A Gaston County man will go to prison for killing his ailing wife

Yahoo

27-03-2025

It didn't take long for a judge to sentence Rickey Holdsclaw to prison.
Holdsclaw, 75, was found guilty of shooting and killing his ailing wife, 72-year-old Judy Allred Helms, immediately after his attorney and the prosecutor finished their closing arguments.
The moment marked the end of an almost three-day bench trial in front of Superior Court Judge David Phillips. Holdsclaw was charged with voluntary manslaughter in the death of Helms, who he was alleged to have shot March 4, 2021, as she lay sleeping in bed.
The case centered around confessions Holdsclaw made to police and dispatchers immediately after the shooting. In one recording, Holdsclaw told a police officer, "She was laid down, covered up when I shot her."
Helms had Alzheimer's Disease, and Holdsclaw up until her death had been caring for her around the clock, taking her to medical appointments, administering her medication, feeding her, clothing her and helping to bathe her when necessary.
In his 911 call, he talked about this experience.
"She has these spells where I have to hold her down," he said, speaking through tears in the call. "She suffers so much when she has one of these spells."
Holdsclaw's confessions landed him in jail, initially on a charge of first-degree murder. He said from the witness stand this week that after spending around two months cold and miserable in his jail cell, he wanted to change his account of what happened.
For the first time on Tuesday, Holdsclaw said that his wife died by suicide, shooting herself after overhearing him telling a neighbor, Magaly Thalacker, that he intended to send her to a memory care facility. The conversation, according to Holdsclaw, took place in a phone call the night before his wife's death.
Thalacker specifically told police in a recorded interview right after the shooting that she had not called Holdsclaw that night. When called to the stand and asked directly about the call on Wednesday, Thalacker was indecisive. She said that she didn't remember whether or not she had called him. Then she said that she thought she recalled checking on him, and that it would have been by phone.
Holdsclaw's defense attorney, Rocky Lutz, said in his closing arguments that forensic evidence in the case pointed to suicide. He said that Helms appeared to have been shot at close range, and as an experienced marksman, Holdsclaw wouldn't have killed her that way. He also said that the shot appeared to have been fired upwards at an angle, supporting Holdsclaw's testimony about his wife's death.
He said that the state was relying on statements Holdsclaw made while suffering from an injury that eventually caused him to develop sepsis, right after witnessing a traumatic event.
Holdsclaw, Lutz said, was protecting his wife.
They had "a protective relationship that would be hard to believe, except it was corroborated by the surrounding neighbors, who testified to the numerous sacrifices Rickey would make to keep her safe and away from harm."
It was "a marriage or relationship that can only be best described as what we read about or is written in fairy tales," Lutz said. "The undisputed evidence is that Rickey made every effort to protect her, not hurt her."
In her closing statements, prosecutor Kristen Northrup accused Holdsclaw of perjury.
"Perjury is a crime, and that's what this court heard from Mr. Holdsclaw over the last two days," she said. "Not only did Mr. Holdsclaw shoot and kill his wife, Judy Helms, on March 4, 2021, he tried to make her the scapegoat four years later in this courtroom by claiming that she killed herself. The only reason for that is for him to not be held accountable, and that is shameful."
She said he made the decision while incarcerated that he wanted to be a free man.
"And now he is risking imprisonment, and that is why, four years later, he came up with this story that's never been told before," she said. "Until yesterday, there was reason to feel sympathy for Mr. Holdsclaw. In the end, after his testimony, this in fact was a murder. This defendant killed his wife, and he did so intentionally."
Northrup said that the two most important pieces of evidence were the blue blanket that was covering Helms, which had a bullet hole in it, and Helms' body. She contradicted Lutz's characterization of the forensic evidence, saying that the bullet entered Helms' body through her right breast, not at an angle, but "virtually parallel across her chest," landing in her back.
"That is inconsistent with his testimony that she could have shot herself," Northrup said.
She also said that Holdsclaw claimed to have checked his wife's pulse, but he had no blood on his hands.
"We've heard a lot about him and very little about the woman he killed," she said.
In the end, Phillips didn't buy Holdsclaw's new story about what happened.
Without pausing to deliberate, he said after the attorneys presented their closing arguments that he did not feel Helms' death was a mercy killing, and he found Holdsclaw guilty of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced him to about five to seven years in prison. Holdsclaw spent 33 months, or almost three years, in prison before his trial.
This article originally appeared on The Gaston Gazette: Gaston County man to go to prison for shooting ailing wife