A 69-year-old Arkansas woman was convicted of killing her husband for ordering a porn channel.
Patricia Hill, a Sunday school teacher and a nurse for 50 years, testified in court Tuesday that she wasn’t thinking when she shot and killed her 65-year-old husband, Frank Hill, at their Pine Bluff home in July 2018.
She said she couldn’t explain what her intentions were she shot toward him, but that it was only to get his attention, KATV reported.
Hill was charged with capital murder, but a Jefferson County jury found her guilty on a lesser charge of second-degree murder on Tuesday.
Her attorney and prosecutors agreed to a sentence of 16 years in prison, Kyle Hunter, the prosecuting attorney for Jefferson County, told BuzzFeed News.
Hill told the jury on Tuesday that she had busted her husband for watching porn several times since they got married in 2001, and he had promised to stop watching it, KATV reported. When his VCR was no longer useful, Frank Hill allegedly ordered a porn channel from the Dish Network.
When Hill found out about her husband’s porn channel purchase last June, she canceled it, according to court documents. She apparently warned her husband that if he did it again, he’d have to leave the house.
A month later, on July 28, 2018, Hill opened the Dish Network cable bill in the mail, which showed that Frank had reordered the porn channel.
Hill went to confront her husband in the utility shed behind their house, which Frank used as his “man cave,” according to court documents. When she entered the shed, he was watching porn again, Hill told the jury on Tuesday.
She allegedly told her husband to take his televisions and leave the house, but he refused; Hill then kicked over a table, knocking over Frank Hill’s beer bottles, cigarettes, and remotes.
She left the shed and went to the couple’s house, where she armed herself with a .22-caliber pistol, authorities said. She reportedly returned to the shed a short time later where she shot her husband twice, striking him in the leg and in the head.
Hill went back to the house and called 911, telling the dispatcher that she had shot her husband and didn’t know if he was breathing. Frank Hill was transported to a medical center, where he was pronounced dead a short time later.
Authorities found Hill’s gun and an open Dish Network bill in the living room.
In an interview with investigators after the shooting, Hill admitted that she had shot her husband. She said there was no physical altercation with her husband before she shot him.
When asked why she shot her husband, Hill told the investigator that she “just snapped.” She said there was no history of abuse between the couple and that “she just really messed up,” according to court documents.
Hill’s lawyer, Bill James, told the court on Monday that Frank Hill’s porn viewing was a “personal affront to [Patricia Hill] and her god,” the Pine Bluff Commercial reported. “She told him over and over again to stop, and he said he would but went right back to doing it,” James said, describing the couple as “basically estranged.”
He said that Hill “lost her mind” and “flew into a rage” when she discovered her husband watching porn again.
"The stressors of being with her husband just basically caused her to snap,” James told KATV before Tuesday’s verdict. “We had our doctor look at her and he agrees that it was a dissociative episode, a very quick one, and now it's up to a jury to decide that.”
Ultimately, the jury decided to convict Hill on the lesser offense of second-degree murder instead of capital murder.
Hunter, the prosecuting attorney, told BuzzFeed News on Wednesday that he felt the facts of the case justified the capital murder charge for Hill but added that she had a “fair trial.”
"I've never been away from her for more than two weeks in my whole life, without hugging her and kissing her and telling her I love her, it's been hard,” Hill's daughter, Andrea Cheshier, told KATV on Tuesday.
“She's the person who has loved everybody and spent her whole life taking care of people and she stayed with him to take care of him, and so it was shocking and almost impossible to believe," Cheshier said.