Photo: Rhonda Jean Clark
A Mountain Home woman sentenced to 17 years in prison for killing her live-in boyfriend in 2010 is scheduled for a parole hearing in mid-August.
Forty-seven-year-old Rhonda Jean Clark was found guilty of second-degree murder by a Baxter County Circuit Court jury Dec. 21, 2012.
The state had originally charged her with the more serious crime of first-degree murder, but the jury exercised its option to recommend the lesser included offense, which the court accepted.
Clark was accused of shooting and killing then 43-year-old Antonio Sanchez III in the home the couple shared on Old Tracy Ferry Road.
An autopsy was performed on Sanchez’s body. He was found to have been shot twice, including a head wound determined to be the most serious. What was first believed to be a bullet wound in Sanchez’s back proved to be a “stab-type” puncture wound to a depth of almost 6 inches. The State Medical Examiner’s Office reported the wound was likely inflicted by an instrument other than a knife.
According to testimony during trial, Clark had gone to a restaurant on U.S. Highway 62/412 East on Thanksgiving Day and told a co-worker Sanchez had committed suicide. One investigator dismissed the suicide story, when he testified, “you don’t shoot yourself twice in the back with a rifle and then stab yourself.”
The defense painted Sanchez as being abusive to Clark to the point law enforcement had been involved.
Clark was interviewed by a Baxter County deputy sheriff a few months before the shooting. She maintained Sanchez had assaulted her, and she suffered a number of injuries to her chest and back. She said she had also been choked.
On the day of the shooting, Clark maintained Sanchez had grown angry with her because she had refused to go with him to his father’s house in Mountain Home to help prepare the family’s Thanksgiving dinner.
She said a verbal and physical altercation ensued.
Clark had told investigators a number of stories about how her boyfriend had been killed. She said at one point if she did shoot Sanchez, it would have been an accident.
Shortly after her trial, Clark’s attorney filed a notice of appeal in the case, but it was dropped.
Clark has been up for parole several times, the latest decision from the state Parole Board came in early September last year when her case was deferred.
She is an inmate at the McPherson Unit of the state prison system.
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