Husband gets 20 years in Prior Lake woman's murder

Charles "Tony" Maddox will serve 20 years in prison and another 10 on supervised release for the brutal murder of his wife, community newspaper reporter Ruth Anne Maddox, a Scott County judge ordered Wednesday.

Ruth Anne Maddox, 45, was slain on Nov. 11, 2008, in her Prior Lake home.

In June, a jury convicted Tony Maddox, 48, of second-degree murder in a case that was solved by police piecing together text messages, cellphone calls, online sex solicitations and more.

"At any moment that night, you could have stopped to call 911 for an ambulance and she could have survived her injuries," Ruth Anne's sister, Karen Whitaker, told Tony Maddox during a victim impact statement. "Instead, you chose to beat her, bruise her, break her bones and then cut off her air supply."

Judge Jerome Abrams told Maddox that he couldn't ignore the "elaborate" ruse that Maddox used to cover up the killing. He dressed in her clothing and a wig and drove her car to the airport, hoping to make it look as if she'd left town. He left a goodbye note, purportedly from Ruth Anne. Then he took public transportation home and continued to try to cover up the death, sending out texts from her phone as if she were writing them.

Maddox lied to the police and Ruth Anne's family after she failed to show up for work, and they began looking for her. Early the next morning, on Nov. 12, 2008, Prior Lake police, armed with a search warrant, found her body in the garage, wrapped up and ready to be hauled away in his truck.

Without the persistence of Prior Lake police detectives Chris Olson and Darcy White, Tony Maddox may well have gotten away with the murder, Abrams said.

"You have no idea what it was like for me to hear the news that Ruth Anne had been murdered by you," Whitaker said to Tony Maddox on Wednesday.

"My world came to a screeching halt," she said.

She said she remembers calling relatives to tell them about her sister's death. "To this day, I can remember the individual noises of anguish each one made," she said. "I am haunted by these sounds, and my heart is forever broken."

Ruth Anne Maddox, a reporter for the Shakopee Valley News, had filed for divorce. The day before her death, she had told Tony Maddox that she was going to show his mother sexually explicit e-mails that he had written, soliciting sex online, prosecutors said. They also were fighting over who would get the couple's two dogs.

Defense attorney Fred Bruno said an appeal is imminent.