Inset: Neil Howard (MCSAO). Background: The house where Howard killed his mother with a bungee cord in 2023 (KSKD).
A 46-year-old man in Illinois will spend several decades behind bars for killing his own mother, strangling her with a bungee cord in her bed after she returned from a date because he’d “had enough of her sleeping around” and “not giving him money.”
Circuit Judge Amy Maher on Tuesday ordered Neil Howard to serve 30 years in a state correctional facility for the 2023 slaying of Norma J. Caraker, authorities announced.
The trial and sentencing hearing
Following a weeklong trial in February, a jury deliberated only about three hours before finding Howard guilty on one count of first-degree murder for killing his mother.
According to a news release from the Madison County State’s Attorney’s Office, Howard must serve 100% of his sentence, meaning he will be 76 years old before he first becomes eligible for parole.
“If this individual ever steps foot outside a prison, he’ll be an elderly man,” State’s Attorney Tom Haine said in a statement. “We continue to hold the family and loved ones of Norma in our prayers. They have exhibited true grace and poise throughout these difficult proceedings. Our hope is that this resolution allows them to begin to heal.”
During Tuesday’s hearing, prosecutors said they sought a minimum sentence of 45 years for Howard, emphasizing that he had previously been arrested several times for incidents involving other members of his family.
“It is clear that the defendant is a violent individual, and he’s especially violent toward women,” Assistant State’s Attorney Luke Yager told the court, per the release.
During his closing argument, Yager told jurors that his mother’s dating was making Howard “angrier and angrier and angrier, until he got drunk enough that he couldn’t take it anymore.” He then “wrapped that cord around her neck and he pulled, until she stopped breathing,” Yager said.
“This defendant had had enough of his mother,” Yager said. “He’d had enough of her sleeping around. He’d had enough of her not giving him money.”
The murder
As Law&Crime previously reported, officers with the Troy Police Department responded at about 1:30 a.m. on Sept. 13, 2023, to a call at Caraker’s home in the 600 block of Lower Marine Road, which is just over 20 miles northeast of St. Louis, Missouri. Prosecutors said the 911 call came from Howard, who told the emergency dispatcher that he was “worried about his mother because she was unresponsive.”
“Officers located Caraker in her bed with a bungee cord still secured around her neck,” prosecutors wrote in a prior news release. “She was unresponsive and not breathing. Efforts to resuscitate her were not successful.”
The Bellevue News-Democrat reported that a visibly drunk Howard told investigators that he saw an unknown man run out of a sliding-glass door in the home before finding his mother. However, police later determined that the door had been locked and Howard was soon arrested.
Howard’s surviving family
The News-Democrat reported that Andrea Hall, one of Howard’s two sisters, as well as his fiancee, Dawn Hall, served as witnesses for the defense and supported Howard throughout the trial. Andrea Hall told the newspaper that she believed investigators had “jumped the gun” when they arrested Howard for their mother’s murder, adding that she “wasn’t expecting” a guilty verdict.
Howard’s defense attorneys, Jeremy Sackett and David Fahrenkamp, told the newspaper they took the case for free because they “believed in” Howard and the case. They too suggested that police were too quick to home in on Howard as a suspect, emphasizing that investigators did not bother getting a DNA sample from the man Caraker had been on a date with just before her death for more than a year.
A crime lab technician reportedly testified that DNA found on the bungee cord and beneath Caraker’s fingernails came back as a match for the man she had been on a date with, not Howard.
The defense attorneys said they plan to appeal Howard’s conviction.
