True Crime Chronicles: Thirty years later, the life of a mother goes on while her son remains five years old forever

Among the women serving time in the Arkansas Division of Correction for murder, Stephanie Kay Wofford is one of the long timers at the McPherson Unit in Newport.

The last detailed statewide snapshot that broke offenses out by gender counted 122 female inmates whose primary offense was first-degree murder and 55 whose primary offense was second-degree murder.

McPherson is the only prison for women in the state, the intake point for every female commitment, and the place where those life sentences collect. Wofford arrived there on September 20, 1996, ten days after a Sebastian County court imposed life for first-degree murder.

Stephanie Kay Wofford

She is still there.

The victim was her five-year-old son, Mark. They lived in Fort Smith. On the afternoon that ended his life, she called her parents’ home nearby. Her sister, Amanda Hutchins, heard about the call and thought something was wrong. Hutchins went to the house and found Wofford on a couch with blood on her wrists and clothing.

The father and brother arrived, along with a family friend, Henry McMurtery. Hutchins dialed 911 and reported that Wofford had tried to kill herself, that there was blood all over, and that Wofford had said her son would not wake up. McMurtery went to the rear of the house and found Mark on a bed in Wofford’s bedroom.

The child’s wrists were cut. His eyes were open and dilated.

Fort Smith officers William Ohm and David C. Boyd Jr. were already on the block.

They heard the dispatch and entered without a warrant shortly after 3 p.m. They spent ten or fifteen seconds checking Wofford. Boyd tried to learn what had happened. She appeared dazed.

She said, “I can’t die. I cannot die.” She asked, “Why won’t he wake up?” Asked about her cut wrists, she said she had cut them with a knife that was in the back room.

That is the scene the later appellate record preserves. The officers’ first entry was treated as an emergency search under the rule that lets police go in without a warrant when they have reasonable cause to believe someone inside is in imminent danger of death or serious bodily harm.

A second pair of officers later entered and seized items. Wofford’s lawyers fought that seizure. She entered a conditional plea of nolo contendere to first-degree murder, which allowed her to keep the suppression issue alive on appeal while accepting the conviction and the life sentence. Circuit Judge Don Langston imposed the sentence on September 9, 1996, in case 1995-1038.

The Arkansas Supreme Court took the appeal as Wofford v. State, CR 97-38. On October 2, 1997, Justice David Newbern wrote that the first warrantless entry was justified by exigency and that statements she made at the hospital were admissible because she was not then in custody for Miranda purposes.

She had been taken to the hospital for her injuries, not marched there by police as an arrested suspect

. The court would not review other issues because a nolo plea generally cuts off appeal except for the reserved suppression question. The justices remanded one narrow point: whether the first officers had seen, in plain view, the items later seized by the second team. After a hearing on remand, the case returned to the court.

On April 30, 1998, a per curiam order noted the trial court’s findings and set further briefing. The conviction and life sentence stood. She has remained at McPherson ever since.

What the public record does not supply in detail is a full psychological file or a trial narrative of motive.

There was no jury trial. The plea itself was the adjudication. The physical facts the courts recited are spare and brutal: a mother with slashed wrists on the living room couch, a five-year-old on her bed with matching cuts, a knife in the back room, a sister who walked into the blood, a friend who found the child already beyond help, and a woman repeating that she could not die and asking why the boy would not wake up

. First-degree murder in Arkansas requires a purposeful killing. The plea accepted that legal conclusion. Life in Arkansas for that offense means exactly what the inmate sheet still says three decades later.

No PE/TE date other than life. No second trip through the gates. The same unit that took Christina Riggs before her 2000 execution still holds the women whose cases never reached a death verdict but never left the system either.

Wofford is now in her early sixties. The child she was convicted of killing would be in his mid thirties. The house in Fort Smith is long since someone else’s. The legal fight over the doorway and the plain view items is a pair of bound volumes in the state reports.

The rest of the story is the daily inventory of a maximum and medium women’s prison on Corrections Drive: classification, counts, the infirmary that serves the sickest female inmates in the state, and a life sentence that does not move. That is the record as the courts and the Department of Correction left it.