True Crime Chronicles: Fear of loss of relationship with adopted son led to killings of ex-wife's boyfriend in 2008
- Dennis McCaslin
- Mar 24
- 3 min read
Robert L. James (known as Mickey) spent most of his life in the Logan County town of Paris in Logan County where he and his wife Heather raised an adopted son together. By 2008 the couple had separated but James continued to see the 13-year-old boy as the main anchor in his daily existence.
He had no prior criminal record and worked ordinary local jobs. Heather told James in May 2008 that she had started a relationship with Tony Lee Rice, her coworker at the Paris Wal-Mart.
Rice was 40 years old (born September 16 1967) in Paris. He had a son and two daughters and two grandchildren. Rice lived in the same small town where his parents James Dale Jimmy Rice and Patsy Rice resided.
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James learned about the affair over several weeks. He reached out to two of Rice's former wives for information. He spoke with Rice about how the situation might affect the adopted boy. Those exchanges left the tension unresolved.
On August 8 2008 James told the boy he was going to buy bread. He drove to the Wal-Mart parking lot. Heather and Rice had finished their shifts and stood near their vehicles. James pulled up and blocked Rice's truck. He got out with a loaded revolver and fired several shots. Rice attempted to run but James followed and fired again after Rice fell.
James then removed the spent shells from the gun got back in his vehicle and drove home.
He told the boy "I shot Tony" and waited on the porch for police. Officers found the revolver inside the house along with a note James had written to Heather. The note thanked her for the years they spent together and for the time raising the boy.
It expressed regret over how matters had concluded.
In a taped statement to a state police investigator James described the shooting as something he remembered only dimly as if it occurred in a dream or a daze. When pressed on his reason he said the act stemmed more from dread of losing custody of the adopted son than from the loss of Heather.
Prosecutors pointed to the note and the sequence of actions in the parking lot as signs of forethought.At the September 2009 trial in Logan County Circuit Court the defense argued for a manslaughter conviction based on extreme emotional disturbance. The jury convicted James of first degree murder after brief deliberation and the judge imposed a life sentence.
James was 61 at the time.
Rice was laid to rest six days after the shooting. A service took place at 10:00 a.m. on Thursday August 14 , 2008 at the First Baptist Church in Paris. He was buried in Corley Cemetery in the Corley community outside Paris.
James entered the Arkansas Department of Correction on September 30, 2009.
He has accumulated no disciplinary violations and remains classified at minimum risk.
Now 78 he serves his life term at the Varner Unit.
The central element in James's stated motivation was the boy. He feared the new relationship would separate him from the child he had helped raise. That concern overrode any attachment to Heather in his account to the investigators.
The jury weighed those words against the physical evidence of planning and pursuit and concluded the shooting met the standard for purposeful first-degree murder.
Tony Rice left behind his parents his son and two daughters and two grandchildren who continued without him in the same community where the event occurred.
