A 46-year-old man in Illinois will serve several decades in prison for killing his own mother by 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.”
Neil Howard was sentenced to 30 years in a state prison on Tuesday by Circuit Judge Amy Maher for the murder of Norma J. Caraker in 2023, according to authorities.
The trial and sentencing hearing
During Tuesday’s hearing, prosecutors stated that they were seeking a minimum sentence of 45 years for Howard, citing the fact that he had previously been arrested 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, according to the release.
During his closing argument, Yager told jurors that his mother’s dating was making Howard “angrier and angrier, until he got drunk enough that he couldn’t take it anymore.” Next, he “wrapped that cord around her neck and he pulled, until she stopped breathing,” Yager told me.
“This defendant had had enough of his mother,” Yager told the jury. “He had enough of her sleeping around. He’d had enough of her not paying him.”
The murder
As previously reported by Law&Crime, officers from the Troy Police Department responded to a call at Caraker’s home in the 600 block of Lower Marine Road, just over 20 miles northeast of St. Louis, Missouri, around 1:30 a.m. on September 13, 2023. Prosecutors said Howard called 911 and told the 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 stated in a previous news release. “She was unresponsive and stopped breathing. Efforts to revive her were unsuccessful.”
According to the Bellevue News-Democrat, a visibly drunk Howard told investigators that he saw an unknown man run out of the home through a sliding-glass door before finding his mother. However, police discovered that the door had been locked, and Howard was quickly arrested.
According to the News-Democrat, one of Howard’s two sisters, Andrea Hall, and his fiancee, Dawn Hall, both testified for the defense and supported Howard throughout the trial. Andrea Hall told the newspaper that she thought investigators “jumped the gun” when they arrested Howard for their mother’s murder, and that she “wasn’t expecting” a guilty verdict.
Howard’s defense attorneys, Jeremy Sackett and David Fahrenkamp, told the newspaper that they accepted the case for free because they “believed in” Howard and the case. They, too, suggested that police were overly quick to identify Howard as a suspect, emphasizing that investigators did not bother collecting a DNA sample from the man Caraker had been dating for more than a year prior to her death.
A crime lab technician reportedly testified that DNA found on the bungee cord and beneath Caraker’s fingernails matched the man she had been on a date with, not Howard.
The defense attorneys stated that they intend to appeal Howard’s conviction.