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Former death row inmate goes back to prison

By COLLEEN JENKINS
Published November 14, 2006

TAMPA - Fresh off death row three years ago, Rudolph Holton went looking for love. He found it with his uncle's soon-to-be ex-wife and the two later married.

But shortly after Holton was convicted last month for trying to kill his wife, she paid him a visit in jail - with her new boyfriend.

"He came to ask me could he marry my wife," Holton said during a collect phone call Monday from the Falkenburg Road jail. "I said yeah, go ahead. And he got down on his knees."

Holton, 53, had recounted the marriage proposal earlier Monday for Circuit Judge J. Rogers Padgett as part of a winding soliloquy about his soured relationship. He blames it for botching his fleeting freedom.

"I married the wrong lady," he told the judge.

Unmoved, Padgett sentenced Holton to 20 years in prison on charges of attempted murder in the second degree and domestic battery - a punishment made more severe because of Holton's history of crime.

The man's one redemption came in January 2003, when the state Supreme Court threw out his conviction for killing a 17-year-old prostitute in 1986. Holton had spent 16½ years in prison for a crime he said he didn't commit.

He was free, with a JCPenney winter jacket and $100 cash.

He made plans: Get married, have a family, go fishing, get a dog, get a truck, start a business. He met Sandra Holton. She was divorcing his uncle, a man she had accused of threatening to kill her.

Rudolph Holton said she asked him to marry her the first time they got intimate.

"I didn't have nobody," he said in court. "I wanted somebody to love me."

Sandra Holton, a dialysis technician, paid the bills and drove him to job interviews.

He got in trouble twice in 2003: once for assaulting the son of Sandra's ex-husband and then for striking Sandra several times with a golf club. The latter offense sent him to prison for 14 months.

The couple reunited upon his release in January. Holton said he worked in construction but also did $300 to $500 worth of cocaine on the weekends. They both drank too much, he said.

In court Monday, Holton's attorney said her client claimed he could no longer remember the events of June 18, when he choked his wife until she passed out. Padgett dismissed the claim, because Holton testified under oath during his trial last month.

In the phone call eight hours later, Holton reiterated his testimony, saying he had acted in self-defense after his wife came after him with a knife. He said his memory came and went because of his medications.

Sandra Holton did not attend her husband's sentencing and could not be located for comment Monday.

[Last modified November 14, 2006, 01:47:03]