to the Pinedale jail, Lee and Gerald stopped for prepackaged sandwiches at the marina and ate their lunch at a roadside picnic table. They talked about his memory, his life, and all the people they knew in common. For Lee, it was all part of the game—acting like a casual friend, hoping the faked closeness would induce Gerald to drop his guard.
“I think that at the time, I was insane,” Gerald admitted. “I don't know about now, but at that time, I was insane to think I could get away with all this.”
At the end, they had no better idea about Virginia and her boys than when they started. If Gerald was guarding a secret, it stayed guarded.
Back at the jail, Lee handed Gerald his card and wished him well as he went back inside forever.
“Take care,” he said.
Gerald's reply chilled him.
“Watch your back,” he told Lee. “Be careful out there. One of these days, you're gonna meet somebody just like me, only not as nice as I am. I don't want to read about you in the paper.”
Ryan Lee began to wonder who'd been playing whom.
Don Prunty had been a ghost for more than forty years, but he'd only been haunting Tina Trimble lately.
How many times is the average American personally brushed by a single murder in a lifetime? she wondered. Once? Maybe?
Yet she knew without a doubt that Alice Uden was connected intimately to four. She had murdered one husband and was indirectly involved in three other homicides, including her husband's ex-wife. The marital theme leapt out. Suddenly, the premature death of another husband warranted a second look.
SA Lonnie TeBeest first suspected it, and a doctor who examined Prunty's medical records had raised the specter of foul play. But finding Ron Holtz was a surer bet at the time.
Now Trimble had Ron Holtz, and she had Alice's confession. She also had accounts from two of Alice's children that Alice had put “something” in her alcoholic husband's beverages to end his drinking. If Alice's confessions to her children led to Ron Holtz's bones, it wasn't far-fetched to think they might reveal another killing.
Shortly after returning from Missouri, Trimble's team collected Prunty's medical records and death certificate for Dr. James Wilkerson, the Colorado medical examiner who'd autopsied Ron Holtz. They also compiled a summary of Alice's various admissions to her children about the mysterious “something” with which she dosed him. And they asked if an exhumation was likely to prove anything after four decades.
Two weeks later, Dr. Wilkerson responded:
The medical record demonstrates malignant hypertension, kidney failure, and encephalopathy. While these symptoms are attributed to hypertension, they could also be seen in poisoning, specifically, with ethylene glycol. After the blood pressure was controlled he continued to have kidney failure with a blood urea nitrogen of 68 mg% and creatinine of 6.6 mg% [both elevated]. He continued to remain confused and lethargic and had severe electrolyte abnormalities with a sodium of 121, chloride of 69, and a potassium of 2.4% [all grossly unbalanced]. He remained encephalopathic and by the morning of 7/23/1973 he was much less responsive than when he was admitted on 7/21 and subsequently expired.
These findings are similar to those that would be observed in ethylene glycol poisoning. Ethylene glycol is the principal ingredient of most automobile anti-freeze solutions, particularly in 1973. Its metabolites are toxic. Upon ingestion, individuals can develop neurological, cardiorespiratory, and renal symptoms. Neurologic symptoms develop within 12 hours after ingestion. Cardiorespiratory manifestations occur 12–24 hours after ingestion.
Mr. Prunty has been reportedly buried in a steel casket. If the remains are dry, it is possible that ethylene glycol could be detected in the tissues. Certainly if kidney tissue remains, oxalate crystals can be seen in renal tubules and sometimes in the brain. I would be happy to assist with the autopsy should an exhumation occur.
Ethylene glycol is the primary compound in ordinary automobile coolants and antifreezes. In the past century, it has also been a favorite poison—especially for husband-killing wives, according to forensic data—because it's in every garage, it's colorless and odorless, it tastes very sweet, and its toxic effects can be misdiagnosed as something else.
Like its distant cousin ethanol, the stuff in booze, ethylene glycol is a moderate neurotoxin that causes slurring and stumbling. But its real damage is done by the human body's chemistry, which breaks it down into oxalic acid in the bloodstream. That acid combines with calcium to form sharp-edged calcium oxalate crystals that slice and dice cells in the kidneys and other organs.
Its fast-acting effects include seizures, slurring, and headaches. Over time, the neurological effects can include symptoms of dementia, delusion, and significantly disrupted movement and speech.
Ethylene glycol poisoning fit Don Prunty's case history better than a salt overdose, Wilkerson believed.
That was enough for Trimble, who immediately contacted the funeral home that prepared the forty-six-year-old Prunty's corpse for burial. The mortician confirmed he'd been buried in a sealed steel casket and probably embalmed with formaldehyde, the only chemical used in Wyoming in 1973. The manager of Laramie's Greenhill Cemetery told her there were no water table issues. Don Prunty's body should be reasonably preserved. If so, and if he had been poisoned, modern science would likely see it.
The likelihood of definite answers was all Trimble needed to get a search warrant to exhume Donald Prunty.
On the frigid Monday morning of January 13, 2014, gravediggers opened the grave. Trimble and a handful of DCI agents, the county coroner, and the funeral director all watched as the vault was removed and the casket lifted into the open air and sunlight for the first time in forty years.
And that's when things started to go wrong.
The badly rusted casket was partly collapsed. Water had penetrated the seals and generally corroded everything except the stainless steel handles.
Back at the county coroner's office, the corrosion was so bad that the mortuary's universal casket key—or “end crank”—wouldn't work, so they used a reciprocating saw to rip the coffin open.
Inside, it was a god-awful mess. The casket and its seals had failed miserably. A lot of water and mud had seeped in through gaps and busted gaskets, and a thick layer of dirt had settled in the bottom. They found wriggling earthworms in the muck and live spiders in the remnants of a dirty, decaying liner.
What they didn't find was anything recognizable as Don Prunty.
The skeleton was mostly mired in mud. No soft tissues remained, although a small patch of skin clung to the skull, with its hair still neatly combed and parted. His once-white shirt and green suit were mostly decayed.
Dr. Wilkerson carefully collected the remains and took them back to Loveland, Colorado, for a closer examination. The rusted, useless casket was left behind to be junked.
The body was so degraded that some investigators surmised that he hadn't been embalmed at all, a sneaky mortician's way of saving money; the funeral director argued that once water gets inside a casket, even the best preservative can't forestall the rot. Both theories were plausible.
Alas, the bright lamps of Dr. Wilkerson's morgue shed no new light on Don Prunty's ending. Except for that patch of hair on his skull, he was skeletonized. Even with his moldering clothing and a crust of mucky bug husks, he weighed only twenty-three pounds. The autopsist collected fingernails, hair, and debris for toxicology; although none of them would show ethylene glycol, they might contain other strange substances. (Ultimately, they did not.)
When Wilkerson opened the skull, there was plenty of mud and water inside, but no brain.
The ME also found Prunty's gold wedding band, still encircling the bones of his sludgy left ring finger. It was offered to his son Joe and daughter Rachel, but they didn't want it.
In fact, when the autopsy was done, Prunty's son and daughter from his previous marriage wanted to cremate his remains and rebury them in Illinois, as he'd wished, but they weren't his next of kin. Alice was. Although she was awaiting a murder trial in the Cheyenne jail, she and Eliza demanded that her late husband be reburied in Laramie. The state of Wyoming, which had torn apart his first casket, picked up the cost of a new one, and Don Prunty—minus his wedding band—went back into the same wet hole he'd occupied since Nixon was president. (The ring was found years later in a coroner's file cabinet, overlooked somehow in the reburial.)
In the end, the exhumation signified nothing. Don Prunty wouldn't be any help in solving the riddle of his own premature death. And his exhumation certainly didn't provide enough information for criminal charges.
“Based upon the history and autopsy findings,” Wilkerson wrote in his final report to DCI, “it appears that Donald Prunty most likely died of his heart disease. However, poisoning cannot be entirely excluded. The remains are too degenerated for definitive testing. The manner of death is undetermined.”
With Don Prunty—or what little was left of him—back in his grave and Gerald claiming the full blame for Virginia and her boys’ slayings, Alice now had only to answer for one untimely death: Ron Holtz.
Alice Uden's trial for the first-degree murder of Ronald Lee Holtz began on Thursday, May 1, 2014, in Cheyenne, nearly forty years since anyone had seen the deeply troubled kid alive. Her fate was in the hands of five men and seven women.
A criminal trial is a construct that only approximates reality. Citizens assume that juries hear all of the evidence against accused criminals, but that isn't generally true, and it certainly wasn't true in Alice Uden's case. They hear only what the judge thinks is enough evidence.
In pretrial hearings, Alice's court-appointed defense lawyer, Don Miller, argued vehemently that Gerald's crimes—even though they'd been publicly confessed—could only pollute the case against Alice. The jury, Miller asserted, might be so disgusted by Gerald's murders that they transferred their anger to the question of Ron Holtz's killing. In short, they might base their decision on the “wrong” case.
The judge agreed. There'd be no mention of Gerald's crimes, even if Alice played a role.
The prosecution had bigger worries.
In court, the state must prove who, what, when, where, and how…not why. Motive usually isn't necessary, so prosecutors needn't prove the defendant's purpose. Nevertheless, ordinary people—juries, for instance—want to know why. In Alice's case, the prosecutors’ challenge, then, was to at least offer a plausible explanation for killing Ronnie Holtz, even if it wasn't required by the law, or they risked making the jury feel unconvinced or betrayed.
And the why of Ron Holtz's slaying was still murky. Maybe Alice was erasing a bad life choice, or exerting her ultimate control, or planning a convoluted career move, or covering up a busted scheme to steal some veterans benefits. Or something else. There was no clear motive.
The strategy that most worried prosecutors was that the defense might sway jurors with a strong argument that Alice was simply defending her baby from a crazed, drug-fueled Vietnam-killer wacko.
And much had changed since 1974. Mostly Alice.
Jurors didn't see the dark-haired, big-bosomed, curvaceous seductress. What they saw now was a bespectacled seventy-five-year-old grandma in a wheelchair, her wispy white hair combed straight back, her face withered. She wore a wireless listening device and matronly clothes off the rack, which made her seem all the more feeble.
Assistant District Attorney Leigh Anne Manlove, who'd be Alice's chief nemesis, had started as a part-time prosecutor of domestic abuse crimes. The daughter of a judge, she was passionate about protecting victims of family violence, mostly women and children. But if Alice succeeded in using the law to justify the cold-blooded shooting of Ron Holtz, it would damage the legal prospects for real battered women and kids.
This was an execution, not self-defense. Alice was a predatory, manipulative, greedy, and ruthless survivor who did whatever was necessary. It wasn't by accident that she had gotten away with murder for forty years.
Manlove knew about the Prunty suspicions and presumed Alice played a starring role in Gerald's dramatic murders as well, even if they couldn't be used in court. But, she wondered, had there been other “instant partners” just like Ron Holtz whom she dispatched and left where they'd never be found?
But this case could be about one victim, and only one victim: Ron Holtz. Manlove painted the broad outlines of the prosecution's case in her opening statement.
The evidence would prove, Manlove promised, that Alice shot Holtz in his sleep around Christmas Eve 1974, crammed his dead body in a storage barrel that had held holiday decorations, rolled it into an abandoned mine, and did her best to disappear without a trace. Jurors would hear it all—and hold Holtz's skull.
“And you will have the opportunity to see the bullet hole at the base of it,” she said.
“If there is one word that describes everything you will hear and see in this case,” Manlove told the jurors, “it is ‘cold.’ Cold because this was a cold case, a largely unknown homicide unsolved for almost forty years. Cold because the evidence will prove the manner in which Ron Holtz was killed was calculated and malicious. And cold because after Alice Uden murdered her husband and covered up her crime, she just moved on, no remorse.”
Naturally, the defense had a much different thesis, and it began with time travel back to 1974.
“Nixon just resigned,” Don Miller said in his opening. “Gas was fifty-five cents a gallon. Vietnam just ended. In Cheyenne, we dialed just five numbers. There was no mall. There also was no abuse shelter.
“If you called police to tell them, ‘This man is beating me,’ they would tell you, ‘Let us know when he's actually doing it because it's just your word against his.’ People would tell their daughters, ‘Go home and make your husband happy—that's your duty.’ There was no 9-1-1. There was no stalking law. There was no place to hide.”
Miller portrayed Alice as a desperate single mother in 1974, already once divorced and once widowed. She had a trailer, five kids, and insurmountable debts. The VA psych ward in Sheridan hired her to talk to patients because she wasn't trained to do much else.
“She met a young man named Ron Holtz, and she did her job: she talked to him and tried to help him through whatever he was going through,” Miller said.
He led jurors through Alice's version of the tawdry romance that followed: falling in love with a handsome, well-built, likable—and much younger—guy…her protective feelings for Holtz, as if he were a stray puppy…the hasty-hot wedding…the demons that soon showed themselves.
He didn't just abuse Alice physically and mentally, Miller argued. When Ron raged, he destroyed anything he touched. Bit by bit, he wrecked Alice's mobile home—“the one piece of security she had.”
And Holtz was irrationally disturbed by crying babies, Miller said. When little Eliza wailed, he freaked. “Shut the kid up!” he'd scream. “I'll kill her!” He reportedly told Alice about a crying five-year-old Vietnamese girl he'd killed. “I can kill this one too,” she remembered him saying. “It doesn't make a difference to me.”
One morning, while Ronnie Holtz slept off whatever high from the night before, Eliza began to cry. Alice was in the kitchen when she heard Ron get up. She sensed trouble, but when she rushed to calm Ron, he punched her in the back and stormed toward Eliza's room. Alice grabbed her .22 rifle from the closet and followed him.
As Ron reached for Eliza, Alice raised her gun. She pointed it at the back of the crazed man's head and pulled the trigger. He slumped, dead.
“She didn't have a choice,” Miller said as his dramatic story ended. “She didn't have time to think. Ron never got his hands on Eliza, but he wasn't there to burp her. He wasn't there to read her a bedtime story. He was there to do harm. And Alice stopped him.”
The stage was set for an emotional, gut-level struggle: Did Ron Holtz die in an act of self-defense or self-indulgence? Was his murder a trailer park siren's calculated depravity or a mother's instinctive protectiveness?
The prosecution's first witness was DCI Special Agent Lonnie TeBeest (retired).
TeBeest led jurors through the entire history of the stop-and-go-and-stop-again case. How Alice's son Ted had first revealed his mother's private confession about killing Holtz. How Alice twice had a chance to justify her killing but completely omitted Holtz from her list of husbands and the psych ward from her long list of jobs. How DCI had dug at the Remount mine, finally finding Holtz's bones forty feet down that awful hole in 2013.
“Nobody ever reported Ron Holtz missing, right?” Don Miller asked TeBeest on cross-examination.
“Yes.”
With that, Miller entered Ron Holtz's thick pile of medical records, including his violence, insanity, and drug abuse.
The next prosecution witness was Thea Thomas, Alice's daughter and second-oldest child. She was no longer a child but now fifty-five years old and haunted. She hadn't spoken to her mother in years.
Thea described a rootless childhood that bounced between her father's Illinois home and whichever crappy trailer Alice happened to be hauling from town to town. She had good memories about moving from Illinois to the Remount Ranch, even hauling a small horse in their U-Haul trailer…and checking every few hundred miles or so to see if it had suffocated back there.
A significant break between mother and daughter happened in Thea's sophomore year of high school, she said, when Alice left Thea to babysit Eliza while she rode with her then-boyfriend, a trucker. When Alice returned to find Thea sick and the house a mess, Alice flew into a rage. She tried to paddle her teenage daughter with a metal spatula. Thea left.
A couple years later, Alice came to Illinois to help Thea sew a prom dress. The two of them—mom and high school daughter—were drinking at the kitchen table. Thea asked about Alice's latest husband Ron, whom she'd never met.
Oh, Alice casually told Thea, she'd shot him while he slept. She packed him in a cardboard barrel like Thea's grandparents used to store canning supplies in the basement, then dumped him on the Remount Ranch.
Their matter-of-fact conversation wasn't a big deal for either of them, Thea said.
“I don't remember any drama. It just was,” she told the jury. “Considering my whole life and things that happened with my mom, it was just one of those things…. I just wanted out of there. It was like, Really? Could that have happened?”
Whether it was momentous or forgettable, Thea only talked about it with her brother Ted a few times and never told another soul until a Wyoming detective, Dave King, asked her about it in the 1990s.
The defense had few questions for Thea.
The next witness was Ted Scott, Alice's middle son. He barely recognized his own mother sitting at the defense table, but it had been more than thirty years since he last saw her. His testimony had been delayed because he'd shown up drunk the day before.
Like Thea, Ted also loved his Remount years. “I could think of no better place to live,” he told Manlove. “I had a two-thousand-acre playground.”
But he, too, recounted the countless moves and a childhood constantly on the brink of calamity, never settling long under anybody's roof.
Life was just weird for the kid. For example, when he was sick, Alice—a trained nurse—would ask the local veterinarian for penicillin, ostensibly for her animals, then inject it in Ted's butt.
He testified that he never met Ron Holtz, who was “just another guy in my mom's past.”
Then, in seventh grade, he moved with his mom to Laramie. She was supporting herself and kids as a barmaid in tiny Buford, twenty-five miles east. Although he was only twelve or thirteen at the time, it was his job to accompany her for the night shift, then drive her home every night while they shared a filched six-pack of beer.
One night while they were driving back to Laramie, both a little buzzed, Alice just blurted it out.
“She just—out of the blue—just kinda flat-out told me how she had got up one night and got a .22 and shot Ron in the head,” Ted told the silent courtroom.
She told him the same story about the barrel and the Remount mine, adding only one detail: she had sought the help of a friend.
“Apparently, he was a bigger guy, and she couldn't get him loaded up by herself,” he told Manlove. “That's when she got help. It was the owner of the Buford store at the time, Kay Florita. Then they drove to the gold mine and dumped the body in there…it was the ranch burial ground.”
“Why did she tell you this story?” Manlove asked Ted.
Ted shrugged.
“I've asked myself that question for years and years,” he said. “I have no answer. I don't know why a mother would tell her children that she killed somebody. I don't know. It's haunted me for years.”
Privately, Ted had told Manlove that on that dark, drunken drive, he had confronted his mother—he only called her Alice, not Mom—about her poor parenting skills. She responded with her story about killing Ron Holtz. He took it as a threat to him, not a tender moment of motherly vulnerability. She didn't know why he couldn't bring himself to tell that same story to the jury now.
“Did you ever tell anybody?” she asked.
“I've told everybody I ever came in contact with over the years,” he said, starting to lose whatever fragile glue held him together. “I've told sheriffs, bosses, spouses. I've told everybody, trying to rip this demon out of me.”
He explained how he'd first told the late Riverton cop Jack Coppock about Alice's confession nearly twenty years before, then showed Agent Tom Wachsmuth the location.
“Nothing got done. Nothing got done,” he repeated. “Nothing got done.”
The hushed courtroom wasn't ready for what happened next.
Subtly, Alice silently mouthed to Ted, “I love you.”
Ted erupted.
“I hate you!” a seething, red-faced son yelled at his mother, who sat stoically beside her lawyer. A long second passed; then Ted shouted again across the courtroom: “I hate you!”
The angry judge recessed for both sides to collect their wits. Manlove calmed Ted down and told him to face the jury, not Alice, for any remaining questions.
When court resumed, Miller cross-examined Ted, who admitted that Ron Holtz might have been abusive; that he didn't like Lonnie TeBeest; and that over the years, parts of his story became Thea's, and vice versa. He was shocked when he first discovered Alice had told Thea because he half hoped, half feared he bore that burden alone.
Ted's questioning was done. The judge excused him, and he left the witness stand.
“I hope it was all worth it,” Ted muttered to Alice as he passed her on his way out of the courtroom. She just stared forward through her wire-rimmed glasses.
Next up was DCI Special Agent Tina Trimble. District Attorney Scott Homar, who had no intention of letting Alice off the hook without a fight, led Trimble through the crucial last few years of the investigation. She focused on the three abortive excavations in or near the mine and finally the successful dig in 2013. She showed the jury the circular metal ring of the barrel lid, and she described the discovery of the young horse's bones, Jefe's collar, and Ron Holtz's bones.
There was no cross-examination.
The next few witnesses, all largely unchallenged by the defense, included the Cheyenne Fire Rescue chief, DCI's crime scene unit boss, and Dr. Rick Weathermon, who all described the messy process of finding Ron Holtz forty feet below the surface of the prairie.
ADA Manlove intended to put Ron Holtz's daughter, Sharon Mack, on the stand by telephone from Chugiak, Alaska, but Miller angrily objected.
“She didn't want to talk to me [before the trial], so I'm not exactly sure what she's going to say,” Miller told the judge. “She's never met Mr. Holtz. She has some pictures. I don't see any way this could be relevant. I'm concerned it would be more prejudicial. Things like ‘Gee, I miss my daddy’ or ‘I never got to see him.’”
Mack's testimony was ultimately allowed, but it added very little. She explained her lineage and confirmed she'd given DNA, not much else.
One of Ron Holtz's younger sisters, Karen Lash, then took the stand. She told the jurors about family life with her brother, who was constantly seeking his father's approval. She described a boy who could be affectionate to his sister but cruel in every other way. She had met “big and mean” Alice when Ronnie brought her home to meet the parents.
When Alice and Ronnie took off to Illinois to meet her family, they left little Eliza with her parents for six weeks. The babysitting chores fell to Karen, only thirteen, who took Eliza to church on Sundays and slept in a bunk bed with her.
When they came home and fetched Eliza, that was the last Karen ever saw her brother.
A DNA expert confirmed that Mack and Lash were directly related to the bones found in the Remount mine. The chances that those bones weren't Ronnie Holtz were a million to one.
Next, Dr. James Wilkerson, the veteran Colorado medical examiner, described his autopsy. Ronnie Holtz died of a classic bullet wound in the back of his head. Back to front, slightly right to left. He probably lost consciousness immediately, was immobilized, and bled profusely, but he was not necessarily technically dead.
The defense was more interested in whether the bullet hole could possibly indicate whether Holtz was standing or lying down, awake or asleep, when he was shot. Dr. Wilkerson admitted it couldn't.
DA Homar began his redirect questioning by handing Dr. Wilkerson a box.
It contained Ronnie Holtz's actual skull.
Dr. Wilkerson illustrated the bullet's trajectory by poking a rod through the hole to the spot where it ricocheted off the inner wall of Holtz's forehead over the left eye. Holtz was shot while his head canted slightly down or because the shooter fired from a lower angle, but there was no way to know for certain.
The prosecution closed its witness list by bringing SA Trimble back to the stand. She recounted Ronnie Holtz's mental health history in excruciating detail: suicidal thoughts at sixteen; debilitating father issues; paranoia that nobody cared for him; thirteen hospitalizations since his premature discharge from the army; diagnoses of character disorder, high blood pressure, drug dependency, depression, lack of impulse control, aggressive tendencies; fears of being locked in anywhere; admission to the VA psychiatric ward in Sheridan; and falling for his nurse Alice.
In less than two months, he and Alice both fled the psych ward, marrying only eleven days later in Colorado.
During her first interview in Missouri, Alice first told Trimble that she shot Holtz at Eliza's crib, but she couldn't explain bloodstains on their mattress. When she was questioned two days later, though, she admitted she'd shot him while he slept.
With that, the prosecution rested.
The defense wasted no time.
Don Miller's first witness was Alice Uden herself. The bailiff wheeled her to a spot near the witness stand, very near the jury box.
In a sweet, soft voice, Alice catalogued her mean history: an unwanted baby, moving around constantly with her military father, pregnant and married at sixteen, four kids, divorced, married again with a fifth child, widowed, adrift, doing any work she could find.
That's when she met Ron Holtz.
She told the court she had reservations about him, but she married him anyway because he seemed like marriage material. Even at thirty-four, Alice claimed to be naïve and easily manipulated. Although she met him in a psychiatric ward, she claimed she didn't know he had mental problems. She felt sorry for him. They were intimate fairly quickly.
Yes, she dumped Eliza with Ron's parents while the two of them went east to find work. They lived with her parents until they moved back to a trailer park in Cheyenne, still out of work. Ron got a job as a cabbie, but his abuse and rampages escalated.
She told the jurors—who'd already heard several versions—that she shot Ron at midmorning over Eliza's crib, not while he slept in his bed.
“I tried to stop him,” she said. “He knocked me down and ran into her bedroom. I was by the mop closet, and I had a gun in there. I followed right behind him. He had already entered her room. I came around the corner and saw him reaching for her.”
“What happened next?” Miller asked.
“I shot him,” Alice said. She had no emotion in her voice.
“Can you explain what you felt?”
“Fear,” she said. “I was scared. Scared he wasn't dead and he would turn on me—beat me up or kill Eliza.”
“So you were committed the moment you touched the gun?”
“Yes.”
After calming the two-year-old and taking her to the Colorado in-laws, Alice came home to Cheyenne three hours later to clean up her “mess.” She retrieved a cardboard barrel from her closet and slowly shoved Holtz's naked, dead body into it. When his trunk was mostly inside, she stood the barrel on end to fold his limbs in. She latched the metal lid on it, then rolled it to her back door, where she had backed her Ford LTD up to the porch. She wrestled the barrel into the trunk. She tied down the unclosed lid and drove to the Remount in midafternoon.
Getting the heavy barrel out of the car required a lot of grunting, but when she finally did, she rolled it under a protective barbed-wire fence around the old mine and into the hole. Alone.
The next day, she snatched up Eliza from her in-laws. She put her mobile home up for sale, sold the murder weapon, paid her bills, and fled to Illinois in a U-Haul containing her worldly goods and the bloody mattress—crib mattress, she corrected herself—for her mother to take to a county dump, three states away.
Before she killed Holtz, Alice said she called the cops to report Ron's abuse, but they couldn't help. After he was dead, she didn't call the cops because she had the important job of raising a child and couldn't afford to go to prison.
DA Homar seemed slightly incredulous as he cross-examined Alice.
On the day of the killing, when she heard the baby cry and a commotion in the back room, why did she reach for a gun instead of rushing to the baby first?
By “mess,” didn't she mean “the dead body on the floor”?
If the safety and rearing of baby Eliza were paramount in Alice's motherly mind, why did she allow her twelve-year-old son to drink and drive? Why did she tell her children she was a murderer at all?
She testified that she confessed to her kids because she felt guilty, but she had told Agent Trimble that she wanted to scare them off drugs. Which was it?
She feared being homeless if Ron destroyed her trailer—yet after she killed him, she sold it and moved in with her parents?
If Ron Holtz fell dead in the crib with a bullet in the back of his head, how did blood leak on it?
“And about the bloody crib mattress, aren't most crib mattresses waterproof?” the prosecutor asked.
“I don't know,” Alice replied, her voice slightly more forceful now.
“It's funny, but you said in your divorce papers that you couldn't find Ron Holtz,” Homar said. “I'm sure you couldn't. That wasn't a lie to the court?”
“In my mind, it's not.”
“You say you sold the trailer and it paid all your bills,” Homar pressed. “So why file for bankruptcy?”
“I had more bills than money.”
On redirect, she admitted telling three of her children that she shot Ron Holtz while he slept, but it was just a fake story.
“Why did you say you shot him in bed?” Miller asked.
“Because I thought they already had me,” Alice replied. “I wanted it over with. Just tell them what they want to hear and get out of here.”
The defense had only one more witness, a professor who was both a former cop and a domestic abuse expert. He explained how in 1974, law enforcement wasn't dealing well with spousal battery. The first shelter for beaten women in Wyoming, he said, opened in Cheyenne in 1979, five years after Alice killed Ronnie Holtz. But Manlove pointed out that Wyoming wasn't a misogynistic Wild West: it had already ratified the Equal Rights Amendment in 1974 and was one of the few states that had codified battered woman syndrome.
Both sides rested.
“It really is a simple case,” Homar said in his closing remarks to the jury. “On that day, did Alice Uden get out of bed and shoot Ron Holtz in the back of the head while he lay sleeping? So started almost forty years of lies, deceit, and, as you saw, family anguish.”
Nobody denied Holtz's unpredictable explosions or his horrid behavior, but if Alice felt threatened—a big “if”—killing him wasn't her only option. It's more likely that she simply wanted something else and needed to wipe her slate clean.
“Ron Holtz was mean. She didn't want him around anymore, so she took care of it. She didn't tell anyone until she told her kids. She covered it up, and she held it tight for forty years. There's no self-defense, nor is there defense of others.
“He was asleep,” Homar ended his passionate speech. “He was asleep.”
Miller came out equally passionate. He explained Alice's many discrepancies and inconsistencies as the fog of memory over four decades. “Forty years is a long time to remember things, especially when you're trying to forget them,” he said.
He warned jurors they must travel back in time to 1974 and consider the killing of Ron Holtz in the context of its moment. Alice had nowhere to turn. Wyoming was a hard place that required hard people to solve their own problems. Sometimes those solutions were harsh and looked unfairly harsher under brighter lights two generations later.
“Alice made mistakes,” he admitted. “There is no doubt about it—she made a lot of mistakes. She told you after her husband died, she was lonely. At that point, here comes this handsome, attractive man. She made a mistake from the get-go: he was extremely violent, unpredictable, and impulsive.
“But if you look at the situation she was in, I think you'll see it was reasonable for her to be terrified of him.”
DA Homar stepped up to the jury box one last time on rebuttal.
“You saw her reaction on that screen [during her videotaped interrogation in Missouri],” he said. “She didn't make a lot of mistakes. She wants you to think she's weak-minded. They want you to think she can be talked into things, manipulated easily…That's not Alice. She does what she wants to do. Weak-minded? No.”
Homar dismissed the wheelchair-bound granny in front of them.
“That is not the woman who shot Mr. Holtz,” he said.
He held up a picture of young Alice instead.
“This is the woman who shot Mr. Holtz. And less than a year and a half later, she was happily married again, moving on with her life.”
Homar made one last emotional plea.
“Alice lived her life,” he told jurors. “Ron Holtz didn't get a chance. He didn't have a chance to get better. He didn't have a chance for anything. He spent the last thirty-nine years in that hole. She shot him when he was asleep. Thank you.”
For the jury, the case wasn't as simple as Homar would have it.
A quick poll at the start of deliberations showed seven jurors ready to convict Alice of premeditated first-degree murder and five who saw Ron Holtz's killing as merely manslaughter. First-degree murder carried a mandatory life sentence. They all agreed she had committed a crime, but the defense's battered-wife theory was powerful for both male and female jurors. They also had to work hard to imagine frail grandma Alice as buxom, young, street-savvy, and ambitious.
As discussions unfolded, jurors slowly migrated to the first-degree side, until only one insisted Alice was guilty of nothing more than manslaughter. Deadlocked after thirteen hours—and coming perilously close to a mistrial—the lone holdout agreed to a compromise: she would accept second-degree murder as a compromise. They agreed.
The jury declared Alice Uden guilty of second-degree murder, which might still land her in prison for the rest of her life.
At her sentencing, an angry letter from Ron Holtz's only child, Sharon Mack, was read into the record.
“I believe you are a very disturbed individual yourself,” Mack wrote directly to Alice. “You do not deserve to be alive in my eyes…. Justice has been and will be done. Know you are not forgiven for your sins.”
DA Homar requested that Alice serve a minimum of twenty years in prison, effectively a death sentence for the infirm septuagenarian.
“We don't want to send a message to society that if you cover up a crime long enough, you'll get away with it with very little punishment,” he said.
Defender Donald Miller asked the judge for mercy. He suggested Alice be given probation because her daughter Eliza, now in her forties, reportedly had breast cancer and was expected to live only six more months.
District Judge Steven Sharpe said he weighed all the possible mitigating factors, including Alice's lack of a criminal record. Suspicions about Donald Prunty's death weren't discussed; her participation in Gerald's triple murder and cover-up never came up. But this one brutish act couldn't be explained away easily.
“This was very much a cold, calculated murder,” Sharpe said. “The jury heard all of the evidence that was before the court, and the jury rejected the defense that it was self-defense.”
Alice, who lied to the end, deserved life in prison, the judge decided.
As with Gerald, there would be no parole unless the governor intervened.
But parole was likelier than an honest explanation of why four separate murders—six years apart—were so eerily similar. What were the chances that two supposedly unconnected killers would both shoot their victims in the back of the head with .22-caliber rifles; dump their bodies in lonesome, abandoned mine shafts; and transport them in barrels?
The question was its own answer, but since neither Gerald nor Alice would ever breathe free air again, it was irrelevant.
ADA Leigh Anne Manlove counted it as a win, but it was sometimes hard for her to feel like she'd won. Claire was gone. Virginia and the boys were still missing. There was no chance that Ron Holtz's family would ever be whole again. But Manlove and Homar won. It was better than losing, even if the difference were sometimes indistinct. She took comfort where she found it.
Gerald and Alice would both die in prison. That would have to be enough.