A Mountain Home woman sentenced to 17 years in prison for killing her live-in boyfriend and recently paroled has now been arrested on drug charges.
Fifty-year-old Rhonda Jean Clark appeared in Baxter County Circuit Court Monday and entered a not guilty plea to her latest charges.
She is free on $5,000 bond and was ordered to reappear September 25.
Clark was initially booked on a parole violation. The local Community Corrections office sent a violation report to the State Parole Board, but it was decided at the state level not to issue a warrant for the violation.
Dina Tyler, communications director for the Arkansas Department of Corrections, said while no arrest warrant was issued, the board did set conditions for Clark to remain out. A curfew was ordered and she is required to wear a GPS tracking unit.
She was arrested August 4 after a Mountain Home policeman spotted a tan Chevrolet Impala in a church parking lot along East Arkansas Avenue.
The officer reported seeing an apparently unconscious female slumped over the steering wheel. He knocked on the car window multiple times but was unable to wake the woman.
He then opened the door and tapped the woman on the shoulder and brought her around. The officer said she appeared to be under the influence of an unknown substance.
The officer checked on the woman and found she was on parole with a search waiver on file. He reported finding a plastic bag containing a substance field-testing positive for methamphetamine.
She was also checked to determine if she had been drinking since there were beer cans in the back seat of the car, but the test was negative.
THE MURDER
A Baxter County Circuit Court jury found Clark guilty of second-degree murder in late December 2012 and she was sentenced to 17 years in prison.
The state had originally charged her with the more serious crime of first-degree murder, but the jury exercised its option to select the lesser-included-offense.
Clark was accused of shooting and killing then 43-year-old Antonio Sanchez, III on Thanksgiving eve in 2010 at the home the couple shared on Old Tracy Ferry Road.
An autopsy was performed on Sanchez’s body and he was found to have been shot twice, including once to the head which was 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 six inches. The State Medical Examiner reported an instrument other than a knife likely inflicted the wound.
According to testimony during the trial, Clark had gone to a restaurant on Highway 62/412 East on Thanksgiving day and told a co-worker Sanchez had committed suicide.
During the trial, an investigator who worked the case dismissed Clark’s 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 to be called.
Clark had been interviewed by a Baxter County Deputy Sheriff a few months before the shooting. She maintained Sanchez had assaulted her and that she had suffered injuries to her chest and back and had been choked.
On the day of the shooting, Clark alleged 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 then physical altercation ensued. Clark told several different stories about how her boyfriend had been killed. She said at one point that if she did shoot Sanchez, it would have been an accident.
Clark was up for parole several times but was either denied or the decision was deferred until a later date.
She had been an inmate at the McPherson Unit of the state prison system in Newport.
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