True Crime Chronicles: A Benton County murderer is serving a 999 yeas, 999 month and 99-day sentence
- Dennis McCaslin
- 9 minutes ago
- 2 min read
On June 2, 1979, the body of 19-year-old Sharon Taylor was found stuffed into a feed bin inside an abandoned barn about five miles northwest of Lowell in rural Benton County. She was partially nude. Her hands and feet had been bound with baling twine. Her head had been battered by a rock found nearby, and she had been strangled.
Medical examiners could not determine whether the beating or the strangulation caused her death. Evidence also indicated recent forcible sexual intercourse.
Taylor, a local housewife and mother of two small children, had left her home in the early morning hours and never returned. T
The man who admitted killing her was Randall Ray Wilson, then 21 and also from Lowell. Born June 24, 1958, Wilson stood six-foot-one with brown hair and blue eyes. Prison records would later list him at 253 pounds, with tattoos including hearts on his right arm and a tiger head on his left.
According to Wilson’s testimony, he drove to Taylor’s residence that morning. She left with him voluntarily, he said, leaving her two young children asleep alone in the house. He drove them to the isolated barn. There, he claimed, he struck her with a rock and killed her because she was trying to blackmail him and threaten to testify against him in a child-custody case involving his former wife.
He denied kidnapping her, denied strangling her, and denied any sexual assault.
Prosecutors saw something different in the bindings, the partial nudity, the signs of force, and the remote location. They charged capital murder.
In January 1980, a Benton County jury of six men and six women heard the case. On January 30, they convicted Wilson of capital murder in case 1979-138 and sentenced him to life without parole. In Arkansas Department of Corrections records, that sentence appears as 999 years, 999 months, and 99 days—the standard coding for a term with no possibility of release.
Wilson entered custody on February 7, 1980. He has remained in maximum-security confinement ever since.
Wilson appealed. In 1981 the Arkansas Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and sentence in Wilson v. State. The court rejected challenges to the capital-murder statute, the jury instructions, and the claim that life without parole constituted cruel and unusual punishment. No prejudicial error was found.
The trial took place in Benton Circuit Court while David Clinger served as the county’s prosecuting attorney.
Sharon Taylor’s two small children were left without their mother. Wilson’s own account showed he knew her well enough to appear at her door in the middle of the night and that she held information relevant to his custody dispute--information he said she tried to use against him.
Whether their connection was personal, coercive, or adversarial was contested at trial. The physical evidence and the capital verdict rejected the version in which a voluntary outing simply ended with a single blow from a rock.
More than forty-six years later, Randall Ray Wilson remains at the Maximum Security Unit. His projected release date is listed as “Life WO.”
The sentence still stands exactly as recorded: 999 years, 999 months, and 99 days.
