CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) - A defense attorney’s family emergency caused a judge to temporarily suspend jury selection in the first-degree murder trial of an elderly Missouri woman accused of killing her husband nearly 40 years ago in Wyoming.
The process was set to resume Thursday morning in the trial of Alice Uden, 75.
Prosecutors allege Uden, of Chadwick, Mo., shot then-husband Ronald Holtz, 25, with a .22-caliber rifle while he was asleep sometime between late 1974 and early 1975. Uden’s attorneys plan to argue self-defense.
The jury-selection process already was going slowly as defense attorneys, especially, sought to empanel jurors who wouldn’t be confused or biased by the fact that Uden’s current husband recently began serving a life sentence for three other decades-old murders in Wyoming.
Authorities arrested Alice Uden and Gerald Uden, 71, in Missouri last fall. Gerald Uden pleaded guilty Nov. 1 to three counts of first-degree murder for shooting his ex-wife, Virginia Uden, 32, and her two sons, Richard, 11, and Reagan, 10, with a .22-caliber rifle in central Wyoming in 1980.
Investigators have not linked the two cases.
The Udens’ arrests came weeks after investigators unearthed Holtz’s remains from an abandoned mine on a ranch between Cheyenne and Laramie. His skull had a .22-caliber bullet in it, they say.
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